Pete's Adventures on the Road

The great thing about October in places like Albania is the fact that it can still be warm enough to swim. Would I come here purely for the purposes of swimming in October? Probably not because warm weather, as we know, is not always guaranteed, so coming here just for beaches in October could be a bit dangerous and kind of fifty-fifty. Being here though is much better as it's more likely you will experience at least one brush with weather warm enough. We went to Pasqyra beach last week. Pasqyra in Albanian means "Mirror" so it's also known as Mirror Beach. It's a gorgeous spot, set down below some chalky kind of white stone cliffs, which probably helped create the name. Looking at it, you can kind of see why it'd be called Mirror Beach. Pasqyra Beach Getting to the beach is an interesting hike through the village of Pasqyra from the main highway that connects Ksamil and Sarande, first up a paved bit of track and then through this relatively rundo...

We just got back from a little side trip to Athens to collect our things from our friends who has been amazing enough to keep them for so long. We had initially only planned to leave them for seven weeks back last November, but when Pete then suffered a lot of ill health and it went on and on for seemingly ages, I ended up having to go back to Canada and well, the rest of the story is pretty boring. So seven weeks turned into more like 10 months and we finally  got back to Athens. The bus takes around 10 hours from Saranda, which isn't too bad considering the distance. What I wasn't expecting was the border to be so close to Saranda. I know we live very close to the south, south border, but I didn't expect we lived so close to the next border along which is known as Kakavia. Saranda and Kakavia are both circled below. Map of where Kakavia is It wasn't my first border by foot/car. I'd done this only once before in Laos into Thailand and that was a colos...