From the precarity of minibusses and pedalos, a traveler discovers the dramatic scenery of Albania, reflecting on the country’s gradual progression from tyranny to tourist utopia.
Thirty years ago, foreigners were forbidden.
Across Albania, exhausted teddy bears hang menacingly from half-built hotels. These alien-like creatures keep away the evil eye. Before capitalism, garlic and no hotels managed the protection. Now, this army of manufactured smiles does it instead. Bedraggled plastic irises focused on the demanding tourists transforming reality. Albania opened up in 1992, the roving was quick, sending back distinguished Italian chefs, jeans, toys, tourist towers, and Western ideas of glory. We were here for it all, a slice of culture shock within Europe, longing for lonely beaches.
We initiated our trip in the capital, Tirana. Espresso inhaled for a honeyed 80 cents, we began our search for a rental car to embark on a blue-skied road trip down the Albanian Riviera; the famed dramatic coast. Tirana keeps us for a while with its sleek alabaster concrete neatly unfurling toward rounded mosques, arrow-straight skyscrapers, and a wide wriggling river. It’s everything you would expect from a thriving Western capital. Except, this is technically the East – an old, independent communist strong-hold, neither Soviet nor otherwise affiliated.
After twelve near-death experiences in the first five minutes, we forsook our plans of a car and embraced public transport. We planned to journey the land using furgons – cardboard-signed mini-busses, lined up and waiting to file out, in a car park neatly kept just outside the city center; sturdy things that would see journeys interrupted by drivers pausing for a chat with a passing pilgrim, right in the middle of vertical roads. Yet furgons don’t always – in fact very rarely – congregate neatly in carparks or near bus stops awaiting passengers, gaining a voyage is a sport unto itself. To victor a place on a furgon, you must first stand at nowhere, then scrum your way to sit anywhere. Take your place on a folded stool in the middle of the aisle, squirmed atop a tractor tire, or next to the ninety-plus-year-old woman with an iPhone volume ninety plus, too; the human cinema. Then, watch children in corn wagons fly past in the wrong direction across motorways and as lined industrial estates are replaced by the intimidating crowns of massifs. Community in motion, laughing on the wheels of the wind.
Through my window onboard, I could see them: First Secretary Hoxha’s army of Dalek-like domes dawdling in crannies of the landscape. These Communist bunkers vary in silhouette, magnitude, and visibility, infiltrating the country in vain. A small reminder that our visitation here is a luxury not afforded to those in the last century. Some have been embraced; a quirky tattoo studio, an artistic museum. In Tirana, I visited Bunker One, a museum detailing Albania’s complicated communist history, segregated even from the other communist states of Europe. I’d snapped a photo of my long-haired partner in front of a plaque detailing men’s restricted hair lengths; a tourist snapshot taken as an act of defiance to a harsh history. Other bunkers have been left to wait to be remembered, occasionally gaining new identities, such as toilets. Their presence illuminates under a white sun, speckling the view gently like pimple scars.
“Ndaloni!”
Albanian is one of the oldest languages in Europe and the world. Yet, the internet hasn’t really heard of it. Shouting to stop on the hairpin of the sky seemed perfectly reasonable to our driver. That is, after a kind local pronounced ‘stop’ correctly for us. Backpacks chucked out, we ventured into the empty burnt hills. Laden like heavy-duty snails, we trudged onward, buzzing in 40°C (104°F) heat, toward our one cooling desire – the ocean. Potable water is mostly found in the mini-market rather than taps, so we’d stocked up before leaving the capital and guzzled it down gratefully, lightening the load with each desperate drop. Roads began disappearing beneath us, smashed into sunken earth like snapped twigs. The infrastructure of mountains was hastily bulldozed for beauty spot seekers, then forgotten again.
We’d hiked in hope, cuddled by a sauna mist of eucalyptus and silence, grinning in our eyes and ankles. A view of snowy chipped beaches against an indistinguishable veil of cerulean hugged the coastline. The ocean curdled like custard where the Ionian met the Adriatic Sea.
We’d chosen to come here for typical Western tourist reasons: dreams of untouched oases, undercrowded venues, and under-priced food. It was a silly mistake; a country filled with people is never untouched or undercrowded. We headed down an established trail route towards the notoriously secreted Gjipe beach, with greedy expectations of virgin waters and calm caverns. Instead, we were redirected away from the coast, which had been sold for the new build, away from the paths clinging to the edge of the crag-like crusts of fresh loaves, now littered with construction off-cuts. Onward to booming jingles and congested pebbled foreshore, where each conceivable square had been strung with rags, bronzing bodies, and price tags. We sat reflecting on whether it was worse to be led astray to hidden gems known to all or to commercial resorts privatized from the rabble-making nature accessible for the few. A kayak and the will to weave further could have delivered us closer to our true desire, and so we ventured into the trees and scurried down rock faces to see where was reachable for those who float.
There is a tone to serenity seeking that has an ugly reality of colonialist expedition. For the sake of nature and each other, we have to accept that the idea of ‘untouched beauty’ is somewhere only the birds and fish may go. To visit a country is to visit the people as well as the land and it was a good reminder to ensure to do this.
We pottered back along the hike the way we came, stopping at a resort beach and sunbathing under looming brutalist architecture. Despite the relics of what once was, this was no longer a country of regiment in any way. From every bumpy curve of the crumbling sunset, Albania was goading us to ‘lose your itinerary.’ Like elsewhere in Southern Europe, life is heated but unhurried. Time is the name of the goat over yonder; steady, present, but unwilling to conform to a clock. The quality of a destination isn’t measured by the standards of those who wish to sporadically ascend upon a place but by those who wish to thrive, rebuild, and embrace it. Busses do not depart on the stroke of typed-up watches, and tranquillity has forgotten to be quiet in favor of the throng of community. It is a country with a sense of stoic un-belonging that asserts itself proudly.
The lines of Albania are a Picasso: mountains like chiseled jaws, fragmented bodies, transparent oceans, and repetitively sporadic circular shelters. Borders broker together as illumination fades and the townscape switches to electrification. The cobalt sealine and wonky rubbles drop into a chatty evening. Cattle wander languidly, chancing olives out of the debris. It’s a lasagne of a land where meals and life are warm. Beaches happen to be there. History happens to have happened.
Albanians take xhiro in the evening: a social daily walk; every human and dog swarm down the promenade. It feels liberating to walk so freely in the late evening, children racing for gelato and streetlamps leading like string lights toward popcorn sellers and the music of the fayre on the promenade of Vlora. We passed victorious elations of domino veterans, gathered like fallen leaves beneath trees and littered outside doorways from Himara to Saranda. In historic Berat, where houses are piled upon one another, draped casually toward the river under the eye of a snaking castle, we were warmly gestured into a family taverna as though they’d been expecting us our entire lives. Food is brown, glistening in residues of silky oil on a plate. The bite fizzes in concealed color – aubergines, paprikas, and olives exuding rainbows. Dessert appears from crawling grapes overhead: homemade raki, a taste that leaves the drinker happily blind. Under dusk is where Albania begins to talk.
We venture for two weeks, one furgon at a time, occasionally by foot; pilgrims to a sunny seaside. At the edge of the country, we rent a pedalo, circling the islands off Saranda with shark-like joy. It is there we find loneliness a short drift away from the busiest beaches of all, every inch sectioned into quadrants for shiny hotels. Corfu, a neighboring Greek island, is so close we could be there in well under a day – if there were no border. For a moment, we are alone, our feet lightly green beneath the clear waters, quiet, excited for another setting sun soon to bed red and round and glowing down upon us. The next day, we begin our loop backward, briefly stopping atop our favorite valley, with a tranquil cove reachable by ropes or boat only.
Later in our room, we look out over Himara, sky yolk bursting stupendously against the great toasted corners of the Llogara mountains. The ocean relaxes, hugging its lost friend, the sky. We drink the horizon as it slowly obscures into the collapse of our Earth’s constant star; calm over muffled people, bustling in the darkness. I think about them in this once-caged country, slowly picking the lock, speaking in untranslatable whispers, permitting us to share their presence.
