ElaineFerritto

The Albanian Center for Marine Research's main objective is to train divers (consisting of students, grad students and phd students) in the art of scientific and archeological diving. This includes learning how to transect and map underwater fields. Making a list of acurate measurements is hard enough on land let alone underwater. The students did an amazing job with their diving even with the added stress of collecting data. Practice practice practice...that's really the only way you can master this technique. The students here have gotten spoiled with great diving conditions. Can you imagine trying to measure / map an area when you cannot see more that 2 feet in front of you? or if there is a 3 knot current pushing you off the bottom? It is difficult to simulate those conditions in Albania because ... read more

Our first day off, so we took a short 90 minute trip north to the city of Gjirokaster (pronounced Gee-row-kast-ra). The ride itself is like a roller coster, bumps, curves, tall hills and definitely danger... there are some crazy drivers here! Along the way there are small "markets". It mainly consists one or two old men with boxes of fruit and small snacks for people to purchase for road trip snacks. We stopped at one and apparently you're supposed to buy fruit by the kilo, but I only wanted one peach. The little old man was so cute he wouldn't take my money! I slipped a buck into his tip dish though when he wasn't looking :) Once we arrived in Gjirokastra we immediately saw the castle. It towers over the entire city like a fortress. ... read more

What an incredible anomaly of diving! I am in shock that there are still ancient amphoras and pottery just steps from the beach here in Sarande. So many of the amphoras are in excellent condition too! I've really enjoyed learning about the history of the Balkan region, and now it's nice to "know" what to look for underwater. The other interesting things to see are the echinoderms. There are loads of a cucumbers and starfish all along the reefs. We dove off radar cove whichjust about 20 minutes south of sarande and saw lots of echinoderms as well as pieces of pottery scattered alonbeach shallow reef. We did our second dive on the Probitas: Inside the Bay of Saranda there lies an Italian cargoship. It was sunk during the II World War by German Bombers on ... read more

Luggage has arrived! Woo Hoo! I feel so much better now that my bags have arrived. I was worried that half of the donation items for the Albanian Center for Marine Research was going to be lost in baggage-land forever! Once the bags arrived, Auron, his friend and driver and I headed south to Saranda. There are basically 2 roads that go to Saranda. The first being the coastline, which supposedly is beautiful, but extremely busy on the weekends. The second was the road that we took - through the mountains. I cannot imagine that the coastline road could have been more beautiful, but the countryside in Albania is stunning. We stopped at this little place in the middle of the canyons for lunch. It was a delicious combination of rice, meat, salad and yogurt. Very ... read more

Whenever I travel alone, I really think that there is no easy way. Day One... long travels planned to get to Albania. LAX thru JFK thru Rome then to Tirana, Albania. In total it's approximately a 22 hour trip. From the very beginning, I should have known that it was going to be a disaster. LAX flight gets delayed by an hour due to mechanical failures on the airplane. They transfer us to another plane and off we go for our flight to JFK. Don't they realize that if we take off late, most likely we will land late? Of course, we do not have a gate once we arrive in NY, but luckily after 30 minutes we find a gate and off we go. As I'm running through JFK to get to the International terminal, ... read more