Kat & Mat's big bike trip
Day 68 Tiranë
Sometimes I wonder if we don't know what "rest day" means. Buoyed up by finding a Sombra yesterday, we've hired a car today to head up into the mountains in search of more.
There are two stripes of them across the country, which look like a member of the Sombra team came here on holiday with their spray cans. We're tracking one of these routes today, there are ten shown on the map - we'll see how many we find!
Kat drove the whole way, doing an amazing job in an unfamiliar hire car and some of the the most chaotic traffic I've ever seen. What a legend.
A few things we've learned about Albania and cars:
1. Cars are the ultimate status symbol here. Until the 90s it was essentially impossible to own a car, and that's caused a national obsession with them. We've seen more high end luxury cars here than anywhere else we've ever been.
2. German cars are particularly beloved. We'd guess that half of all the cars on the road are Mercedes, Audi, VW or BMW.
3. Foreign licence plates are also a status symbol. Everywhere we go, we see personalised British and US plates. Apparently it's a powerful symbol that you have foreign connections.
4. Driving has different rules here. Don't feel like you have to indicate or ever look behind you. Traffic in the cities is solid, so rather than wait for a gap, just pull out slowly and someone will stop. Everyone is quite chill and you'll rarely hear a car horn.
5. There are an insane number of car wash businesses. Every single village has at least one, and most streets in the city have at least one. I read that the dictatorship built 3,600 nuclear bunkers around the country during the cold war. There must be at least ten car washes for every bunker.
Back to our day trip, and we found all ten Sombras we looked for! We had a little celebration by the side of the road for the first one.
Our route took us through a big oil field where the landscape was studded with derricks and pumpjacks, and up into the mountains, a few of which had some snow at the top.
On the way back we saw an amazing limestone gorge, and stopped at Berat, a UNESCO world heritage site that had a pretty old white suspension bridge crossing the river.
Love, Kat & Mat x
On the day
💧 2L water
💧 1 cup of tea
💸 1 hire car
👀 5 horses and carts
🎲 10 sombras
👀 2 yellow cars
🐾 2 tortoises
👀 1 unesco world heritage site
👀 1 oil field
🐾 2 flocks of geese
👀 1 protest
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