Spring Break Vlorë 2010

Awaking in Fier to rain and thunder wasn’t the most reassuring sign of a successful day ahead but we continued our flight from the aggressive northern weather front closing in.  The next stop was  Vlorë, which you’ll of course remember was the site of some congress of important Albanians, or the signing of some sort of pact or constitution, or something*.  I would have known a whole lot more if I have been allowed to go to the museum and find out, instead of downloading the entire Wikipedia database onto my iTouch at a later date and then sporadically reading about the gradual etching out of an Albanian state in 1912. 

So, Vlorë.  It was nice, but from what I recall the weather was pretty bleak and we didn’t have much of an opportunity to enjoy it.  It is right on the ocean with a nice stretch of beach, however, and was evidently an important Byzantine naval base.  But the most important thing that I learned about  Vlorë that day was that buses to Saranda leave unfashionably early on Monday mornings.  So depite getting there well before noon we discovered that we had dead-ended on the coast.  This would have been awesome if we were on a Spring Break Tour of Albania and had a seemingly endless supply of money to spend on 3-star 30-euro hotel rooms that seem to be both everywhere and empty. It also would have been awesome if the weather had been better.  As fate would have it, however, we were on some sort of deadline (1/2 of us had to go back to “America” or whatever within the next two weeks).

We walked for a good length along the shore and sat at a resto-bar on the ocean eating pizza and asking literally everyone we could find if there was a possibility of catching a bus.  Averaging out all the feedback we got, the answer was a definitive maybe.  We then decided hitchhiking was not only our best option, but our only option.  Running over a rough topographic draft in our heads of what the road to Saranda would be like (I, reared on the West Coast of North America, expected it would be exactly like the Big Sur in California; my ethnic Albanian host was expecting something exactly the same, only how it was before California had entered confederation).  In any case, in what will eventually follow is a concise account of our trek from Vlorë to our Ksamil terminus.

*Albanian DofI, evidemment.  I love this picture.  I imagine a bunch of men suddenly opening the window and making a huge to-do to the passers-by to get their attention and then once everyone stops to see what is going on, one of the men on the balcony says, “Okay, so guys, we’re a country now” and then everyone goes back to whatever they were doing before because most people in the former Ottoman realms had poorly-conceived notions of any real consequences of post-Westphalian statecraft.