WeGo Yugo Part 1: хаиде ("Hai-day").

It's been over a month since we posted, and we've had lots of great adventures, including a short trip to Norway and visiting friends and family in Colorado and Michigan. I've also got pictures from Prague saved up, as well as a "Best of Bulgaria, Year 1" picture show to post. All in due time (or overdue time). Right now it's more important to blog while the experiences are fresh.  And right now what's fresh is Albania.
Back when we found out we were heading to Bulgaria, we raided the local Bozeman Public Library for anything Bulgaria-related. Not surprisingly, that wasn't very much, and a lot of that only mentioned Bulgaria peripherally.  Much of what I could find on the region focused on the former Yugoslavia.  Intrigued, we planned to visit as soon as we could.
Last summer, I thought we'd head to Croatia. It's supposed to have a beautiful coastline, and it's really not that far (less than 300 miles by air from Sofia to Dubrovnik), at least as the crow flies or even as the crappy car drives, if there were reasonable roads, which there aren't. We tried to go to Macedonia (only 70 miles to the border from Sofia) last September but were foiled by a crappy tour agency and some miscommunication.  We looked into taking the train to Montenegro last November for our "flu vacation", but the trains there and back would have taken almost 4 days of our 5 day break. OK, we'll fly. Europe is full of cheap flights. Except not to Croatia from Bulgaria. Now have a biggish chunk of time in the prime summer travel season, and we considered going to the Alps (we love the mountains), but decided that while the Alps are relatively easy to get to on a short break, this might be the only time we could get to the "Western Balkans," as Lonely Planet calls the region. Yugoslavia road trip here we come!

Sort of. First we needed a car. We bought a car, in May, except that we didn't actually own it yet. By the time we left for the USA, we had a lovely red 1991 VW Passat parked on our lawn, that we had nick-named "хаиде" (pronounced "hai-day," Bulgarian for "Let's Go!").  We had paid for it, and had the keys for it, but it was still registered to someone we'd never met. We bought it from another American couple that teaches at the school, and they had bought it the year before from the wife of a Scottish teacher at the school, but they'd never gotten around to transferring the ownership. When we tried to take care of this at the end of the school year, we were foiled by busy schedules and Bulgarian bureaucracy (we had to have 6 months left on our residence cards to register a vehicle, and they were set to expire in June). We still drove хаиде around on errands in Sofia illegally, but figured crossing multiple non-European Union borders with an apparently-stolen vehicle was just asking for trouble.  We had a very hard time getting in contact with the owner of the vehicle, so that the whole time we were in the USA, we didn't know if we would ever be able to get our car legal.

Once we were back to Sofia, thankfully the rightful owner of the car was very cooperative, and able to meet up on our first day back. We didn't have the time or patience to change car into our names, but we got notarized documents saying we're legal drivers of the vehicle, which seemed sketchy but we were told was good enough for now. Ready to go!

Except not really. We were really jet lagged, we had no itinerary, no plan, no reservations, hadn't unpacked from our trip to the US...vacation was stressing us out. (Me, at least. Shannon read a book or two, put her feet up, and still probably managed to accomplish more useful packing/unpacking than I did while I tried to plan our next trip.)  So we laid low a bit, waiting until Friday to leave. Planning a circuit through Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, maybe Bosnia, maybe Italy, Slovenia, and Serbia (all in 12 days) we'd cover 2500 km or so in total. That would be not such a big trip in the US, but here, it's ambitious.

We decided to tackle the likely hardest drive (Sofia --> Dubrovnik, Croatia, 831 km) first, as it had the most border crossings and worst roads. Splitting it up into 2 days seemed like a good choice. We decided our first stop for the night would be Tirana, Albania, of which we knew almost nothing, except that it was up-and-coming and the former-artist mayor had used brightly colored paint to spruce up the drab Communist-era apartment blocks. Google Maps claimed it was a 7.5 hour drive. We figured Google Maps was wrong, but we had no real idea how wrong, or even in what direction it was wrong (it often over-estimated drive times in the rural Western US), and no one we knew had any better estimates for us.

It was really wrong. It took us almost 12 hours of driving, not 7.5. We hardly stopped at all. We never had to get gas (the beauty of going 40 mph all day). We didn't stop to eat (brought a cooler with snacks.) The border crossings weren't too bad (and they never cared to see our paperwork that we weren't stealing the car, of course).  Even a 12 hour day of driving might not be too bad, in the US on the interstate with a book-on-tape to while away the hours on cruise control.  But it wasn't that sort of a 12-hour drive.

хаиде is good at a few things.  The heater works (not that helpful in August, but I'm sure we'll appreciate it eventually). The windshield wipers work. And as the name says, it goes. It got us all the way to Albania. хаиде is not so good at some other things. There is no A/C. There is no cruise control.  The radio mostly doesn't work. The wheels feel wobbly. The transmission feels like it's going to fall out.  About two hours into our journey, the exhaust system blew a whole. On our first descent down a mountain pass in Macedonia, we discovered the brakes were soft. Push-the-pedal-to-the-floor-to-get-a-response soft. Good times.

With the blown exhaust system, хаиде was LOUD.  It didn't help that we had to have the windows down because it was hot and we didn't have any A/C. We started wearing ear-plugs, though this didn't really get rid the low-frequency rumble in your chest. Luckily, the brakes weren't OUT, just weak, and it was only a problem going downhill (though that seemed problem enough).  We took the biggest "through" routes we could...there just aren't too many kilometers of modern expressways in these parts...at least they were all paved without giant potholes (unlike many Bulgarian roads). There was enough traffic on these windy mountain roads that going down in 3rd gear was OK. This helped me not have to use the brakes very much, which was nice.

We arrived at the Macedonian resort area of Lake Ohrid (Trivia Time: at 3 million years old and 300 m deep, Lake Ohrid is the oldest, deepest lake in the Balkans) around 6pm.  Decision time. Stay at the beautiful lake ringed by mountains and try to get the car fixed, or push on (supposedly) 2 more hours (only 80 miles) to Tirana, the capital of Albania?  So far Google had been told us a 6 hour drive would take 5. Not too bad.  We had a hotel reservation in Albania, and none in Ohrid (on a Friday night in the tourist season). Tirana was a much bigger city (population close to a million). Where would we be more likely to find a mechanic to work on the weekend? A after a quick dip in the lake at the lovely but crowded and littered beach in Struga, we pushed on to Albania, hoping to get there by dark.

Albania is not the best choice for your 3rd country in a day with a crappy old car. It's really hard driving. We never left 3rd gear in Albania, except for stints in 2nd to climb the insanely steep route to the capital city (this was the main route, not some scenic detour through the mountains!).  It is beautiful though (many, many mountains), as least from what we could see while it was still light out. It took us over 3 hours to go the 90 or so miles from the border to Tirana, all the while with crappy brakes and the loud drone of a muffler-less car. I hope as Albania develops they invest in a few more streetlights, as the lack thereof was also a bit of an extra challenge on the way in.

If you like hand car-washes, Albania is the place for you. Every roadside establishment (and many shacks that could hardly qualify as establishments) offers "Lavazh," usually advertised by a guy holding a high-powered hose spraying into the air, just waiting eagerly to remove your road filth. For a country that didn't have any drivers outside the communist dignitaries 15 years ago, they are now very very concerned with having a clean car.  It's also a good place to find a slightly used but durable bunker. Approximately 750,000 semi-underground, concrete-and-steel bunkers (about enough for every family) were built during the Communist years, all over the countryside, and they're so indestructible that they're pretty much all still there.  Very odd sights, the bunkers and the car washes of Albania.

We rolled into downtown Tirana around 10:00 pm local time.  It seems like a really happening place. Lots of young people strolling the streets, the restaurants and bars seemed to be in full swing, and main square downtown (Trivia #2: "Skanderbeg Square", after a national hero that fought off the Turks for many years) was bright and felt safe to walk around.  We amazingly found our hotel after not too long (we didn't have a good map or decent directions), and the friendly staff at Hotel Lugano even arranged for us to have our car looked at in the morning (Thanks!).

The mechanic that was luckily right below our hotel seemed confident and helpful, but we had to go through a few different people to translate our concerns. He didn't need our translators once he put the car up on lift though: the muffler was clear detached from the exhaust pipe, the front wheels were loose "Terrible. Like you are swimming on the road," and the brake fluid was low.  He could fix the brakes today (Saturday morning), but would have to wait until Monday for rest.

Hmmmm. 
Tirana was just supposed to be an overnight stop en route to Dubrovnik. Staying an extra 48 hours would kill the rest of the itinerary. No mountains in Slovenia. :( 
But the mechanic was here, cheap, willing to do it, we were exhausted, who knows how hard it would be to find a mechanic in Croatia, and the "road Karma" seemed to suggest we should stay and check out Albania. So here we are.  Haning out in Tirana.
During our past travels in Europe we have lamented not having a car, figuring it would be so much easier if we could just go places when we wanted on our own schedule. Here we are reminded of the albatrosses of car ownership as well. We still can't go where we want when we want, and it's expensive and stressful as well. I guess independent travel can be difficult no matter how you do it, unless you pay someone lots of money to take care of all your problems for you.
[Yes, I know we should have taken the car to the shop in Bulgaria before we left to check it out.  I'll hide under the lame excuses that the previous owners had it all checked up (supposedly) before we got it in May, and we didn't know a mechanic in Sofia either, and we didn't have time, blah blah blah. It's just easier to be lazy when doing the "right" thing is so much harder, as most things still are in Bulgaria.]

So we'll figure out some interesting things to see in Albania, we'll adjust our schedule, and we'll have a great road trip, with brakes and hopefully without the need for earplugs.