Week 2 : Albania, from Sarande to Vlore

Albania exceeded our expectations through its people's generosity toward strangers, its natural beauty and a peaceful but mysterious isolation from its neighboring countries. We rode the brand new road along the Adriatic coast between the first city of Sarande across its southern border from Greece with its booming southern port city of Vlore. For a bicyclist, the utterly daunting grades with which the roads climb and drop along this rocky west coast had nearly brought our legs to a state of disfunction. In the North near Vlore our lungs began to suffer as road conditions worsened on dusty city streets stirred up constantly by traffic with little or no vehicle emissions control. Alas, after 3 days and 200km of Albania, we were left with no choice but to abandon the East Adriatic course intent (next trip perhaps) to ride the more developed shores of Italy.