Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Today’s stats:
Distance traveled today: 20.17 km (+81 km by bus)
Total trip distance: 2858 km
Max speed:  36.57 km/ hour
Average speed: 14.84 km / hour
Total time biking: 1:21
Total days biking: 50
Spending: 6280 leke ($63)

We awoke to thunder striking and rain thudding against the window. Tomas was waiting for us in the kitchen this morning like a soldier standing at attention.  We sat down to the table for homemade peach jam, wonderfully fresh milk from the countryside, bread, cheese, boiled eggs and oranges from the backyard.  He regaled us with a list of projects he was hoping to start including a coffee shop at the mountain-top castle, a bar/restaurant on Berat’s main street, an information booth for tourists and a shop selling artisanal jams – this after a failed attempt last year to sell rabbits grown on his brother’s farm. He’s the perfect example of Albania’s small middle class, trying to make a go of it in this new world of opportunity that it finally has access to.

Just to put things into perspective, “bourgeois” families like Tomas’ were required during the communist years to host other families in their extra rooms. For years, Tomas hosted two families in his house, each paying the equivalent of 10 cents a month for lodging and 5 cents for electricity.

His wife, Greta, got the gold medal in her secondary school class and wanted to enroll in a physics university program but wasn’t permitted because her father was rich. She was to learn how to be a worker instead.

Puddles swallowed the street as Tomas walked us to the bus “station” after breakfast, greeting townspeople who knew him along the way. The busses all park in a lot in the centre of town, and surprisingly, are clearly marked with their destination city. We threw our bikes in the bottom of the bus to Vlorë, and had a coffee with Tomas before departure time.

When the engine grumbled only six minutes after schedule, I was shocked. For $4 each, we knocked off 80 km of cycling in the rain, on terrain we had mostly already seen on our way into Berat. Apart from two passengers puking quietly into plastic bags and throwing them out the window, it was a pretty uneventful ride, with Nina Simone and “New York, New York” playing on the radio.

The bus dropped us off on the side of a road filled with cement, tires, cardboard boxes and garbage. We rode into the centre of Florë for pizza before heading to the coast.

Richard asked the owner for directions to Kaninë, a town on our way to Orikum, at the foot of the Logara pass. “That’s my village!” he answered excitedly in Italian. We never spoke Italian when we started this trip. But now it’s our lingua franca. “You go, you tell them I sent you, and they will give you the best meat in the village for free!” Then, on a piece of paper, he scribbled a map and words that Richard should repeat when we arrive: Ho sentito ke si manga bene. Gracie.

Then he hopped in his car and led us to the street we should take to get there. Albanians are no good with maps – reading or drawing them – as they were “state secrets” during the communist era. But often enough, they show you how to get there in person.

Unfortunately, our dear friend had led us to a dirt road full of potholes. We’ve handled heavy rain before, but rain on small Albanian roads like this is another matter. The one-lane road became a muddy roller coaster, without enough room for both us and the trucks that splashed us every time they passed.

Luckily, the large coastal road was much better, but with a rain of 1,000 little knives piercing our faces, we couldn’t really enjoy our first look at the “most unspoiled stretch of the Mediterranean coast.” Once again, Albania stole a page from the Sub-Saharan African story book: the roads flooded to such an extent that the bottom of my front panniers ran right through the little lakes. Electricity poles sparked.

When we asked a man on the street for a hotel, he ran some 300 meters through the rain to take us to an unmarked building, where the hotel manager insisted on carrying my bike up two flights of stairs. Albania is still governed by rules of tradition, where women are to be treated like women. I rarely have to carry my own stuff around here.

Richard got to work setting up a clothesline under the heater as I discovered poo leftover from a previous client in the toilet. We wrung brown water out of our clothes. At 10:15pm, the power cut out.