Andrea Hearts Traveling

After an early morning wake up call in Zadar April and I headed to the bus station and got the first bus to plitvice lakes.

I know I have said that I am over waterfalls since nothing really compares to Victoria Falls or Iguazu but I thought that Plitvice looked awesome and were worth the trip, plus they are a highlight of Croatia, so I kind of had to!

The bus ride took a little over 2 hours and although the day started clear and beautiful the closer we got to Plitvice the worst the weather got. Why does it has to rain on the day we decide to walk around lakes and waterfalls? I was really hoping for the rain to stop as soon as we got to Plitvice… but that didn’t happen!

We got off the bus and headed to the info office to figure out where to leave our bags. Luckily, the park offers free luggage storage so we dropped our bags off, got our tickets, and started to explore the famous Plitvice.

After going to Bosnia and Herzegovina it was time to loop back into Croatia; the next destination being the very famous Split.

Once again I found a coastal town filled with huge cruise ships and a million people walking around. I stayed in a hostel right inside the old town so at least during the night I was able to see a more chilled out city with less tourists after they went back into their massive cruise ship and sailed to their next destination.

Right after dropping my bags off at the old town hostel I went to the tourist info office and got a map to see what there was to see in Split and the woman at the desk was shocked that I didn’t know that the 2 days I was going to be there were the celebration of their Saint, St. Dominius, and apparently the biggest holiday celebration after New Year’s! Well, maybe that explains the massive amounts of tourists?!?!?!

Dubrovnik... or as I call it, the city with the most tourists eating gigantic ice creams!

Sarajevo was so unexpected!

I had this idea of Sarajevo being a very ugly city and not very interesting. I have no clue where this idea came from but I was 100% wrong about it! Sarajevo had so much character and was beautiful!

While walking the city I noticed that it had either been rebuilt after war or was not impacted as much as Mostar since there were not that many buildings with bullet holes around the areas where I walked.

I decided to go on a walking tour of the city and it was very good. Our guide was a kid during the time of war so she shared with us lots of her stories about living as a kid through the war and what that was like.

My next country in the Balkans is Bosnia and Herzegovina!!!

I was actually really excited about visiting this country and I knew just a little bit of its history from blog posts that I had read. As I was riding the bus and approaching the city of Mostar I started noticing cemeteries, tons of destroyed buildings and many of them still standing but with bullet holes all around.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, former part of Yugoslavia, had a cold war not too long ago and has been independent only for 25 years. The cold war was basically Serbia and Croatia fighting to make the Bosnian territory theirs.

As you walk around town you feel kind of weird because you can still see the effects of the war on the town, they haven’t reconstructed everything and in a way it shocks you to see it. Many of the houses have their original gates with bullet holes in them.

Montenegro is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L!!!!!!!!!

I arrived in an afternoon bus from Shkoder and it was pouring. Once at the station I decided to walk to the hostel with a guy I met in the bus, Billy. After walking the wrong direction we turned around and all soaked we made it to the hostel and checked in. I decided to stay in to avoid getting even and just enjoyed a relaxed evening inside the dorm room free of rain!

Don’t ask me how to pronounce the name of this city because I have no idea! Albanian language is very hard!

I got a bus from Tirana and after a couple of hours I made it to Shkoder!!!

Tirana… the capital city of Albania!
Many people said visiting Tirana was not worth it and I should skip it but I thought I would do the judging of this city on my own so after teo days in Berat I got a bus to Tirana for the night.

Although my time in Tirana was short I got to experience what the Albanian big city was about and I finally saw where all the younger people in Albania are!

Well, Albania has been a great surprise so far!

It is just so beautiful surrounded by so many mountains all around (apparently the most mountainous country in Europe!… And seems like the country with the most Mercedes Benz per capita! haha)

I arrived in Berat with my friend Adam and immediately loved the vibe of the UNESCO World Heritage city. It felt like a bigger Gjirokaster but still with a lot of charm.

Now I'm off to the Balkans!!!

My start in Albania was a little shaky. First, at the border with Greece (in the middle of the night) I gave my passport to an officer in the border and looked at my passport and he literally went like this: “El Salvador… HA! El Salvador… HA HA”… I just looked at him and said “Well, I guess you don’t get many El Salvadorian through here!” I was annoyed! What’s so funny? I think waking up for border crossings at 2am is not my thing!

Then we crossed over to Albania and handed my passport to the bus driver and 20 minutes later everybody had received their passport except me. After a little bit another officer came and asked for me and that I needed to get out of the bus since Ecuador needs a visa!!!! I was so confused because I knew I did not need a visa and I said I was NOT from Ecuador but he kept saying I needed a visa!
I got to the booth and the new officer told me the same, that my country needed a visa and I told him that I did not! The conversation went like this:

Officer: “You need a visa to enter Albania”

Me: “I do not, El Salvador does not need a visa to enter Albania”
Officer: “Do you have a US visa?”

Me: “No”

Officer: “Do you have a UK visa or Shenghen?”

Me: “I am visa free in UK and Shenghen”

Officer: “Are you sure you don’t need a visa?”

Me: “Yes, I’m sure!”

Officer: “Are you sure?”

Me: “Yes”

Officer: “ ARE… YOU… SURE?”

Me: “YES!”

And showed him 3 different sites that said I did not while he pointed at his phone and said that I did… Finally I think he figured out that he was dumb and doesn’t know how to read El Salvador and Ecuador! So at the end he looked at me, wrote my info on the computer and said “Welcome to Albania” and let me go…

Well, I think both my mom and I agree that Delphi was a total snooze!!! haha OR we are both not into rocks that hundreds of years ago used to be something!

Mid morning the following day we left Kato Gatzea and drove to Meteora. The drive was just wonderful although we got some rain. Driving through green mountains and looking at yellow wild flower fields all over was awesome; both my mom and I were delighted by the views.

My favorite view was the 5km before getting to our hotel when we could see Meteora from the highway and below it Kalampaka, our final destination for the day.

We left the touristy island and decided to go back to the main land and explore the other beauties that Greece had to offer. My first plan was to drive to Thessaloniki but the more I thought about it the lazier I got about having to drive 6-7 hours all the way there so decided to google something in between to stop kind of on our way to Meteora.

I found the city of Volos but couldn’t really find any decent hotels so I decided to stay 20km away from Volos in the cute little town of Kato Gatzea.

We picked up our rental car after spending one night in Athens and witnessing the festivities of Good Friday. There were processions all over town and they passed right in front of our hotel!

Our next destination was Santorini, only two hours away from Naxos in ferry!!!

When we arrived our hotel pick up service was already waiting for us and it was then when we figure out that Santorini was very very different than Naxos. In Naxos as we got off the boat we could walk straight into the town but in Santorini we had to go up a very very very windy street and then drive for 10 minutes to the town of Thira (Fira in English.)

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