Cycling In The Balkans ( 4 Countries Albania-North Macedonia

Rendezvous at Tirana airport and transfer to hotel in Tirana city centre. Meet the rest of the tour group over a relaxing dinner. After checkin in at the hotel, depending on the arriving flights, we will have the chance to do a tour of Tirana and visit the nuclear bunker of Enver Hoxha, the fruit and vegetable market and the national museum of history next to the newly build city centre of Tirana. Before the welcome dinner, your tour guide will go with you, through all the tour details and tell you everything you need to know about the amazing tour you are about the journey. Lively, colourful Tirana is the beating heart of Albania, where this tiny nation's hopes and dreams coalesce into a vibrant whirl of traffic, brash consumerism and unfettered fun. Having undergone a transformation of extraordinary proportions since awaking from its communist slumber in the early 1990s, Tirana's centre is now unrecognisable, with buildings painted in primary colours, and public squares and pedestrianised streets that are a pleasure to wander. Trendy Blloku buzzes with the well-heeled and flush hanging out in bars and cafes, while the city's grand boulevards are lined with fascinating relics of its Ottoman, Italian and communist past, from delicate minarets to loud socialist murals. Add to this some excellent museums and you have a compelling list of reasons to arrive a day earlier here.

We will start the morning with a two hour transfer to the northern side of Lake Ohrid. From where, after we have unloaded the bicycles and fitted them to everyones comfort we will start cycling along the scenic shore of lake Ohrid towards Pogradec. After lunch we will cross over into Macedonia, and visiting the monastery of St Naum before arriving in Ohrid.  Sublime Ohrid with it’s 365 churches, is Macedonia's most seductive destination, with an atmospheric old quarter cascading down a graceful hill, crammed full of beautiful churches and topped by the bones of a medieval castle. Its cobbled streets are flanked by traditional restaurants and lakeside cafes, but it's not a complete tourist circus just yet and still has a lived-in feel. Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest lakes in the world, came into existence during a remote geological ages as a result of tectonic shifts and with its unique flora and fauna the lake is one of the largest biological reserves in Europe and with 212 known endemic species and a surface area of 358 km2 it is probably the most diverse lake in the world.

Today we cycle along the Black Drin Valley following the only way out for the river, from Lake Ohrid down the gorge past several dams and lakes to Debar.  Across the city of Debar passed the main road Via Egnatia. At that time the city included all the provinces on both sides of the middle course of Black Drin - from Struga to Prizren, from Tirana to Kicevo and from Elbasan to Gostivar. All that attached great importance to the economic centers on the western side of the Balkan Peninsula. Throughout the city, there were long columns of caravans in different directions, to Albania, Thessaloniki and Skopje.  Debar has several thermal water springs with temperatures reaching 48°C and is characterized as sulfur-sulphide with a high degree of radioactivity and the presence of algae suitable for treatment and for scientific purposes.