Mountains of drama in Albania for the Bean roadster

Follow Warren Brown and Matthew Benns as they coax their trusty Bean roadster up through the perilous peaks of Albania on the way to Greece.

The hardest part of driving a 100-year-old car across the world has nothing to do with the driving and everything to do with the shipping.

“We are sorry, Mr Warren but the ship from Piraeus in Athens to Alexandria has been cancelled again,” was the message we woke up to in Ulcinge in Montenegro.

Little did we know that just a few days later we would be pushing the vintage car to cover 500km in a day to make the ship.

The veteran Bean motor car had powered tirelessly from Slovenia and through Croatia with The Daily Telegraph cartoonist Warren Brown and I aboard but now we had hit a stumbling block. The Mediterranean.

Matthew Benns, Warren Brown and The Bean at the mountain pass in Vlore, Albania.

Worse, a huge storm front was sweeping in from the sea and the locals were looking at the open-top car and winding roads and imploring us not to go.

Realistically, there was nowhere to go. As the rain drummed down Warren and I hit the phones and called anyone and everyone we could think of to try and line up a ship to Egypt.

If the ferries were cancelled because of the escalating crisis in the Middle East then we needed to get the Bean and the Ford Ranger back-up car into a container.

Marios Adam from Cargo Care in Athens thought he might be able to do something in a week or so. He suggested we let the storm pass and then slowly head to Athens – the 11th and final country in the European leg of the trip from London to Melbourne.

The mountain pass in Vlore, southern Albania, is a 29km-long engineering marvel that opened in 2022.

Elionel Gjorka, the caretaker at the hotel in Ulcinge, said we should try the port in Durres in Albania while Slavisa in Croatia was pushing for the port of Bar in Montenegro. What to do?

Once the storm had passed we headed into Albania and the mountain pass around Vlore where mudslides from the storms covered the roads and the city remained knee deep under water.

Slowly we moved on to Gjirokaster, an ancient UNESCO listed city that was the birthplace of dictator Enva Hoxha. Its steep cobbled streets put the howling Bean through its paces, both up and down.

“We can gently move on but be close enough to strike for Athens in the unlikely event we get a call,” said Warren practically.

And then the phone rang. “Mr Matthew, are you in Greece?”

Cargo forwarding agent Marios Adam had good news and a challenge. “We have a ship sailing for Alexandria but you have to load the cars in Piraeus at 9.30 tomorrow morning.”

It was already midday. Just over 500 km before nightfall.

“No problem Marios, we’ll be there. Book it,” Warren said, pulling on his chamois driving gloves and tightening the elastic on his goggles.

“I knew it was a bit of a challenge,” Marios said as the cars were loaded into the containers the following morning.

“But I Googled it and watched the car on DTTV and I was pretty sure it would make it.”

Matthew Benns

The Bean tackles Albania’s mountains

The perilously near-vertical, vertigo-inducing bypass carved along the side of Albania’s Ceraunian Mountains circumventing the seaport of Vlore – the country’s third largest city – is a 29km-long engineering marvel that opened as recently as 2022.

According to an official Albanian government press release, the intention was for the bypass to “ease congestion and promote tourism” yet this winding, skyward-climbing, bridge-strewn motorway has almost stymied our tourism ambitions as the towering Albanian mountain range is without question an unexpected challenge for us and our 100-year-old Bean car.

Heading south toward Greece with the Bean’s bonnet and headlights pointing ever-increasingly toward the heavens, Matthew and I began the long haul in trying to coax the car up through the mountain pass, the long, steep sections of road requiring us to one-by-one exhaust all the gears in the struggling gearbox – at times struggling along some sections in lowly, slowly, first gear.

Warren Brown makes friends with a local and her donkey in Albania.

Somewhere in this very part of the world in 1927, Australian adventurer Francis Birtles was suffering along a similar road to try and enter Greece, writing as to the extraordinarily poor condition of the mountain roads – at one point blocked by a rock-slide requiring him to reverse some five miles. (We were later to discover our road had been blocked in the same way only the day before).

In time we reach the highest point of the pass where we can see the city of Velore with its population of more than 600,000 as some infinitesimal ants’ nest way down on the coast below.

Matthew – not exactly partial to great heights – took a deep breath as we piloted the car downward toward the town Orikun where before long we had crossed the border from Albania to Greece.

Warren Brown, a local Albanian and her donkey pose for a photograph.

Birtles, of course, was not quite so lucky, having to navigate his way to the Greek capital on rudimentary backroads to reach the port of Piraeus where his Bean was loaded aboard the steamer Mytilus sailing for Alexandria in Egypt.

On magnificent, fast expressways our Bean tore across the full length of the nation to arrive at a shipping depot in preparation for the car to be packed up and freighted to the same destination – Alexandria in Egypt.

Warren Brown

Originally published as Mountains of drama in Albania for the Bean roadster