lukebuehler.com About the life of a pilgrim

Into Greece

After staying in Tirana I was motivated to move on by walking. In the morning after having coffee with the hosts of the hostel I walked towards Elbasan. The weather was nice and crisp after a lot of rain and I felt fresh motivation to do this. After walking the whole day I came by a restaurant that had rooms, I was in the mountains and I had found no place to put my tent so I decided to stay there for the night. Soon after I had made myself comfortable I found out that there was going to be live music. It was a great party. They played traditional Albanian folk songs and people danced besides eating the lamb meat that was grilled outside. It didn't take long and I joined them. They enjoyed it so much to have me dancing with them and it was much fun for me too.

The next morning I walked the remaining 25 kilometers to Elbasan, I had to constantly decline invitations to ride with someone in the car. The hardest was when two guys asked me if I want to join them to go visit Kosovo and then into Greece. They were two travelers with a car. Anyhow, I made it finally to Elbasan, which is one of the biggest cities besides Tirane in Albania. When I was walking around the city looking for a good and cheap hotel two guys sitting in a cafe invited me for a Congnac. When they found out that I'm looking for a hotel they invited me to stay with them for a few bucks. I was a little suspicious at first but they seemed to be okey and friendly. When we were still siting in the cafe the one guy told me he was a hustler and was in jail for nine years. I was a little perplexed by his honesty and got a little anxious what I might have gotten into. When we were at his apartement his girlfriend came home who is a prostitute. She cooked for us while we were smoking (I had to blend in, at least a little) and watching TV. It was a little hard to communicate becuase we had to talk in Italian. The whole evening I was questioning if this could be true what I'm experiancing here, because it was like watching a movie. The next morning I hiked on into the back-country of Albania to a town called Librazhd. It was the third day of walking again and suddenly the motivational low hit again. I literaly felt like I couldn't walk anymore and just somehow made it to a restaurant. I wasn't physically tired but mentally. After some encouragement from my mom I made it to the city where I stayed in a hotel for the night. I started to rethink how I want to make my distance and decided to take the bus to at least Macedonia. The next day was my birth day. I took some buses and taxis into Macedonia to a city called Ohrid. Located at the lake Ohrid, quite a touristic town, but not at this time of the year. I found a guest house that Edwin from Tirana suggested to me and as came in I met a guy I already hung out with in Tirana he was in Skopje and then came to Ohrid too. It was so good because I had someone to spend my birthday with and be a little distracted. In the evening we went out to a restaurant to eat some good meat. Ohrid was so beautiful that I decided to stay one more day.

After that I found a shared Taxi that drove me to Bitola and from there over the border into Greece to a city called Florina. As was just walking the streets in that little city I tried to think what I should do next. Then I remembered a guy I met in Dubrovnik (Croatia). He told me that he worked in a little village in the mountains close to the border to Macedonia and Albania and that I could visit them anytime and stay for a while if I wanted to. I called him and he said I should definitely come visit. So after I missed the last bus to there because my clock was one time zone behind, I hitch hiked up there.

I intended to spend only a few days there but I ended up being there for a whole week, but more about that in the next post.

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