Not enough sleep, not with the incessant pestering of flies and mosquitoes combined with the frightening force of lightning, thunder, and rain all night long. The evidence of our hard night is etched on our skin: clusters of bites on our cheeks, bags under our eyes, a general sheen of filth that accumulates each day that we are unable to shower. Hopefully the latter part will at least change soon - but we are resolved to make it through Albania on our initial withdrawal of 15000 LEK, which amounts to just a shade over 100€ for four days, and we blew through a substantial portion of that the first day on posh quarters and maps and tasty street food. (In reality, the lion's share of that went to paying off the room; the rest was negligible, as Albanian prices are quite low in comparison to the rest of Europe.)
In our exhaustion, we set off down the beachside motorway. Bikes are not exactly permitted here, but they are not yet not not permitted - if the reader can excuse the polynegative mess here, I should explain that the roads here are of recent construction. Indeed, sections of the highway are actively being built, so that we are forced to divert around unfinished overpasses and around cordoned-off unfinished lanes and over unfinished gravel portions with treacherous waterfilled potholes bored by the recent storms. The motorways even lack signs in most parts; we eventually come across the usual sign prohibiting pedestrians, cyclists, tractor-driving farmers, oxcarts, smaller scooters, and other such inferior modes of transportation from using the motorway, but even this is merely lip service to a car-driven ideal - when we stop halfway to the semi-major town of Fier to check our map, for instance, a kindly man waves with his hand to indicate that we might as well use the motorway, as the police will hardly care...
...ah, the police. This must be the largest employer in Albania, for nary a five-kilometre stretch goes by without at least one police-staffed radar trap. They are out in full force, stopping motorists left and right - and yet, given the preponderance of recently erected roadside memorials to victims of careless driving, it may not be wholly excessive. Nevertheless, they do not bother us, not even when we ride in our habitual side-by-side phalanx-of-two formation down the side of the often way-wider-than-necessary blacktop.
We stop for lunch just before Fier, cursing the uniformly flat path we have thus far chosen to take through Albania. This may seem perverse - after all, isn't it a beast of a time to chug up those bloody mountains? - but this alternative is boring, every kilometre exactly like the last. Saturday today; this is the Muslim day of rest. Although the Muslims are a minority in religiously polyglot Albania, their presence is large enough that many businesses - such as the gas station stores we had hoped to purchase additional snack from - are mostly closed, the petrol-pumping parts of the operation manned with a skeleton crew...
...and we reach Fier, where we happily discover two markets and a bakery to purchase the necessities of continued eating. And to think we were beginning to despair that we might not eat properly tonight! The roads bring all manner of vehicles through Fier: hay-stacked carts, tractors, and the increasingly predominant automobiles. In one of the markets, the owner makes an unusual inquiry...
"Where are you living in Albania?" - as though the thought that people could, of their own free will and faculty, come from outside the once-closed borders to pass through this fine country was unthinkable. We reply that we aren't; that we are travellers from North America on a foolhardy quest to spend a full six months of our lives biking around the coast of Europe, voluntarily foregoing the comforts of North American life to bum around in a tent and sleeping bag with little more to our name than the shirts on our backs. We laugh at her bewilderment, politely take our leave, and set off after a quick disappointing beer despite our still-mounting exhaustion.
The coast at last! Endless biking to the coast; at least the roads become more interesting, pressed around hills by the coastal terrain as they take us into the small town of Panaja. Spirits are running low, tempers flaring. Exhaustion - tired, not enough food, bites from yesterday - and to add to the whole bit, in our desperation I purchase the only serviceable-looking snack item from the only open market we can find in Panaja; this turns out to be a pack of repugnantly tasteless cookies that we simply can't stomach at this point. Tired. Hungry. We decide that the cycling must end soon; turning the corner just past the town, we spot a segment of flat-looking land down between some fields and a section of olive grove. We pull off the road and onto the gravel-dirt sideroad, our bikes shuddering with the uneven surface...
...and we set the tent, allowing it to air out and dry. I head off into the olive grove, hoping to find a pair of trees suitable for stringing a line that we may dry our clothes - which, unfortunately, are still soaked from our efforts to wash them in Dubrovnik, and have started to take on a musty smell...
...but before I can do that, a man rides up on a scooter and begins talking to me. Catastrophe! This must be the landowner, come to turf us from the only half-reasonable camping spot we've found in this coastal agricultural stretch - but he is not; just some curious local come to see the oddballs with the bright orange tent that, upon reflection, can certainly be seen by everyone around. He speaks not a bit of English, but he has passable Italian; combining this with the meagre shreds of Italian I picked up during our time in that fair country, I manage to explain the nature, length, origin and destination of our trip, as well as sundry personal details. Impressed with our courage, ardour, and batshit insanity, he shakes my hand heartily before puttering off on his scooter. I set to stringing out the line, selecting two sturdy trees some 10 m apart...
...and am stopped again, this time by a younger and taller man of solid build. This man has more the look of a landowner, being dressed for work in the grove, and I mistake his approach for an attempt to remove us from his hard-earned land. I start taking down the line, but his permissive hand gestures indicate that this is not his concern; rather, he has spotted our rather poorly camouflaged tent in the adjoining field (which, as it turns out, is also his property.) By an exchange in English, pseudo-Italian, Albanian, and copious hand gestures, I understand that he would like to offer us space to camp further inland, in the safety of the grove; I grab Valkyrie, he explains this to her via the same disjointed language mash, and we move our stuff in amongst the olive trees. He offers us water - there is no running water, but as most rural European communities they draw from the town aqueduct and store it in large plastic bottles - and a loaf of bread, which in my exhaustion I nearly drop on the ground. We set our line out and string up the clothing, making sure to lay all our wet bags out in the fading sun so that they might benefit from the last bits of daylight warmth.
The weather looks increasingly dire, clouds moving in off the sea for another nightly storm. Despite the language barrier, our gracious host extends his hospitality yet again: we are invited to have the use of his couch if it rains, and may join them at 1900 for a meal. When that hour rolls around - which it does quickly, for all this setting up and striking and moving and setting up again has taken a while - we clamber inside out of the just-starting rain, and settle in for a conversation that proves equal parts rewarding and taxing. First, we start out with the pleasantries: who are we? How did we get here? Why did we embark on this ridiculously epic journey? When we find ourselves at a loss to explain our route sufficiently, we duck out in the rain to grab our maps; on the back of the Crna Gora map, there is a large-scale map of most of southern Europe, enough to display the majority of our route. This we trace with our fingers. In return, we understand from him - although he speaks primarily in Albanian, using one of the others present to translate into Italian when necessary - that he is a karate champion with an established school in Vlorë; that the others at the house come from all over Albania, and are known to him in various ways; that he spent some time in Greece. Although we speak scant Italian, our knowledge of other Romance languages is sufficient that we can usually read and listen with relative success. He then settles in for the main lesson: a discourse on Albanian history, geography, language, and culture that lasts nearly two hours, hours spent poring over the formerly Albanian sections of our maps and drawing various diagrams on a pad of paper that he produces and writing out the phonemes of the Albanian alphabet (which is capable of expressing a wide variety of sounds!) This, too, is delivered in Albanian and Italian - but, by degrees, we come to understand most of what he says. We are exhausted still, of course, but eager to learn about this unknown land that we have merely been passing through for the last couple of days. At times the electricity cuts out; much of Albania operates on a timesharing system, whereby users contract to receive a certain number of hours of electricity per day.
The lesson mostly concluded, he steps out to Vlorë; we mostly nap, as we are quite tired. They return later with food: eggs, sausages, cake, and the remains of a delicious lentil stew stored away in their pantry. We gobble this up, thank them for the meal, and in our post-meal soporific state are soon well passed out on the couch, safe away from the gathering storm outside...