We said in a previous blog, we think, that there are two things you get on every Explore trip - ruins and churches. At that time we forgot the third. That is... at least one today will be a long drive with a full body massage freely included.
Thursday was that day for this trip, consisting of 3 or 4 long drives. Remember also a couple of blogs ago the reference to Pauls interesting roads and Pips do we really need to do this? Most of the first half of Thursdays long miles fell into this category.
Whilst the road was not rocky or gravelly the tarmac was at best nominal, with the bus axis wheelbase surely being wider than what tarmac did actually exist. Even Paul admitted that Thursdays drive might have been too interesting even for him.
First stop, shortly after leaving our overnight stop at Korca was the Kamenica archaeology site and museum. This is a - partly - excavated tumulus, work on which has shown that its origins date back 7000 years.
graves/440 skeletons, individual bodies, man/woman, women & young children /babies, many with artefacts eg pots, jewellery. But no discernable weapons have been found.
No work has been done on the site for some time now, exampled by the dig site now having wild grass growing totally over it.
The, rough road, route took us through the Albanian southern highlands via the Barmash Pass at 1040m with sweeping views of the Nemercka Mountains forming the border with Greece. As we drove alongside the river, which is the border between Albania and Greece, all our phones received messages from our provider to Greece. You may..... continuing then according to how each of our phone contacts work. Later that day they had all reverted to to Albania....
Erseke, a style town in its old buildings, provided a small coffee stop. Somehow we have still not solved the coffee issue as we both ended up with strong, black, even though we ordered lattes. Others nearby ordered cappuccino and got drinks twice the size of ours.
usually, during an English morning coffee stop, Pip will order hot chocolate. A couple of our group did so here. When it arrived it was basically half a cup of melted dark milk chocolate that had to be ladled out with a spoon.
Continuing on to our stop for that Thursday night, Permet, we had a photo stop at an imposing partisan statue. The official story from the time was that the brave partisans killed 60 attacking German soldiers, saving many children into the bargain.
But, in actuality, the partisans had no weapons. What really happened is that they killed 1 or 2 Germans, who then wiped out whole Albanian villages in revenge.
Our lunch stop was in the middle of a national park forest, at something of a In addition to the restaurant where the group ate there was reference to adventure activities, and there was even a blue lined swimming pool in the grounds.
There are supposed to be wolves and bears in the forest, but we saw none of them. Just lots of ducks waddling around, and lots of local trout in concrete holding tanks ready for lunch.
Firstly a 6km round trip walk up to a remote village, at the base of which was yet another church, though this one was locked. Some lovely valley views on the way.
On the way up whoever was at the front of the group let out a scream that could have woken the dead. They had spotted a snake on the track, up to a metre by all accounts. Sadly we were some way back and it had gone by the time we reached the spot. Pip was mortified to have missed seeing it, and spent the rest of the walk looking in the undergrowth rather than admiring the view.
Then a drive to some thermal springs. Lets be clear, we are not talking Icelandic Blue Lagoon hot springs here. This was essentially a just a few degrees above ambient temperature spring, at around 22°C. Apparently just a few years ago it used to be noticeably warmer but some seismic activity affected that.
