Oct 27 Bar, MNE to Sckoder, Albania

73km

At some point in the past, we had planned to go Bosnia to visit Sarajevo. This began to seem less and less likely considering the mountains and the weather. We completely nixed it at some point in Croatia. Then when we took the bus, we realized we have a bit more time on our hands to go elsewhere. We had originally planned to take a ferry from Bar, Montenegro to Bari, Italy and then a ferry from Bari, to Patras, Greece where we would resume riding. But Albania was calling our name and to Albania we went to much satisfaction to date. Crossing the border was unreal. We felt as the feeling of being somewhere totally different. It is not so much the landscape or the architecture, which is certainly different than say the historical cities, like Ljubljana, rather the people and the culture seems so different here. Feels like we have left the west, so to speak. We have rode our bicycles down expressways along side horse drawn carts and a thousand large semi-trucks with mountains all around. People wave from three fields over and children race along side us just to say hello or ciao. We feel we have finally entered a different place. We once again found ourselves in a tight spot in terms of a camp site. Trash lined the lake and people were everywhere. We finally found a quarry with a few potential campsites. We saw a man walk into the adjacent home and called out to him. The whole family came out to se what we wanted and the young boy acted as our translator. He spoke very good English and was frank. “where do you want to sleep?”, “We would like to sleep on Grass” “Okay, you can sleep over there. Good night” . We cooked dinner while listening to the the last calls to prayer of the day coming from the distance Mosques.