Return to Saranda

June 10, 2018

We awoke this morning to beautiful riding conditions: calm, significantly cooler, partly overcast. We’ll have a much easier time of it on our ride back to Saranda than Under the torrid conditions of two days ago. We start the day again with breakfast on the balcony of Via Kosteli, this time sitting on the seaward, more scenic side of the building.

It is interesting sitting on the balcony, overlooking the city. It is a place obviously undergoing rapid transition, with signs of new commercial activity happening everywhere you look. I’m sure it will soon enough feel like a different place than the sleepy resort town it is now. Our hotel owner asks us for a positive review when we leave, which we’ll gladly give. He tells us it’s a new hotel, in its first season. His family lives half the year in Athens, the other half here starting up their business. I imagine them to be some of the wave of Greek Albanians who are repatriating after the end of the Communist era.

On the seaside balcony of Vila Kosteli. It has the better views, but we didn’t eat breakfast here yesterday because of the wind and rain.

The ride to Saranda is quite contoured, and I think a bit harder going today’s direction. It has two long climbs nearing a thousand feet each plus several smaller rises, and they take it out of both of us. We’re feeling the effects of yesterday’s long ride, and the cumulative effects of almost six and a half weeks now. This is the longest tour we’ve ever taken now, with still another ten days to go. When we take on longer journeys we’ll need to do a bit better at pacing ourselves.

The ride has many delights today. The scenery is of course splendid both ways, and we can afford more time to take it in. The animal traffic on the road again amazes us, especially in the miles around Shen Vasil. The sight I enjoy the most though, oddly enough, is a cricket that hops up on my bicycle chain while I’m adjusting my brakes. It is so amazingly colorful; with those beautiful striped and muscular legs it makes me think of a bike racer or ballet dancer in colorful tights.

For lunch we stop in Shen Vasil, cooking off for a bit and enjoying a Greek salad and grilled tomatoes and peppers stuffed with rice. The owner speaks a bit of English, and perplexes me at first when I ask for the bill. Which way do we want to pay, with or without taxes? I don’t understand, and randomly say with taxes just to move things along. He breaks out a receipt book, but his body language indicates this isn’t his preferred choice. I try again, say we don’t really care, what’s best for him? He tears up the receipt, pulls out a scratch pad, and quickly jots down the item prices from the menu and totals them up. My reading of this is that we just bought a meal off the books.

The return ride to Saranda was warm and hard at times, but much more enjoyable than the ride out. It’s amazing what a twenty degree drop in the temperature and a bit of cloud cover will do.

I was dazzled by this view on our overheated ride to Himara two days ago, but didn’t stop then. It reminds me of the headlands south of Andros Chora from a few weeks back.

A row of concrete bunkers. At the height of the bunkerization campaign, there were over 170,000 bunkers in Albania - an average of 5 per square kilometer.

The Porto Palermo Tunnel, believed to have been used as the base for coastal defence vessels during the Hoxha era

Hmm, I think I see the problem here. Have you tried lubricating your chain?

What sort of day would it be without a few goats in the road?

We’ve never biked in a place with so much free range livestock walking the streets.

Looking back at Shen Vasil, our lunch stop for the day

The green ribbon ahead is the best part of this ride. We’re happy to get to cross it a second time.

I love the way that the fingers of the mountain fracture into small hummocks as they taper into the valley. We’ll see this terrain close up on our ride up to Gjirokaster on Tuesday.

We check into the modern, seemingly brand new TItania Hotel at about three. It’s more elegant than we usual opt for but still pretty inexpensive. We’re here because of our late change in plans, but couldn’t book the same hotel we stayed at before. It’s a nice place, with one slight defect - no elevator. We can leave our bikes outside the front door, or we can carry them up three flights of stairs to the roof. Which we do; and will do so again tomorrow, since we’re here for two nights and taking a day ride to Butrint in the morning.

We have a room with a stellar view of the bay, with one of the prime swimming holes straight below us. We both feel too grimy and whipped to feel like going down when we arrive, and it’s too hot still. Rachael takes a shower and we both crash for an hour, but looking over the balcony grows on me and eventually I decide to go down alone, and Rachael decides she’ll stay behind and take a video.

At the bottom of the stairs I’m surprised to see a different face at the reception desk, and she is surprised to see me as well. She informs me that I’m in the wrong hotel! It turns out that our building houses two mirror image hotels, each with its own reception desk and stairwell but with no separation on the floors. I’ve come down the wrong staircase, one of those things you just have to learn from experience.

The water is great. I really love the feeling of floating on the water looking at the city rise above the undulating waves - it always reminds me of swimming in Calvi on our first tour of Corsica fifteen years ago.

For dinner we go to Mare Nostrum, a modern place with a more eclectic menu that Rachael liked the reviews on. We share a delicious grilled vegetable/saganaki salad; she has chicken curry; and I have a massive veal steak - just what’s needed to put some meat back on the bones, as I’ve been feeling a bit undernourished.

Afterwards, another stroll with the masses on the promenade, another ice cream. I’m glad we’ll be here again tomorrow - Saranda is a town that grows on you.

Defying the odds, we still haven’t lost Jen’s opener.

The view from our hotel balcony. Eventually this was too tempting to resist.

Looking down the coastline toward Butrint, which we’ll visit in the morning.

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Ride stats today: 33 miles, 3,500’; for the tour: 1,503 miles, 132,900’

Today's ride: 33 miles (53 km)
Total: 1,417 miles (2,280 km)

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