I got into a discussion recently about the Milano-Taranto classic car and bike rallies. Effectively they are like a ‘touring’ remake of events originally conceived as a race on public roads.
I was told that you need to do the Milano-Taranto at least once in your life. However, it is expensive to enter and you still have to arrange your own transport back to the north of Italy at the end.
The Tre Mari is a scooterist’s equivalent. It’s similarly a touring event based on a 1950s Vespa road race. I would also argue that it’s also a ‘must do once in your life’ for anyone with a passion for classic Vespas or Lambrettas.
The difference between the two, however, is purely in value for money. While participating in Milano-Taranto costs €1,600; this year’s “Albania Special Edition” cost only €640.
Consider then what is included:
- Two overnight ferry crossings, with cabins and two 3-course meals
- Four nights accommodation in 4-star hotels
- Four more sit-down wedding-style meals
- Luggage transport between venues
- A backup ‘sweeper’ van carrying spares and collecting any breakdowns
- An Albanian Vodafone SIM card with 35GB pre-paid data
- A ton of goodies and gadgets including two t-shirts and a cooler bag
- A well-planned booklet with routes, programme and contact details for every competitor and official
Without coming into your room and offering a turn-down service with happy ending, you have to say that the organisers – Vespa Club of Bari – really could do no more. They’ve been running the Tre Mari since 2005 and by now are a machine so well-oiled that it smokes like a GS150 running at 6%.
I want to do it!
Yes, you should. Of course, for any northern European, getting to the start line in Bari on the heel of Italy will cost more than the entry itself. Geography – like time – is an obstacle that nobody can overcome.
The hardcore way is to ride there, compete and ride back, but from Northern Europe that might mean 3 weeks of holiday. The easiest way to do it is to club together, put the scooters in a van and send some poor unfortunate to drive it while you fly directly to Bari. That’s what the SIP Scootershop guys did. We were lucky enough to be in Italy with scooters to use, but even in the Rimini Lambretta Centre van, it’s a 6-hour journey at 90mph on the motorway.
Entrants are divided into teams of 4 or 5 riders and pillions; if you want to bring your ‘Zavorra’ (baggage). Everyone is issued an individually-numbered bib which doesn’t offer a spectacular level of breast support. I’ll stick with Playtex.
Albania
The Vespa club of Bari learned from our last escapade to Albania in 2018; where we sat around for hours in the port town of Durres waiting for our SIM card to be issued. This time we were given everything we needed beforehand in Italy. After a flag-waved send-off under the inflatable arch, our team of 5 was on the road for Pogradec on the border with North Macedonia. That’s the latest name for ‘FYROM’ after settling their naming dispute with Greece.
It’s remarkable how quickly you become accustomed to a place that was initially quite a shock to the senses. Dean and I grabbed a breakfast kebab from a little shop on the seafront. The owner explained how the property prices in Albania have risen to compare to Italy but wages have not kept up. That was his explanation for the flow of Albanians to the UK in rubber boats. It was also interesting that he thought England had gone to the dogs, now we had an Indian-heritage Prime Minister…
Missing tarmac and missing drain covers = missing limbs
The irony of people who are often subject to racism subsequently being racist about other people didn’t escape me, but for the benefit of a quick kebab I let it ride…
Albania is clearly a country undergoing massive shifts. The rich get richer, the middle class is growing but the poor are no better off than they ever were. If anything the gulf between haves and have-nots is ballooning.
On the road you encounter really high-end Mercedes, BMW and Audi cars (often on British plates) sharing tarmac with amputee beggars. They jostle with homebrew 3-wheeled vehicles created by welding the back of a Chinese scooter to a box on recycled car wheels that steers with a tiller. Helmet law – if one exists – is widely ignored; even by policemen riding to work in high-peaked hats.
Checkpoint Kavaje
Into this mayhem rode 120 scooters from Italy, Germany, Luxembourg and Britain. Our first destination being a timed checkpoint at Kavaje where you could get your roadbook stamped; though it seems most people have given up the pretence that this is any sort of sporting event and simply get a coffee.
The town centre square in Kavaje consists of rough marble flagstones which have become polished over the years and treacherously slippery even in the dry. No sooner had Mickey said ‘watch out’ than an elderly Italian couple lost their footing and ended up on the floor wearing a Vespa PX.
Men at work
From there, the road headed towards Elbasan in the centre of the country, before the suggested lunch stop at a restaurant called Gjahtari in Librazhd. Directly opposite the restaurant, the road was being dug up to repair the surface with a team of navvies directing traffic around the gravel where one lane had been removed. By the time we’d eaten they’d all pissed off for the day, taking all their machines and road signs with them. This left drivers coming around a valley corner to discover that the road surface was now missing and to make a decision to either go off-roading or to take their chances driving head-on towards oncoming traffic.
I think it’s fair to say that you need to keep your wits about you at all times in Albania, if only for the animals. Goats and dogs do not appear well-versed in the Highway Code.
One thing that was consistently good in Albania was the food. Balkan cooking favours a lot of nicely prepared meats along with quality salads and cheeses. Tomatoes taste like they did in the 1970s, not like the supermarket red blobs of today which taste like a Dutchman’s welly.
Sledgehammer
The road followed a winding river valley and for the next section a few of us may have become embroiled in some ‘spirited riding’ together with a couple of guys from Rome on tuned PXs. Micky from Casa Performance was testing an early evolution of their 333cc Sledgehammer touring engine in his LI Series 1. While it performed perfectly reliably it didn’t take much to see that this was like a small dose of methadone to someone who has an addiction to the 76hp Casa Performance Twin.
BGM 195
Meanwhile, on my BGM195-powered LI Series 1, I was having a grand time. With a simple piston-port engine, a BGM sport box and a 28mm Keihin PWK it pulled wonderfully one-up or 2-up with only a 4-speed gearbox. Then again, if you read my Complete Spanner’s Lambretta Kit Book, you’d know how all the different engine configurations compare and why this one is a great choice for touring.
At one point I suddenly realised that everyone I’d been playing with had disappeared. Both of the Vespa riders decided to calm down. Micky stopped to look for his rear brake lever which somehow ejected from his engine. Shortly afterwards I took a Whatsapp call via the Albanian sim card from my wife Tracy to explain that she’d run out of petrol on her Quattrini-powered LI Special. This call came through on my Sena helmet intercom while waiting in a petrol station only a few km down the road. An easy problem to resolve thanks to Albania’s seemingly superior 4G and 5G network; at least compared to the UK.
Techno Pantaloni
When I did my first Tre Mari in 2005 there was no social media, no Facebook and no Whatsapp. Communication between Italian-speaking organisers and French or English-speaking competitors was challenging for everyone. In less than 20 years it is amazing how much the world has shrunk. The Tre Mari now runs effectively on Whatsapp groups, with the organisers able to post instructions directly to everyone’s phone and use Google Translate to do so in several languages.
Photos, video and even live streams are broadcast to the world directly from previously remote corners of the Balkans; with Google Maps directing everyone to the next hotel. It’s extremely useful but I can’t help but feel that some of the mystery of travelling is evaporating under the heat of the digital world.
Holy Barone
Outside the 4-star Hotel Enkelana, Alberto – one of the Barone Racing Team – made a spectacular display of how not to repair the kickstart shaft of a Lambretta Series 2. Tipping the scooter on its side so you don’t need to drain the oil is a good move. Tipping the side casing over without first removing all of the M6 washers, so some of them fall into the transmission, is the step you should avoid if you can. Obviously, all of those watching were hugely sympathetic and nobody took the piss at all.
Since the Tre Mari started out as a Vespa-only event in the 1950s, there remains a thread of good-natured rivalry with those riding the ‘other’ Italian scooter. As such, anyone seen fixing a Lambretta at a pit stop can expect the odd sarcastic comment from old Italian mechanics more used to building Vespas for the pope (I’m not joking) than seeing Lambrettas receive open heart surgery in front of a posh hotel. The Piaggio-powered Tifosi revel in scooter-based schadenfreude as much as we the tuned Lambretta riders enjoy overtaking them on the road.
Day 3 – optional routes
The programme in Pogradec offered a choice of routes: either north on a lap of Lake Ohrid crossing into and out of North Macedonia, or south to Korce and the hill town of Voskopje. Our group – which expanded to include most of the riders from Emilia Romagna as well as those from Brescia – elected to add some adventure by tackling a 1600-metre mountain on an anti-clockwise lap of the lake. Heading in that direction revealed that the road surface had been totally removed for repair, leaving us riding over gravel for a few kilometres towards the Macedonian border. Once there, it became obvious that the four of us who weren’t covered on our insurance to ride in North Macedonia weren’t going to be let in, and there was nowhere at that border to buy insurance.
The insurance man
A group decision was made to go back over the gravel road and the opposite way around the lake and to buy insurance for those who needed it. Once at the other Macedonian border post, we were ushered into a grotty office to buy insurance where the guy demanded to know how many of us there were, because we were clearly stopping him from an important task like going for a dump. He then proceeded to explain that the minimum insurance we could have was 50 Euros for 15 days cover. Not willing to be extorted out of almost £100 for a few hours riding on the other side of the lake, I refused to be rinsed. In retrospect that was probably a mistake. Life is counted in experiences, not money.
Fill her up
In the end those that did cross over found an even poorer version of Albania. Peculiarities included ramp blocks in the petrol stations that you could back a car onto. These allowed the fuel tanks to be absolutely filled to the brim.
The alternative excursion was to visit the stunning Albanian church in Korce. At least 23 competitors went this way, with the Vespa Club of Bari dividing their sweeper vans to ensure that everyone had some backup in case of a problem.
Day 4 Pogradec to Tirana
In order to get to the capital we had to retrace our tracks to Elbasan, and then travel north through the mountains to Tirana. While the official guidebook suggested taking the motorway, anyone who attended the 2018 edition would know that there is a parallel road that follows the peaks of some spectacular mountain scenery.
At the summit, with gathering storm clouds, we found a largely empty restaurant where our swollen ranks of 20 hungry Italian and British scooterists assembled a massive table and devoured a spectacular feast. The owner prepared liver soup, feta salad and steak together with a whole lamb roasted slowly over coals. It was probably the best meal we had all week and still cost less than 20 Euros a head.
Gianluca on his Barone 190 smallframe
While we ate, nature put on a spectacular audio-visual buffet of barking sheepdogs, thunder, lightning and a torrential downpour that had all but dried off by the time we came to leave. Sometimes the stars align and everything just comes together perfectly in time. This was one of those moments. All that remained was 40 miles of a spectacular descent of the mountain pass back down to Tirana.
The contrast between the empty roads of the hills and the insane busy city seemed particularly stark. Cities everywhere have their own high rpm beat that you either acclimatise quickly to or get crushed. This almost happened in a literal sense to Nicolò – one of the young lads from Bari – who nipped up the inside of a concrete lorry, only for it to turn right and side-swipe his PX. He had the foresight to step off to safety while the PX fared a little worse. His was the only machine that needed to be returned to Italy by van.
Day 5 – Tirana to Kruje
The official agenda for this day was the same as in 2018: a visit to the spectacular mountain castle home of Skanderbeg: an Albanian soldier trained in military matters by the Sultan who lead a rebellion against the Ottomans using Kruje as his base in 1443. Skanderbeg remains a national hero and his herald flag depicting a two-headed eagle on a red background remains the symbol of Albania today.
Having visited the excellent museum previously, Micky instead found a worthy alternative excursion: Bovilla Lake: a massive reservoir created in the mountains.
LIFE LESSON: Do not assume that a beautiful place shown on Google Maps is the full story.
Google Maps failed to explain two things. Firstly that its suggested route out of the north of Tirana would tackle roadworks, one-way back streets, closed roads and general driving insanity that saw one of our fold; Fabrizio Pirini, getting run into a wall by a (possibly drunk) driver; which dislocated his shoulder. After waiting for a while in a bar and sending out search parties, Pirini eventually arrived together with his teammate Mauro on a lovely Lambretta D. His scooter was fine but he was now like a clock; with one hand longer than the other. Somehow he managed to pilot an SST 265 like that. He explained that he suffered regular shoulder dislocations and he would wait to pop it back in later because doing so was painful! Despite this they planned to continue the ride.
The other failure of Google Maps was to explain that the road through the canyon to Bovilla was actually 10km of potholed gravel track inhabited only by old women carrying straw on their heads and massive dust-throwing lorries carrying stone from a quarry. The take-away from this is that orange in the traffic overlay of Google Maps does not mean busy traffic, it simply means slow going. Unsurprisingly, Pirini and Mauro both bailed-out once the road disappeared, but the rest of us continued.
Having reached the impressive dam at Bovilla I couldn’t resist a swim. It’s only subsequently when researching on Wikipedia that I found out that the reservoir – finished with the help of the Italian government after the collapse of communism – supplies most of the water needs of Tirana. As a result swimming is actually banned. I apologise to any city residents who detected a faint hint of two-stroke oil from their taps in the subsequent days. Perhaps some ‘no swimming’ signs are in order.
Seaside date
Back at the hotel, there was time for a dip in the pool while the rest of the Italians ventured to a seafood restaurant in Tirana. Their meal included the delicacy ‘datteri del mare’ (dates of the sea). These are molluscs that are illegal to collect in many countries because doing so requires the destruction of their habitat, but Albania does not subscribe to that treaty.
The culmination of the week’s festivities was a massive rideout around the city centre and a concert in Skanderbeg square. This was organised to coincide with the Tre Mari by the Vespa Club of Tirana (Fanatics) who brought Vespa riders not only from all over Albania but also nearby countries including Kosovo and Croatia.
Any excuse for a party
Now, if a Vespa club in Britain tried to organise something that took over the central square of the capital city, not only would it be impossible but it would be treated as a hostile invasion by both the authorities and the general populous. Here in Albania, the arrival of 400 Vespas and Lambrettas was a focus of interest and an excuse for a party.
The ride-out around the city was intense. Two-stroke smoke and noise filled the air as we toured the streets with a police escort, lead by Roman Vespa enthusiast Luciano Zaccagnini on his Faro Basso.
Once back in Skanderbeg Square I wasn’t expecting a whole heap of a party, but the best ones often arrive like that. After a funk/disco DJ set we were treated to a competent rock band called Gruppi Burn.
Albanian rap
A lot of the Vespisti began to leave as an Albanian hip-hop duo West Side Family took to the stage, but for every scooterist that left, more and more locals arrived for the party. Now if anyone told me in advance that Albanian Rap would actually be good I’d have suggested they get a hearing test at Specsavers, but they whipped up the crowd.
Last up on the bill as the sun went down was Xhesika (Jessica) Polo, who literally had everyone dancing in rings. Locals descended on Skanderbeg Square including a stag night with a poor lad in an inflatable Sumo suit who ended up bundled onto stage with Ms Polo.
Last brand standing
By midnight, when the music stopped, we looked around the square and our group’s Lambrettas outnumbered the few remaining Vespas. It’s not the first time that I’ve noticed that Lambretta riders tend to party harder. Maybe it’s because we are happier to arrive…
LIFE LESSON: In Britain particularly, Albanians do not have a great reputation, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Albania is unsafe. In our experience, it was quite the opposite. Throughout the night in Tirana scooters were left unlocked with expensive crash helmets on the seats. Nobody touched a thing; despite little gypsy kids going around begging.
That same weekend a lad in my adopted hometown in the midlands had his house broken into and a knife put to his throat in order to steal his crash helmet, money and scooter. It was poignant that we Brits and the SIP crew were the only entrants to chain our scooters up in the hotel car parks, more out of habit than need. The uncomfortable truth is that Britain is far worse a hotbed of motorcycle crime than pretty much anywhere else in Europe. Perhaps the fact that Albania seems to have a policeman on every corner has an impact, but I suspect it’s more of a cultural thing. In Britain, the little chavvy bike thieves run riot because they are allowed to. The vast majority of them are British by birth as well.
Day 6 – Tirana to Durres
With our overnight ferry not leaving until Saturday night, the tour took us to the seafront south of Durres where Vespa Club of Bari organised another massive buffet lunch and use of the facilities for the day at Hotel Dolce Vita.
After a dip in the sea, Dean, Mihaela, Tracy and I took a spin into the countryside for a coffee and to compare notes.
Albania remains an enigma. Tourism is increasingly important but as prices rise it is losing its competitive advantage compared to Italy, Greece or Croatia. On that basis, only the adventurous or curious will go. As such; if you like holidaying in interesting places without the crowds it’s definitely worth a try.
For the adventurous Vespa and Lambretta gang though, Albania is off the menu for the next edition. Rumour has it that the next Tre Mari is going back to its roots, touring the vibrant south of Italy and maybe even taking in Sicily.
One thing that I can guarantee is that the Vespa Club of Bari will make it the best value mass scooter touring event in Europe, because their organisation and experience is unrivalled.
Trophy for biggest clown of the event, presented in honour of previous competitor Mango.
Words, Video and Photos: Sticky
Additional Images: Mihaela Dicanu, Dean Orton, Marco Aperti, Micky RLC, Robbie Nutella, Bozamix, Tracy.
