We awoke to the sound of the 4:45 AM call to prayer from Shkodra’s main mosque, after which the ubiquitous sidewalk cafes filled up with men, young and old, drinking strong espresso, reading the papers and smoking. As we rode through town after town, the cafes remained busy throughout the day, with the complex rhythms of Middle Eastern music often pouring out into the street. 

With Muslims making up 60% of the population, Albania is the first country in this trip that feels truly Middle Eastern (Bosnia felt like a very complicated hybrid). It also feels much poorer than even Bosnia, to say nothing of Croatia, Austria or Finland. This is perhaps most evident on the roads, which are generally in deplorable condition, perhaps hilariously so if we weren’t on our bikes, crashing and bumping along, dodging massive potholes, rocks, garbage, carts, dead animals, live animals, and a million other obstacles.
      
We also got a lot of very warm smiles, hellos, ciaos and other friendly greetings along the way. Eventually we realized that by remaining on the secondary roads, though described as highways, we would never reach Tirana, and decided to jump on the main highway running down the center of the country. Though better paved, certainly, the incredible dance of activity never ceased. Here is the scene of the highway on ramp, with people walking and biking against traffic. 

Having come yesterday from quiet and mountainous Montenegro, which has a population less than Seattle, today’s riding in Albania produced what felt like sensory overload. Upon quiet reflection from the comfort of our hotel room in Tirana, it was an exciting and adventurous day, but also pretty intense. This might be best encapsulated by the morning scene in one tiny village we rode through, Vau i Dejës, where in the span of a block we saw a group of men selling live, flailing fish out of 50 gallon drums in the middle of the street and watched a young butcher take a massive axe to a lamb carcass right on the sidewalk, with horse drawn wagons and a Mercedes Benz sedan with black tinted windows competing for space on the road, loud music blaring out of the cafes and people and animals walking every which way in the street.