Aloft and Agog: Cycling Coastal Roads of Albania and Greece
A touring cyclist. A bike to be returned to Greece. A fondness for roads that swoop from cove to cove along sun-bleached coastlines, and a yen for the unknown and less travelled. The compass kept swinging to Tirana, Albania as a place to launch the wheels to get to Tilos, a Greek island four turquoise-besotted seas away. The
route, through countries that shared a border but had known two opposing political realities – dictatorship and democracy – intrigued. And I knew this region of the world would offer sunshine, mountainscapes never far from the sea, farmlands and stone villages, and the occasional comfortable seaside pension. And above all, the trip promised a challenge entirely dependent on my own resources. No tour, no ‘van man’. Route planning, bike maintenance, local communication, food, water, fortitude and forbearing would all need to come from me. Should any of it falter or fail, I would have no one to blame but myself. How terrifyingly irresistible.
32 Hours in Tirana
Emerging unscathed – both my bike and I – from the three flights to Tirana helps to tone down the terror a notch right at the outset of the trip. As does the taxi ride into the city; no need to know Albanian if your Spanish is up to their Italian, the hotel; a welcome drink, mama cooking
me breakfast, and the son eager to help me reassemble my bike, and the city; the centre giving way to pedestrian-only streets, national monuments, an assortment of religious gathering places, and beaming civic pride.
Integral to my get-acclimatized day in Tirana is a ‘free city tour’. As with similar tours I had taken in cities in Hungary and Romania, the 2-1/2 hour tour with a university-trained guide brilliantly introduces our group to a city undergoing radical transformation since the fall of communism. We learn why the Albanian brand of communism had been so severe. It had stemmed from a deranged dictator – Enver Hoxha – whose chokehold on the country had been so harsh that no news, ideas, information, or intelligence had leaked in or out of Albania’s borders for 41 years (1944-1985). Tight as a drum, a consummate police-state. 175,000 bunkers – concrete rabbit-holes – were built to defend and protect the populace from imagined attack or nuclear/chemical annihilation. Webs of underground tunnels, cells and interrogation rooms ensured that the machinations of a paranoid government were kept secret and secure. A city museum – “The House of Leaves” – displays the methods of control – torture, 
imprisonment, exile to brutal labour camps, execution – that had helped to ensure people’s political fidelity (something superceded by the perennial Godfather-like presence of the national petrol company, “Il Kastrati”, today!).
When Hoxha died, Albania began to open its doors to the world. Shops stationed at the airport to divest Westerners of questionable fashions (like revealing clothes and long hair) were phased out at the same time Coca Cola and that most
exotic of fruit – the banana – become market staples. Real estate companies and cars salesmen emerged, and people were gleefully on the roads before licensing is enforced. The early euphoria and mayhem of this new-found freedom has clearly settled since 1991, with just the occasional quirk, like the unabashed use of bike lanes by mopeds and pensions proudly bearing the name “Relax Hotel”, belieing Albania’s individual take on Western ideas. It won’t be long now, they tell us, before it is ready to join the EU, perhaps by taking Britain’s place…..
The Launch
It was the quirkiness – its caught in the past while it takes earnest steps forward – that I loved about cycling in Albania. Figuring that extracting oneself from central Tirana would be a challenge for a cyclist, I leave at 
first light – 6:30 a.m. – to find that the only congested places are the bus stops, where long queues of commuters wait for their morning shuttle to work. Within 30 minutes, I have left the city and am on a country road, dodging children waiting for their school bus, and stray dogs ambling down the centre of the road. Keen for the coffee I never had prior to bolting from Tirana, I hungrily eye the small roadside kafeions I pass by, reluctant to stop if it is clear that they are men-only establishments. Remembering scenes like this in Turkey – men herding cows and goats, men behind wheels of farm vehicles, men repairing roads, men intoning the call to
payer from village mosques, men stopping for morning coffee, I sensed that traditions in the Albanian countryside run just as deep, and I would be facing a caffeine-free trip if I held out for a co-ed cafe environment in rural Albania. The addiction being what it is, I do stop, and the espresso is gratefully but swiftly dispatched.
My country road edges higher and higher, until cool arbors of pine forests 
and panoramas of Albania’s Mali me Gropa Mountains fill the view. A group of male cyclists out for a morning mountain ride pass me, and while quaffing beer at their summit taverno, applaud my final ascent. I continue the rest of the day entirely alone, giddy with the realization that I was getting away with this -a 63 year old solo female touring cyclist carving impromptu paths through Albania. While people seem to be indifferent to my presence on the road, I sense that that would all change should help ever be needed.
As is the case, when, on the second day of riding, I am hobbled by a flat tire that refuses to be repaired. Sputtering into the gateway of the Albanian Riviera – Vlore – pumping air into my tire every three kilometres inches beside four lanes of kamikaze traffic, I am left dredging cafes and
shops for any information about a possible bike shop. It emerges – down a back lane, in an open air stall with a flotsam of old bike tires and parts dangling from the ceiling. A woman, peeling vegetables into a colander, calls for her son to help me. Wordlessly, he assesses the situation and within 15 minutes, I have three tubes patched (even my spares had punctures), tire
back on and re-inflated, and my supply of patches and glue generously replenished. Road angels, roadhouse angels – I would learn that these would appear exactly when needed in Albania.
Reaching the Adriatic, Approaching Greece
After reaching the Adriatic coast from Albania’s inland capital, I face a
challenging pass into the southern part of the Albanian Riviera – The Llogara Pass – through mountains which had historically separated Albania from Greece (and which the Greeks still believe they do!). It is relentlessly steep, forcing me into low gear for the last 2-1/2 hours of the climb. Glorious pine forests, shrouded in shore-swept fog at the summit, are traded, within minutes of the descent, for the dry brush and gorse and stone hillsides one finds in Greece. I flash by countless day-tripping cyclists making the ascent from the other side and feel slightly Herculean in my accomplishment. Until I begin climbing again….and again….and again. A series of spectacular mountain ‘staircases’ define this part of the coast road in Albania, which, thanks to its engineer – Benito Mussilini – is admired by the legions of camper and caravans that ply this road today.
Eight hours ascending, 2-1/2 descending brings me to Sarande, the seaside jewel in Albania’s crown, where I will be staying with a 
Dutch woman whose cousin I had connected with on my cross-Canada cycle trip just months before. Urbane and chi-chi in its waterfront cafes and restaurants and marinas, I am thankfully soon rescued by my host, Mare Plaket. I learn how Sarande captured her heart long ago, and now, with her own apartment, and Albanian boyfriend, she is happily a year-round resident. A filling yogurt and meat casserole for dinner at a local restaurant is the perfect prelude to a comfortable sleep, courtesy of Sarande, Mare, and an apartment cooled by the sea breeze.
Waking refreshed, Mare helps me to plot a route through to the Greek border, now only 40 kms away. I bypass the heavily touted Greco-Roman ruins of ‘Butrint’ and its painfully long queues, and, via a rustic river cable ferry, join the road to ‘the frontier’. I am climbing again, this time through tamarind and mandarin
plantations (who knew?) until a harsher landscape signals a looming border. A bristling Albanian border agent waves me through to the cheerier Greek side, and within two hours, I am in Igoumenitsa securing a Greek SIM card, and deliberating on which of the myriad inviting cafes along the sea I will stop at for a refreshing afternoon lemonade….Ah…..Greece.
Ionian Islands Retreat
Ah……. Pargas, my destination for the night. A sweet seaside town on the Ionian Sea, brimming with the beauty and ebullience that says ‘Greece!’ – painted signs and shutters and merchants and awnings and bougainvillea and panakes (scooters) on pebbled streets. My pension is Italian owned, but Greek in soul – one balcony for my bike, another for long gazes to the sea, cats that take refuge in the rain. Home.
From Pargas, I head to the Ionian Islands of Lefkada and Kephalonia which promise to break me in gently to the slower pace of the Peloponnese. Between me and my warmshowers.org host in Lefkada Town, however, lies an undersea tunnel that forbids 
bicycles On-line reports and blogs reassure me, claiming that an emergency van service for pedestrians and cyclists is, simply, procedural. Wrong. First warning that things might not go as expected is the flat I acquire just shy of the Preveza tunnel, which, after an hour spent fixing and replacing, is followed by another. Even with sweat and consternation dripping from my brow, emergency vans categorically refuse to take my bike and ‘kindly’ flag down taxis that will take me through the two kilometre tunnel for an extortionate fifteen euro.
Enter my Road Samaritan. An eventual bus ride through the tunnel with an extremely cranky driver yields another cyclist- a young German man – who is willing to help me fix my flats, listen to my rants about unswept roads and Greek bus drivers, and simply be that support that a solo cyclist yearns for. We cycle together to Lefkada Town, share a drink wharfside, and too quickly part ways, he to where he will be able to hang his hammock for the night, I to my warmshowers accommodation. Thank you, Filipe; your kindness lives on!
As does the kindness of my Warmshowers hosts, Karen and John Spencer. Spectacular guest villa to myself overlooking Lefkada Town, lavish vegetarian meals, long, long conversations about cycling, Greece, 
refugees, mental health, families, and afternoon barbecues on terraces wrapped around homes high above the sea. Lefkada may be relatively populous, given that it is the only bridge-accessible island in Greece, but it is large enough that the green and wild and rugged hills remain the island’s ubiquitous feature.
Likewise, Kephalonia. Accessed from Lefkada via charming café-strewn Fiscardo, this is another bite-off-the mountainous mainland 
island, with roads that disappear round another bend in the mountain, another sweep down into a tucked-away bay. What joy on a bike; to balance on the seamless drop between mountain and sea, the blue-upon-blue vistas only occasionally eclipsed by the shadows of passing cars. A final ten kilometre descent sweeps me into the town of Poros at the south of the island and my jumping off point for the mainland in the morning. I savor the last night on an island, my weariness soothed by quiet, lamplit streets, a mother calling her child, the ocean gently breaking on the shore.
Peloponnese Surprises
Things do not revert to chaos (remember Prevesa?) when I rejoin the Greek mainland. In fact the opposite unfolds; quiet coastal roads, well behaved traffic, and navigable cities, and, for the first two days, relatively flat terrain. By the time I reach Kalamata, head of the Mani peninsula, I am once more truly, madly, deeply in love
with this country. There is a singular beauty to rural Greece – stark landscapes that are Biblical in character: desert and stone and olive tree, goats peering over walls of a long ago summer settlements, village squares swathed in the shade of jasmine and fig trees. Scenes that are invariably backdropped by a rooster’s crow, the chime of a church bell, the quiet chug of a caique as it casts off in the stillness of early morning. Here, the elements – air, water, sun and light – distill life to its essence. Like a pebble to be polished by the sea, one submits to this purifying alchemy whenever one returns to Greece.
Nowhere has that alchemy been stronger than perhaps the Mani Peninsula. Home to a people long isolated from the rest of Greece, 
and fiercely loyal to their land, the Maniots would never subject to Ottoman rule, and inspired the eventual fight for Greek independence in 1821. Strong, resolute, and chiseled by the rigours of their lives, proud remnants of Maniot culture – their tower homes – glower from inaccessible rock outcrops above the road that cuts through their land today. When I’m not hunched over my wheels, willing another gear to appear to help me up the punishing hills, or praying a goat won’t suddenly dart in front of me on the flight down, I imagine the tower to tower communication, the sieges and the standoffs on this wild and spectacular point of land. Not surprising that the gods had been on their side.
I stop in Kardamyli to hunt for writer/Grecophile Patrick Leigh
Fermor’s home (which is, as anticipated, completely unidentified even though it offers tours and writer’s retreats now), and by nightfall I reach sweet Gerolimenas, a tiny inlet with a huddle of small hotels and cafes around it near the bottom of the peninsula. In the morning, before facing the climb over the spine of the Taygetus Mountains to the eastern side of the peninsula, I divert to visit
Vathi, an abandoned Maniot village, but the site is closed. The climb looms. Tough, elemental – Maniot country indeed. Once the Taygetus are summited, I can remember little of the descent other than one glorious smashed-against-the-hillside-Greek-village after another flashing by, the sirocco wind hurrying me to the top of the peninsula, and the port of Gytheio. Here a string of weather-worn buildings and tavernas and fishing boats compete for space along a wide and welcoming bay, and just 
beyond, The Milton Hotel, where Petra, the proprietress, has been waiting to demonstrate ‘filoxenia’ (Greek hospitality) at its best. She helps to carry my bike up the stairs into the hotel (something no Greek man had done), assigns me the best room (corner suite overlooking the sea and town), and is up early to ensure the cyclist’s breakfast includes not just a glass, but a carafe of freshly squeezed orange juice.
The infusion of Vitamin C is timely. To get from the Laconic Gulf to the Argolic Gulf on the eastern side of the Peloponnese, I would be crossing the Parnon mountain range, but the estimated distance across was only 80 kms. How difficult could that be? Well, one 20 km section of the ascent takes four hours to climb, and would have been longer if three dogs guarding sheep and property at the side of the road hadn’t decided to give chase! Adrenalin-fueled, and with a new large dog-repellent stick in hand, I reach the 1200 metre
summit at the village of Kosmas. Dominated by church and a plaza buried in plane trees, one could only imagine how haunting Kosmas would be under a fresh snowfall in winter….Another riotous descent back down to sea level follows, the thrill of which I have to keep to myself as the two Dutch cyclists I meet in my pension that night will be facing the same road the next day. In reverse.
Coasting to Pireaus
The final two days of my Albania-Peloponnese ride are my just desserts – undulating coastal roads into Nafplio, and then a surprisingly rugged and wild strip of cliffside shore along the Gulf of Corinth into Galata, and onto Poros Island. Nafplio marks my re-
emergence into urbane prosperity and pastimes; shopping, dining, strolling through lovingly curated Medieval villages, and ogling others doing the same. Indeed, Nafplio is just what everyone says it is – one of the belle villes of Greece – and I am glad I have tucked it into my Peloponnese tour. Being upscale and popular means a crowded breakfast room in my pension in the morning.The Greek Canadians from Calgary at the table beside me seem to take pride in the fact that everyone in the room wants to know more about the Canadian cyclist’s story.
On the final day of my ride, the ancient site of Epidavrous – 
birthplace of Asclepius, son of Apollo, and most celebrated healing centre of the Classical world – is directly on my route. Though I had decided early on in my trip that diverging for tourist sites was not going to fit into a two-week time frame (so, many major sites – Mycenea, Olympia, Sparta, Pylos, Monemvasia, Gulf of Navarino – were earmarked for a later trip), Epidavrous’s 
14,000 seat pitch-perfect amphitheater sounded too good to be shelved for later. The theatre, perfectly positioned amongst hills and forest, proves to be definitely worth the stop, though the tourist crowds feel a bit jarring after fourteen rather solitary days on the road.
As do the crowds on the island of Poros, but here a healthy mix of local fishers, hoteliers, gelato sellers, tourists, Athens escapees, cracked sidewalks and roads awaiting repair, give Poros Town a comfortable Greek feel. 
And, as on any Greek island, within ten minutes on a bike you have left the crowds behind, and are atop an achingly beautiful and barren hill, enveloped by views to the sea. And overwhelming gratitude for a country so sublime for a cyclist: jaw-droppingly scenic, fabulously interesting, historically rich, with good and lightly trafficked roads, charming but inexpensive lodging, excellent and fresh food, accommodating people, and…..guaranteed sunshine! Given the ease in which one can ride, and attain the support one needs – food, shelter, mechanical assistance, wifi, ATMS – it is an ideal place for the
independent solo touring cyclist. And female novitiates like myself can feel assured, given that civility and honour run deep in both Albania and Greece, that the only time you may feel vulnerable is when that guard dog suddenly appears at your heels! At time like those, be prepared to get out your ‘big girl underpants’ (and perhaps a wildlife horn, a large stick, and your best braying alto voice!) and deal with it! And know that reprieve is near – a private balcony overlooking the sea with beer in hand, the expanse of sea&sky slowly returning your pulse to a slow and dreamlike pace. And it that’s not restorative enough, there’s always a ferry to hitch a ride with in Greece (did I mention bikes on free on Greek ferries?). And, in my case, when the final day on the road is a 15-hour ride from Pireaus to Tilos, you can imagine how chilled I was by the time I got to my destination!
Go to Greece, ride the Peloponnese, and let the land hold you in its thrall.
