Sarande to Tirana and some more pics

We left Sarande very early, a 4:30am start to catch the 5am bus to Tirana. The drive was spectacularly scenic and spectacularly slow. It was all switchbacks and narrow roads fro the first four hours and then all construction and narrow roads for the last 3 hours. The mountains of Albania are beautiful and green. The farmland is very picturesque in the valleys. The construction and development is weird at best. There are 80% of buildings that are incomplete everywhere. Rebar out of the roof and sides of homes and buildings, half finished walls and building skeletons. This is interspersed with nice new homes, old farm houses, nice new buildings and everywhere random stores. Ther really is no marketing strategy I think. There was a brand new Yamaha dealership with SeaDoo's out front next to a cess pool house with cars strewn about and the roof crumbling in and this was all in a field on the outskirts of Durres about 40km from Tirana. Tirana is more of the same, having no building or traffic logic, a severe lack of planning seems to hold the entire country in its grips. You can see everywhere the legacy of Hoxha, in the poorness of the landscape and the randomness of his bunkers, they are all over the countryside...weird again. We visited the National history museum in Tirana this afternoon and it was eye opening to see the long history of the Albanians and the clear fact they wish to move on from their recent communist past (Hoxha was nowhere to be found in the museum). Skandeberg is quite the guy, am impressive figure to be sure. We are off to Kotor tomorrow at a more reasonable time. Below is some more Turkey!