Now we’re cooking with gas

Tuesday 1 October 2024

We ran out of gas 10 days ago, mid-way through boiling the kettle and cooking toast for breakfast. We knew finding a replacement cylinder in Albania would be virtually impossible but we hadn’t reckoned on our search being in vain in Italy too. Thankfully Italy is home to the best and cheapest espressos. Coffee culture is massive in Italy, 97% of Italians drink coffee every day and a single espresso costs, on average, €1 irrespective of where you buy it because the price is regulated by law! We paid £4.67 for two coffees and two croissants in a cafe in Iseo overlooking the popular Italian lake of the same name.

Evenings were doable either having cold meat & salad based meals or BBQ’ing. But to start the day off properly, a cup of coffee or tea is a must …. that and toast, a pastry or a croissant! We managed to find a couple of campsites with cooking facilities but it has made us rethink our minimalist packing. We’ve never carried a spare cylinder before but we’ll look at getting a small emergency canister and compatible regulator for our next big trip.

Today, in a hardware shop in France we finally managed to exchange our empty cylinder for a full one so ‘now we’re cooking with gas’ again. This was an advertising slogan from the 1930’s which encouraged people to use gas, rather than electricity, for cooking. The phrase later took on a new meaning implying ‘heading in the right direction after a period of trial and error’ or ‘functioning effectively.’ This is our third big (6000+ miles) roadtrip in this van and after each trip we jettison some stuff and think about purchasing other useful items. In general we don’t carry too much because we’re so limited on space. After this trip the large rechargeable lantern will be consigned to the attic and I doubt we’ll bring the SUP with us again as Dave’s only used it twice in 7 weeks and it takes up a huge amount of space. The solar shower bag was also only used twice and is a bit of a faff to fill and use so that may be jettisoned too.

All our other gadgets have proved their worth - the £10 USB rechargeable fan from Argos, the very effective mossie catcher/light, our wonderful micro folding BBQ, the hard wearing griddle, the smart speaker and our indispensable Karcher window vac for sucking up condensation. The versatile little white plastic folding picnic table cost us a few £’s in Turkey 12 years ago and is still going strong - that’s definitely a keeper!! 

Albanian Adventure Roundup

Friday 27 September 2024 

Edward Lear was an English landscape artist of the 1800’s, also famous for writing nonsense poems and limericks including ‘The Owl & The Pussycat’. In 1848, during Ottoman times, he travelled through Albania painting and writing about his travels.

He compared Albania to other countries he knew saying “You have that which is found neither in Greece nor in Italy, a profusion everywhere of the most magnificent foliage. You have majestic cliff-girt shores; castle-crowned heights, and gloomy forests; palaces glittering with gilding and paint; mountain passes such as you encounter in the snowy regions in Switzerland.”

On this road trip we’ve travelled to many of the towns and regions he visited including Gjirokastër, Himare, Vlorë, Apollonia and Berat (where they have signs honouring him). The Albanian National Tourism Agency have featured his paintings in a promotion of the Via Egnatia Roman route which goes from Durrës in the west to Lake Ohrid in the east before continuing on through North Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. 

Albania today seems to be a country struggling to move on from its complex past, trying to modernise but constrained by lack of investment. 

Many aspects of the country reminded us of our first time in Turkey in the 80’s. The local minibus transport system - called ‘furgon’ is very similar to the traditional ‘dolmus’ in Turkey. They can be hailed from virtually anywhere, don’t particularly run to a timetable, stuff in as many passengers and their baggage as possible and take a very roundabout route to its final destination. Trains are virtually non existent. We found driving standards in Albania to be almost as bad as Turkey, and that takes some doing! Impatience leads to dangerous overtaking and undertaking, vehicles tailgate you, drivers stop in the middle of the road, without warning, to chat to friends, they double or triple park to pop into a shop and at roundabouts half give way to traffic already on it and half don’t!! We coped with most of it but avoided driving into the capital Tirana because, in all honesty, my nerves couldn’t take much more!

The food is influenced by eastern cuisines and menus feature dishes we are familiar with from Turkey and Greece. There’s loads of lovely bakeries and fruit and veg shops, all reasonably priced, and a range of well-stocked supermarkets.

It’s a small, very mountainous country, (highlighted beautifully in the raised relief map on the wall of one of the campsites we stayed in) resulting in the area available for tourism development being quite limited. There aren’t enough tourist attractions to accommodate the domestic visitors arriving by car and foreign visitors on excursions from their hotels. The attractions that already exist don’t have the infrastructure to make it a stress-free experience, the roads are truly awful in places and car parks far too small. The levels of littering is also very off putting - a few areas seem to be tackling it but not enough.

In 14 days we travelled 753 miles and covered most ‘drive-able’ areas. We’ve seen some amazing places and the people are really friendly and welcoming. The country needs resources investing in it to enable it to develop rapidly, yet sensitively, if it wants to compete for tourists with neighbouring countries especially Greece, Montenegro and Italy.  

Edward Lear wrote about Albania “There is luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard living and filth on the other.” That seems as true today as it did nearly 200 years ago. We’ve enjoyed our first visit - perhaps we’ll come back in 10 years or so to see how things have progressed - once my nerves have recovered! 

And breathe ……

Treat Time

Tuesday 24 September 2024 

We’re hopefully done with the dusty, off-the-beaten-track dirt roads in Albania now so we treated the van to a €10 sudsy ‘lavazh’ (wash) this morning. We’ve also treated ourselves to the same in a rather smart campsite on the outskirts of the town of Shkodër. It has a swimming pool, cafe-bar, restaurant, steaming hot powerful showers, lovely clean toilets, laundry and cooking facilities. The latter are particularly welcome as we’ve just run out of gas and are unlikely to find a replacement cylinder in Albania.

Having recovered from the trauma of the narrow twisty tarmacked road up to Theth in the Albanian Alps we, perhaps foolishly, decided to try the road to Koman. Lots of blogs recommend the beautiful 2 hour ferry trip from Koman to Fierze to experience the stunning scenery along the River Drin. First though, we had to negotiate 13 miles of unpaved, potholed, rutted dirt road - a very slow dusty torturous journey. 

We were undecided as to whether/when to do the ferry trip because the weather forecast was for thundery storms. On approaching Koman we felt quite pressured by a number of sales agents vying for our business to buy tickets for the trip. As foot passengers the price was reasonable but the camper would have cost quite a bit, and presumably earned them a reasonable amount of commission. We drove past lots of parked cars and minibuses on the road leading to the ferries before arriving at a single width, roughly cut, dimly lit tunnel which we innocently drove through. 

At the other side was the ferry ‘terminal’ and we were met with the usual chaotic double parking of scooters, cars and minibuses and absolutely nowhere to park or turn around easily. With two cars following us through the tunnel it was a bit like that Rush Hour traffic jam logic puzzle to try and turn round and head back through the tunnel away from the stressful melee and yet more ticket touts. We felt we had probably already seen a small glimpse of what we would see further upstream on the drive up so we decided to give the ferry trip a miss.

We wild camped half way back down the dirt road, lit our mini folding BBQ and sat out enjoying the peace, tranquility and dark skies. The photographs won’t do it justice but the stars and the Milky Way were just amazing.  

From the campsite in Shkodër we walked up to Rozafa castle positioned high on a hill overlooking the town. It’s an extensive site with sections dating back to the 4th century BC. The views from the castle in all directions were beautiful, whether looking west towards Lake Shkodër and Montenegro or looking south at the confluence of the three rivers that surround the town - the Drin, the Kir and the Bajana. 

We’ll head south from here over the next three days making our way towards, hopefully, a more organised ferry terminal in Durres. From there we will take a 10 hour overnight trip to Bari in Italy and start on our trip back home.