Intro to Albanian Geography

I got an e-mail from a dear friend yesterday.  She told me she had been reading the blog and following our activities, but she was about to lose her mind keeping track of all the places I refer to, especially not knowing where they lay in position to each other and how much travel was required between them all.

It got me thinking about some of my favorite novels growing up.  They usually had an illustration of a map at the beginning laying out the locations of the fictional towns or estates or country borders.  Goodness, most Bibles even have a set of maps at the end!

I could get really detailed going into a geography lesson here, but I'll try to stick to the main places.  Albanian geography is also extra complicated because the typical map doesn't really portray the topography (like mountain ranges, which Albania has in abundance) and the system of roads here which varies dramatically in quality.  A "major road" here may not even have painted lines on it!  In other words, not all distances are truly equal when it comes to travel ease or time.

(yellow highlights added by me)

Tirana -- the capital of Albania.  Our apartment/offices are on the south side of the city, near the big park (more visible in the map below).

Elbasan -- located more in the geographic center of Albania, this is the city where Reni lived at the time we adopted him.  Thanks to a new tunnel that opened in 2013, the drive from Tirana to Elbasan was cut from 1 hour 45 minutes to just 45 minutes (from our end of town).  A lot of Bethany's recent adoptions have been from the orphanage in Elbasan, so we have made some trips there to visit adoptive families as well as other friends there.  Elbasan lies in a field surrounded by mountains, therefore the weather is a bit more extreme than Tirana (more hot in the summer, colder in the winter)

Vlora -- the city where Ellie resided when we adopted her.  Vlora is a port city on the deepest harbor in the Adriatic, which also happens to be a fairly short distance across the sea (about 45 minutes in a high speed boat) to the closest part of Italy.   Ellie's Albanian registration is still in Vlora, so until we get our residency visa, we can't move her registration to Tirana (which will make it more convenient for matters like getting future birth certificates, which are only valid for 3 months).  From our apartment in Tirana, it takes anywhere from 2.5-3 hours to drive to Vlora.  The views of the sea are beautiful, but the beaches are rocky.

Pogradec -- a city we will be visiting in a couple of weeks on the border of Albania and Macedonia.  There is a German prosthetic team located in Pogradec.  I'm not exactly sure how long it takes to get there yet.  We've heard the road along the edge of the lake leading to the city is abysmal.  In the summer time, Pogradec is supposed to be a popular place to escape the heat and the lake (Ohrid) gets very warm.

ZOOMING IN:

As for the trip we make most frequently (Tirana/Vlashaj), I've noted our village on the map above.  The drive from our apartment in Tirana to the village takes about 45 minutes -- the longest part is just navigating traffic through Tirana.  As you can see, Vlash is just off the autostrada that connects Tirana with Durres (the biggest port city in the country).  We are hopeful that proximity to these significant commerce centers, along with decent infrastructure, might bring economic opportunities to our community.

Incidentally, we are discovering that this busy road is even busier on weekends in the summer time.  Can you guess why?