It was a long, but not uncomfortable, 8-hour ride back to Tirana on Thanksgiving day, spent listening to podcasts and trying to ignore the two motion-sick women behind us. We were truly thankful when we reached Tirana. The guy who asked us "Taxi?" wasn't really a cabbie and his car made protesting noises all the way to our hotel, but we could see he needed the money and we went with him.
Albania has had two Nobel Prize winners, Mother Treresa and the guy who discovered Viagra. The Hotel Nobel honors them both and the prize with a box in the lobby which contains a photo of Alfred Nobel, a replica of the medal and a stick of dynamite! The rooms are tiny but cheap for Tirana, and the hotel is near the departure point for the bus to Macedonia.
Our bus to Sturga this morning entered a different Albania, an Albania with good roads and clean towns with no liter. I guess people who have flowers on their balconies are incapable of throwing their trash on the road. We traveled Albania from Montenegro to Greece looking for someplace scenic and all we had to do was cross the country from west to east.
