The Wild East

"The sign was ridden with bullet holes."

We couldn’t leave the house until Lazlo’s mother had given us both a Coffee Macedonia (Turkish Coffee). I tried to converse with her in Russian, but she didn’t seem to (or pretended not to) understand. When I tried to turn the conservation to the pros and cons of Tito, I drew another blank response.
Above the town a roman amphitheatre was being reconstructed. Mark noted (with a hint of bitterness in his voice?) what a leisurely pace the work was taking place here. Certainly there didn’t seem to be any central government imposed targets/customer satisfaction surveys/stress/EU directives and everyone seemed pretty contended with life. Not for the first time I can’t help thinking that wealth and future EU membership will exacerbate Eastern Europe’s problems.
Back at Lazlo’s (which Mark had already christened Tom Bombadillo’s) we questioned him on whether he had been to Albania. He hadn’t, but seemed to think that it was OK there.

Later that evening while quietly relaxing in a cafe we were joined by 'the Beckhams' – a man with bleached blond hair (who had the arrogance of a top footballer) and a dark haired wife. They were sat themselves in the most prominent seats and stared critically at everyone making sure that they were being noticed.
For some reason me and Taylor received the most vicious glances, perhaps for being foreigners and therefore with the potential to upstage them.

Wednesday 19
The bus station was chaotic but we eventually managed to get a bus to Sveti Naum, the last town in Macedonia, right on the border. There were no signs and it wasn’t long before we were wandering aimlessly through a campsite. Up ahead we saw a sign in English saying “You are entering a border zone. Only persons with permission may enter this zone”. The sign offered no indication of what happened to those without permission and me and Taylor were left to speculate between ourselves.
This area must have changed enormously over the past 20 years. From 1945-85 Albania didn’t even have any official borders with its neighbours and the first embassy came in 1986. The Macedonian border point looked new and efficient and passports were scanned in onto a computer database.
We walked into no-mans land.
A couple of hundred metres along the road there was a faded orange double-headed eagle flag. There was a signpost next to it. Mark gave a squeal of horror as we came closer. The sign was ridden with bullet holes. The bullets had been fired from the Albanian side.

Up ahead there was the Albanian border post. No laptop computers here though, just some vicious looking Alsatians (on leads luckily), two men engrossed in a game of dominos, and a some bored looking troops sitting under a tree.
There was a faint sound of 1950s music playing from a radio. It seemed to be the sort of place I would imagine parts of Cuba are. Our names were written down in a leather-bound book we handed over 10Euro each and then suddenly we were inside the Land of the Eagle.

A taxi driver waved us over half-heartedly but we declined. Barely had we stepped into the country when MT announced “Concrete bunker number 1”. Hoxha, Albania’s ultra-Marxist-Stalinist leader had built nearly 1million of these pillboxes to defend the country against enemies.
These enemies included Yugoslavia and Greece, the USSR (after a fall out in the 60s), China (after Mao died), all western/capitalist nations, all religious and Islamic nations…Albania didn’t have many friends and had been pretty much closed off from the rest of the world until 1992.
Some teenagers walked past us. Six teenage heads turned to stare at us, though the looks were of puzzlement rather than hostility. Looking back there were several radio masts perched on the hillside. They weren’t for broadcasting MTV and were probably some sort of warning system for an oncoming invasion/used to hunt down potential escapees.
We walked for another 6km past about 50 more bunkers, a Mercedes doing 180degree wheelspin turns and lots of curious locals. Some of the children waved at these strange-looking characters with backpacks on and others shyly said “Hello”.

We arrived in the town centre of Pogradec and saw a new looking bank – it was closed, but a special exception was made for us and we got our first look at the Lek, the currency of Shripquerise (Albania).
We checked into a hotel. The service was friendly, in English, the lift was in perfect working order and we got an en-suite room with the best view we’ve ever had. The view to the nearby mountains was stunning. What was going on – where was the paranoia, the bugged rooms, the huge decrepit communist-era hotels with dingy, smoky corridors?! It did seem that we were 10 years too late. The days when the Sigurimi patrolled the beaches in speedboats shooting Albanians trying to swim to Yugoslavia seemed a long time ago.

We headed outside for something to eat. The beach was busy and looked like something from the Med – the girls wore bikinis – Albania is the least muslim of the Islamic countries I’ve been to. We got two delicious and very exotic hotdogs and beers for £1.10, no English spoken.
It wasn’t long before we were in the Albania that we were expecting – there are no traffic lights or any form of road markings in Pogradec and each junction was on a strictly first come first served basis, older cars give way to newer cars and only bad drivers check their mirrors. Finding the bus station was a challenge as there wasn’t one. Neither were there any timetables, or any street names for that matter.
I suppose Albanians ‘know’ that Mehmet goes to Tirana on alternate Tuesdays in a blue minibus and he leaves at 10am from outside the bread shop. Tomorrow would have to look after itself.

Taylor had a sleep in the room while I spent one of the most successful people-watching sessions ever from our 5th floor balcony.

While walking round town in the evening Mark noted (with visble delight) that there was a village idiot in town – a man with Mongolian features who kept weaving in and out the traffic and waving to the drivers causing even more chaos on already chaotic roads before making an imaginary phone call to his phantom friend on his imaginary mobile phone. In the gloom and Taylors excitement I lost sight of him and ended up walking straight into him.

Wednesday
Trying to find a bus to Tirana was a case of guesswork, trying to ask bemused locals and luck. We were the only passengers on board and the driver did another lap of the town trying to find more passengers. Then another. And another. And another.
Just as I was about to offer the driver extra to take us straight there, a middle aged woman boarded and the driver considered it would now be a profitable venture with 3 passengers. The scenary was generally spectacular with rugged mountains, deep gorges and clear rivers everywhere. It looked like some parts had never been explored before, though even in the remotest valleys there were the ubiquitous pill-boxes everywhere. Sometimes there was an occasional monument to the communist partisans and some pro-Hoxha grafitti on the walls, but most buildings signifying the communist period had been utterly smashed and gutted. When the hardline communist regime finally ended in 1992, there was no velvet revolution here, only an armed and violent uprising during which all organised authority crumbled.

We travel through Elbasan, where the Steel of the Party steelworks was constructed in 1974. The steelworks are now abandoned and so hideously ugly that they should be a tourist attraction in their own right. Nothing in Poland or Romania or even Ukraine compares to this. We sat outside at a café and spoke to our companions on the bus. The driver spoke no English but the middle aged lady spoke some. She was a maths teacher in Pogradec and was travelling to Tirana to renew some residence documents. She was very convinced that Albania’s future lay with Europe and the west. She was very pro-American (like a lot of Albanians we met) and hoped the days of Hoxha and partnerships with Russia and China were in the past.

The next stage of the journey was a white knuckle ride of pure terror. The road went up to around 4000ft involving the navigation of around 25-30 hairpin bends. There were barriers to stop vehicles going over the edge (which would involve a drop of about 700ft and probable death) but they looked pretty flimsy and there were often big gaps in them. The vast number of lorry wrecks we’d seen on earlier stages of the journey didn’t inspire any confidence in Albanian driving.

In early afternoon we arrived in Tirana. We needed to find some accommodation which involved putting in a bit of legwork. The going rate seemed to be about 30Euros for an en-suite two person room and working fan. There didn’t seem to be any dirt-cheap grotty accommodation available.

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