On A Collision Course
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Yesterday we arrived in Brasov, Romania, where we’ve booked an apartment for four weeks. I’m happy to be staying put for a little while. I need to get some writing done!
On a Collision Course
We met a really nice woman who owned a restaurant in southern Albania, in a sort of medium-sized beach town. Some friends had recommended her place, and the food was as good as they said, but the best part was the owner. She had lived most of her adult life in Sarasota, Florida, and therefore spoke absolutely perfect English. We were thrilled to be able to pick her brain, as we had just arrived in Albania. We ate in that restaurant three times in a week.
She told us not to count on any kind of schedule—Albanians move at their own speed. She told us which nearby sights to check out, that the ocean was still way too cold for swimming, and to ignore panhandlers (although she called them Gypsies). She told us what Covid has been like there, and how her daughter feels about the high school she transferred to when they left the US. And she told us how much trouble she had adapting to the roads in Albania.
The first time she went to Tirana (the capital, a city of half a million people), she had to hire a driver, because she was so freaked out by the chaos on the roads.
The way a person approaches driving and traffic rules is a function of culture as much as anything else. Our new friend had grown up in Albania, but had been driving in the US for years. She had grown accustomed to American road behavior, like turn signals, traffic lights, speed limits, and parking rules.
Things are … different in the Balkans. Someone told us that when Enver Hoxha (the crazy Albanian dictator) died in 1985, there were only three thousand cars in the entire country. As soon as average citizens could acquire a vehicle, they did—and they drove those vehicles, having apparently never done so before. It’s still a bit of a free-for-all. Half the cars now are big black Mercedes; the other half are banged up Dacias. They all go as fast as possible. On one twisty mountain road, we saw those little makeshift memorials people put up after a traffic fatality—on average, about one every quarter mile or so. It was more than a little unnerving.
Our drive went like this:
Me—There’s another one!
Me—There’s another one!
Me—There’s three!
Me—Another one! I can’t believe this—look, there’s more!
Lee—Are you insane? I can’t look! I’m DRIVING!
In our experience, Albania was the most extreme example, but only by a little. Lee got into the habit of pulling off the road whenever cars approached from behind (assuming there was any kind of shoulder or pull-out) because they’d all just ride our bumper. Narrow roads twisted and turned with no protective barrier. Construction zones appeared out of nowhere, with no clear system for managing the cars whizzing in both directions on one side of the road. One of our tour guides got a speeding ticket and had to leave us in her car while she took a taxi to pay the ticket at some kind of sketchy money exchange office. Google, of course, took us on all kinds of ridiculous routes. And don’t even get me started on the traffic circles—some people go, some people come to a dead stop, some people plow through in a straight line. There is no uniform system.
It all felt a little like the Wild West, until we were the ones causing the chaos. I think the problem might actually be tourists who don’t know how to read the road signs.
We were in Serbia, driving around a national park looking for a trailhead. We pulled up at a crazy intersection between five roads. Google said to go left, but there were three lefts. We picked one one and went. So far, so good.
It was a beautiful forest. We were tooling along on this winding road, blissed out to be under the shady tree canopy. Cars started passing us on the left, which was the norm for us in the Balkans. It’s a little disconcerting, because they all go fast and the roads are narrow and twisty, so we worried a lot about whether we were going to struck by flying sheets of metal when the left lane turned into a fireball of truck-on-car, but on this particular day, it seemed even more insane than usual. I was studying the map, concerned that we might have chosen the wrong left-turn, when Lee finally got my attention—Look—look at that! He’s passing in a blind curve! These people are crazy! Okay, he might’ve used stronger language than that.
I decided we definitely had taken the wrong left, and told him to pull over, preferably without getting us killed. He did. I showed him the map, and we agreed. He began maneuvering our little stick shift Dacia around, so we could go back the other way. Something finally dawned on me.
Are you sure this isn’t a one-way road?
I don’t think so, he said, as we turned back in the direction we’d come from, picking up speed as the road curved. Of course it’s not. We had seen oncoming traffic just a minute ago, right? We drove for a few seconds, and I began to notice that I could only see the backs of the road signs.
Shit! It’s definitely one-way.
Are you sure?
At that moment, a car in the other lane, flashed its lights at us and blew the horn as it came fast around the downhill curve, and we knew; in that instant, we also realized there was nowhere to turn around.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but my whole body braced for impact.
Mercifully, thankfully, miraculously, Lee managed the world’s fastest, most panicked three-point turn on the side of that mountain, and we had survived. Eventually my heart rate came down.
We laughed about it, much later in the day, but that felt to me like tempting fate. When we returned that little Dacia a few days later, I breathed a big sigh of relief.
Take care,
Lisa
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