The Wild East

"Helga’s meal was bloody awful – some very chewy liver and a mush of pickled tinned vegetables"

Time to leave Durres and head north to Shkodra. A man in a ripped T-shirt indicated in English that there would be a bus sometime around 2pm. We had to trust him and headed to the town centre to kill some time.
So far we’d found the Albanian roads to be pretty good, far better than all the guidebooks had suggested “Until recently on Albanian roads it was never possible to drive fast enough to kill anyone” but a small section of the Tirana-Shkoder road was 10mph with passengers thrown around in every possible direction.

The guidebooks suggested that the area outside Shkodra still had security issues and was best avoided. The north of Albania featured much more prominently in the 1991-92 and 1997-98 uprisings and some of the isoloated areas are still not under central government control.
The scenery was even more spectacular with higher mountains and an even more remote feel to the place. This is a place I’d like to return to though there are so few foreign tourists around at the moment that language and logistics may be a problem.

The communist-era Hotel Rozafa was stereotypically Albanian. It was a 9storey grey concrete monstrosity, 80% abandoned with few guests. The top floor is only home to birds. The receptionist eyed us suspiciously before accusing us of being Yugoslavs, a charge we vehemently denied. It was only £2.70 and somewhere to sleep.
We’d noticed that watering of pavements seemed to be a national sport in Albania – everyone, everywhere did it. Taylor’s explanation is that the Albanians think it will help the pavement to grow back again. I could only think that Hoxha told them to do it and people have never got out of the habit – unless this wasting of water is a form of passive resistance to authority. Anyway whatever the reasons, the pavement-watering practice was especially intense in Shkodra.

Another bizarre Albanian phenomenon was when you tried to ask for 2 of something i.e. we wanted 2 coffees – which always resulted in being given 2 each. Trying to explain that one was for mark and the other for me just resulted in a two more coffees being brought over. This ordering for yourself process was bad enough in Tirana and particularly severe up here. However careful we were, we never ended up with what we wanted.
We tried to get an early dinner inside us and went into an underground bar. We were the only customers and a middle-aged woman who we named Helga seemed pleased to see us. She presumed we were German and the more we tried to explain we were English, the more convinced that we were German she became, so in the end we just agreed that we were 100% pure German.

Helga’s meal was bloody awful – some very chewy liver and a mush of pickled tinned vegetables on the outside of the plate. Taylor had cold chewy-looking pizza – definitely pre1990 rationed meals. Helga seemed very concerned that we’d enjoyed the meal, so we agreed it was “wunderbar”.
We explored Shkoder, but there wasn’t much here and some pretty threatening looking shantytowns – we could easily be in South America. We wanted to get back to the centre before dark. There was a huge mosque opposite the hotel, built in 1995 with money from Saudi Arabia, though it seemed a waste of time in Atheist Albania.

That evening we wandered across to the beer garden adjacent the Rozafa. It looked another money-laundering operation with 2waiters for every customer. There was no Beirre Tirana here, only Amstel and no prices on the menu, though I thought it would be dirt-cheap. Cost for 1 small beer and a coke? £4. Ouch!! We complained to the young waiter about how expensive it was. He looked sympathetic but shrugged his shoulders. An older stony-faced waiter wandered over and confirmed that it was 700Lek. It wasn’t worth getting roughed-up over £4 so we paid and left.
The nightlife of Shkodra was as you’d expect – utterly dead. Few streetlights. Few cars, no bars and deserted streets. We wandered over to Helga’s café but it was closed.
We hadn’t seen any police or security since arriving – there probably weren’t any and you had to sort your own problems out as best you could.

The statistic is 1 in 4 Albanians carries a gun looted from the army barracks in the 1991 or 1997 uprisings. Up here though it was probably 1 in 2. I was pretty sure the guys at reception carried guns under the counter. We were prepared to walk a maximum of 4 blocks from the hotel in the darkness to search for any signs of life – it was Saturday night after all. On the 3rd block it seemed our luck was in as we came across a well-lit café with a few couples sitting outside.
The waiter looked familiar somehow. Then it struck me that he was the same waiter as in the beer garden. We asked the price before ordering, but he proudly declared it was 50p for a large beer – he obviously had more control here.
There were 4 waiters all of whom looked about 15. I wondered where the adults were. The drinkers outside had left and the boys turned the TV on and started getting into high spirits – first the football was turned on, then the porn channel (and it was pretty dirty stuff, probably Italian). We indicated that we wanted the football back on, but they had the controls. I remarked to MT that it was starting to turn into Lord of the Flies - 4 hormonal adolescent boys running amok shrieking with delight at the TV. I had a horrible feeling that owners/parents would appear soon and the foreigners would be blamed for corrupting young impressionable minds.
After the second beer we headed back to the hotel and left the waiters run the bar with no customers.

Sunday
Headed over to Rozafa castle. There were handfull of tourists, though they were all Albanians and the occasional Russian or Yugoslav. On the streets below a wedding was taking place and it was mayhem – 50 cars continually peeping horns and driving their Mercedes round like dodgem cars.
At Mark’s insistence we had lunch at Helga’s. It was just as dire as the previous time but choices were pretty limited and a small dark corner of my mind wondered would it really be so bad if McDonalds come to Albania? But Ronald will arrive one day and it was nice to beat him to it for the 3rd time.

Headed back to Tirana on a microbus. We soon encountered a familiar problem – dumped on a corner with no street names or signs in an anonymous suburb. At least we had a compass. There was rough sketch map in the guidebook and Mark asked some old men where we were. But they looked at the book with blank, puzzled eyes and it struck me that it was possibly the first time they had seen a map of their own city. Before 1985 it had been illegal to own a map. During our whole time in Albania I do not recall seeing one, other than the ones we brought with us.
We walked eastwards and hoped that we’d stumble across a familiar landmark. We were in luck and before long were speeding westwards on the nearest thing Albania has to a motorway.

On getting into Durres we headed straight towards the ‘Philadelfia’ there was nobody at reception so Mark marched into the dining room and demanded the key. The old man duly obliged, but there was a problem. The key to our previous room had gone (another guest must be in the room). Unconcerned, we asked for the key to the room next door and were handed it. As we weren’t officially paying guests yet, we had technically just blagged ourselves a room. It also showed us not to leave anything valuable in the room – keys were on open display at reception. Another Albanian anomaly- Banks are being targeted daily by armed criminals and require armed police outside, but hotels have pretty much no security.
Headed back to Daytona beach and relaxed with a few beers.

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