Day 213 Weds 16 May 2007 Vlore to Shkoder, Albania

Leaving the coast behind we drive inland past some weird new house building, well suited to Cherrybrook, and onto Berat, another ottoman walled town built around a castle high above a gorge. In a mixture of Italian and Albanian a boy escorts us round pointing out the main sites and showing us secret passages through the walls and a large underground cistern. Then its back on the road to Shkoder in the north of the country situated on the vast Shkodra lake. Here we find possibly the best hotel since resuming the trip, with free internet and very comfortable rooms.
An endearing feature of Albania is its ubiquitous hemispherical concrete and quite indestructible bunkers which gaze at you from slits on every patch of ground, fields, beaches, front gardens. Apparently there are 700,000 of them scattered everywhere, built to reinforce the sense of paranoia cultivated by Hoxa who wanted everyone to believe that their nation paradise was under imminent threat from all the surrounding jealous neighbours. LP reckons their main function today is as an alternative to the back seat of an old merecedes for losing ones virginity. They’re also useful as tethering posts or mounting blocks for donkeys.