Back in Durres

Finally got back to Durres this afternoon after traveling down South for the last week. I left on Tuesday and went down to Erseke to see Jimmy and Janette. Janette put me to work at the municipality helping her layout a tourism brochure they are working on. Erseke is actually the highest elevated city in Albania, so it was a real break to get out of the heat and dust of Durres and up into the cooler mountains. Thursday I went down to Permet and stayed the night there with Peter. Poor guy doesn't have a kitchen sink in his apartment and has to use the bathroom sink for everything. Plus he has a turkish toilet. Martyr for the cause I guess.

Peter and I went down to Saranda on Friday to see Paul. Saranda is the best beach town in Albania, but you still have to get away from the city to find a really good beach. So the three of us decided to hike from the city over to a bay Club Med is trying to purchase to develop a new resort. We set out thinking the hike would take 4 hours, but the lack of a good map and a couple of steep slopes turned it into a 7 hour hike. Needless to say we were pretty out of it when we got to the beach. The beach was absolutely beautiful though, and worth the effort.

After setting up camp and swimming, we were sitting at the camp site when a shepard came up and started a conversation with. Because he figured we were tourists, after a couple of minutes he asked us if we had any extra money that we could give him. We weren't really bothered by him asking, as it is kind of a common occurance here. But after we convinced him that we didn't have any extra money, he asked us if he could have some of our shirts. I told him my shirt was all smelly and dirty, but he just told me to wash it in the ocean and give it to him. We tried to tell him that the clothes that we had on were the only clothes we had, but he was insistent. After about 15 minutes of discussion, he finally accepted that we really didn't have any clothes that we could part with. Needless to say, we slept with all of our stuff cause we were afraid he might come back and just help himself. Just another weird story from Albania I guess.

I posted some pictures from our hike, but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the shepard.