The morning broke to a beautiful snowy streetscape, so I popped out a bit early to get some photos of the streets, local dogs and scenes in general. Once we were underway, we headed through windy roads (concentrate please Boris), snowy hills, mountain tunnels and cool stuff.

A border crossing, never quite sure if money changes hands. Sometimes we all have to get off the bus and get our passports stamped, sometimes they are collected by Biliana and taken to the desks, sometimes, the border police get on to collect them and eyeball us. In each time, there is one crossing to leave the first country, then another to enter the next. This distance is variable from about 300m to the longest as we saw today of. couple of kilometres, as we went from Kosovo into Albania.

Albania was not part of former Yugoslavia as the other countries have been, and it showed. At the end of WWII, the leader of the army, basically took over, made himself king, president and prime minister (Hoxcho). Effectively, he was a communist dictator who put the whole country into permanent lockdown. They closed the borders and surveiled the population without their knowledge. Paranoia was high and evidenced by the 172000 military bunkers (never used) and up to 5700 people were killed with or without trial as being enemies of state (or suspected of it). People were not allowed to drive, little to no contact with the outside world...just a really crappy place. It even persisted until 1991 after the fall of communism in 1989 elsewhere. Ridiculous.

The city of Tirana felt decidedly uneasy. The drivers are maniacs...just stop wherever on the road, put the hazard lights on and get out to go into shops or whatever. To coincide with this, I got a bit of a tummy upset, even though we've not drunk the water here as it is not clean (you can see it in the toilet.). Bronnie and I went to the bunker in the main city opposite the city hall...never used, but where they had information about this dark time in their country's history. Our tour guide was a bit strange in that she kept on putting down her country when things like police came hooning through the city square and when a group of visiting soccer fans closed off several city streets to march their way through setting off loud fire crackers, flares...pretty much whatever...somewhat intimidating. We did see a nice church dedicated to Mother Theresa who despite being born elsewhere, always said that she was of Albanian descent as her parents were from there.

Anyway, another infamous claim to fame is the film Taken where the baddies are from Albania (sex trafficking)...so whilst waiting for the buscopan and gastro stop to take effect, we watched a poor quality youtueb copy of the 2008 classic. I have a very particular set of skills...