Towards northern Albania: crazy roads and Lake Koman

Tirana Backpacker Hostel was a pretty laid back place to hang out for a few days. That damn heat though. Almost needed adult diapers for the sweat...! Afraid there's no recommendation from us to visit Tirana: it's a noisy city in the birthing throws of the worst of capitalism, it's dirty and crazy hot, the 'tourist sights' are lacklustre at best, local restaurants are wall to wall meat and local cool consists of coloured lights, short shirts and cheesy downbeat. Although to be fair Tiranians were an exceptionally friendly lot.  If anyone else gets the chance to visit Albania, maybe bypass this place and hit up the rest. Seems we didn't even bother taking any photos...

Time to drive up towards the northern Albanian national parks of Valbone and Theth.

We stopped in at Kruja Castle and wandered through its interesting Ethnographic Museum - showing Albanian crafts including ceramics, olive pressing, raki making, weaving and embroidery, with exhibits ranging in age from 70 to 500 years. The historical 'mens room' (for talking smoking etc) with a small mezzanine above for the women peer through small portals in case they wanted anything made some sense of the current ubiquitous all-male customer coffee shops and scarcity of  places for women to socialise.

We paused on the hill overlooking the city of Shkodër and climbed to the top of the imposing Rozafa Castle. The hill has been settled since antiquity - it was an Illyrian (ancestral Albanian) stronghold until being captured by the Romans in 167 BC and has been the site of several famous sieges, including the siege of Shkodra by the Ottomans in 1478 and the siege of Shkodra by the Montenegrins in 1912.

In Shkodër we had a night at a cute little hostel called Mi Casa Et Tu Casa - where we left the car for a few days - before  make the long trek to see some of that hairy old green nature stuff we've been hearing about.

An early minibus (yeah, those are cafe chairs filling up the isle) from Shkodër took us to the start of the three hour bus ferry --from the hydro-electric dam at Koman (finished in 1986) to the port of Fierza-- through the impressive gorge of lake Koman.

Yes. That's right. A bus ferry. A ferry, made out of a bus. An actual bus. Looks like Albanian ingenuity beats good 'ole Kiwi ingenuity hands-down. What do you do when the government fills up your valley with water and you can't drive your bus any more? Why, you weld some steel around the outside of it and call it a ferry of course! The ferry bus would stop every thirty minutes or so and pick up someone that had come down from their hidden house up in the mountains. The best pick-up was this fella in a full suit that appeared right out of the scrubby undergrowth. Corporate mountain meetings, maybe?

The ferry on Lake Koman now forms part of the 'lets go hiking' tourist route to and through the national parks.

The boat is dwarfed by the sheer walls that close in on many stretches of the trip but when the waters open out you have the opportunity to see the high peaks of one of the many mountain ranges looming above. The walls of the cliff faces are an education in the evolution of the very mountains, showing the different layers of sediment set down millions of years ago and then twisted and bent. Sometimes so much that they are almost going back on themselves.