Crossing Albania

We say good bye to Djordje and Petrovac, a town still luckily bypassed by the tourists invasions. There is a day-long trip ahead of us through Albania towards the Ohrid lake in Macedonia. Ceca is returning to Belgrade, and we are leaving her in a small coffee shop at the train station in Bar, her train is coming in less than an hour.
The road to Albania takes us over a highland plateau, maybe this is where the ancient Via Ignatia was. The houses, people and cars are different now. Albania has for sure the highest number of Mercedes cars per capita. The language is now incomprehensible to us and even if signs can be read in latinic, they are not similar to Czech at all, as opposed to all previous countries. We stop at Standa’s acquiantance from a previous trip, the owner of one of the restaurants along the street which is called Enigma 1. This little village with a broken road has also an Enigma 2 restaurant and Enigma 3 is being built in a brand new medieval castle complete with stone walls and towers. This time, the owner does not have any used frying oil for our cars, so told us to stop by next year again.
We navigated through the thick traffic in Tirana and continued on a narrow road along the steep mountain sides all the way to the crest, where the view opened over the valleys on both sides of the mountain range. This rollercoaster ride with all its adrenalin and movement sickness continued for 2 more hours before we finally descended into a wide valley, scarred by a gigantic rusting factory in Ebasan.
We bought olives and cherries, passed by street dogs along the road and started climbing up another mountain range, which held the Ohrid lake.
The never-ending wait at an almost empty border crossing became absurd and bothering, especially because Vladimir needed to be in Skopje by the morning so that he can apply for a Bulgarian visa. As a Macedonian, he needs it to be able to continue travelling with us.
We reached Ohrid at about 10pm, with Nikola and Strezo from Media Artes awaiting us.