It seemed a lifetime since we’d stood in Montenegro on the Balkans ride looking out over Lake Ohrid and quizzing our old mate Cristian about the mountains to the south.
“That’s Albania,” he told us. “I’ve been thinking about a ride through those mountains soon, just to check out accommodation.” The six of us signed on immediately as, while we’d become familiar with much of the Ionian coastline, Albania remained a mystery.
Now, after a few false starts and three years of Covid disruptions later, here we were in Athens looking at a brace of near-new 2023 BMW R 1250 GS Trophys, plus an F 750 GS for Ray whose fused ankle is not compatible with the layout of a boxer engine. Athens was chosen because of the shortest flight time from Australia and being not too inconvenient for Cristian to truck the bikes from his Moto Hub base in Bucharest. On previous rides through Eastern Europe we’d elected to go with hard panniers and top boxes, but with the Moto Hub van already in Athens the option of riding without any encumbrance was a blessing.
Less than an hour on the motorway west of
