Well it was time to finally leave Munderfing and my good friends Rod and Jess....hic......sob.... I was especially going to miss all the lovely road signs of the area. However I was blessed with one last look at 'Pfaffing' as we drove to the train station. Jessie was a sweetheart and drove me to the train station in Salzburg where I caught the 12:12 train to Villach, where I had decided to spend the next couple of nights. There really was no rhyme nor reason to my decision to visit Villach, except for the fact that it happens to be on [View Full Entry]

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Today I caught the train to Munderfing. Yes that is right, I am now in Munderfing. This is where two very good friends of mine from Dubai are currently living and where I will be hanging my hat for a few days. For those of you that are not up on your rural Austrian geography, Munderfing is a little village that is just outside of the district of Salzburg. So to get there I caught a train from Munich to Salzburg. Rod and Jess were kind enough to come and collect me at the train station and then take me back [View Full Entry]

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Well today I spent the day in Munich. Getting from the airport to Munich centre was a little bit of an adventure as the airport is quite a way out of town. A bit like Heathrow really. And I was trying to do this really quite late at night. However I made it into the centre of town and then had to walk through what appeared to be the red light district of town, at 10:00pm at night with all the drunk and drinking men to reach my hotel. My hotel is lovely and is called Litty's Hotel. A very pleasant [View Full Entry]

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We left Saranda in the morning and caught a ferry boat to Corfu, Greece! Finally out of Albania and back to the land of the Euro. It was actually quite a process getting out of Albania, involving many passport and ticket checks, in what were quite frankly the oddest of places. Although this was nothing compared to the passport control coming into Greece. One of our passengers is an Asian Australian who just happens to be living and working in Ireland. Well he got pulled off to one side and interogated for quite a while about what he was doing and [View Full Entry]

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This morning we left Gjirokastra and headed off in a private transport to the Adriatic Coast (well it is practically the Ionian Coast now) and the town of Saranda. The Saranda that we are staying in apparently mostly dates from the 1930s when people began to settle here during the communist times. Hence the large amount of ugly concrete buildings. The drive here from Gjirokastra was just lovely. It was a short drive only being 50kms, however the drive was over some pretty intense hills and they don't have 3 lane highways here. Instead you have very windy, narrow roads with [View Full Entry]

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We left Berat this morning on a private transport and headed off towards a town called Gijrokastra. This was approximately 4 hours drive away from Berat, but was probably only 3kms down the road. No not really but the roads in Albania are certainly not 6 land super highways so the distance between the two towns probably isn't all that large. The drive itself was relatively uneventful, but that could be because I spent a large portion of time with my eyes closed, dozing away quietly. The biggest excitement of the day came when we arrived at Gijrokastra and tried to [View Full Entry]

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It's my birthday. It's my birthday. I'm sorry, this isn't the most conventional way to start off a blog entry but "it's my birthday and I can if I want to!!!" Anyway so today is my birthday and I started the day off most plesantly with some surprise presents from Kris and Susie that Stuie had carried all the way from Dubrovnik I was totally overwhelmed (even with a small tear in my eye) as I totally didn't expect to get any actual presents today, let alone two or three gifts from such lovely people. After breakfast, and the wee present [View Full Entry]

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We left Ulcinj yesterday morning and commenced our quest to enter Albania. We were very priviledged in that we had a private transport to take us from Ulcinj to Tirana. It was only a short jaunt from Ulcinj to the border, however it took sometime to actually get through the border. When we arrived at the border crossing there was a massive queue of cars waiting to enter Albania from Montenegro. However our bus driver was a crafty little bugger and slipped a wee bribe to the appropriate person and we managed to skip all of the queue. Even doing this [View Full Entry]

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Today we finally left Dubrovnik and headed off towards Montenegro again, on our way to Albania. Unfortunately the first thing that I had to do today was to walk down the 155+ stairs to reach the departure point for the bus. This proved to be somewhat more tricky than I thought it was going to be. Of course I had to wear my funky yellow boots, as they don't fit into my backpack, and putting these high heeled boots together with cobblestoned, steep stairs was possibly not the best idea in the world. Somehow I managed to go over on my [View Full Entry]

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On day 55 we were due to leave Kotor to drive to Dubronik. We were very lucky and Kris had arranged us private transportation to take us between the two cities. This meant that we were actually picked up at our door and delivered to the city centre of Dubrovnik. The drive between the two cities was spectacular. It was one of the most beautiful drives that I have done in a long time. The weather was playing nice with us and the water was just divine. A gorgeous sparkly bright blue. We had to drive around the coast and in [View Full Entry]

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