THE corner of south-eastern Albania my friend and I were thinking of crossing didn't sounds very tourist-friendly. What literature there was warned us about corrupt officials, gangs of youths, deep potholes in unlit streets, counterfeit money, drinking from or swimming in the water, closed museums, and local bears, wolves and jackals. "Traditional patterns of Balkan banditry have revived in some areas, particularly in the south-east Some travellers carry a separate `dummy' wallet to hand over to thieves ...
"Women are particularly vulnerable ..." And about the hotel in the town we were going to - "the staff are unhelpful and restaurant dirty. Some rooms smell. It can be very cold in winter, sleeping bag recommended. AVOID." "Be grateful if there is any running water at all," the Lonely Planet guide said about Albanian hotels, "much less in your room."
But who could resist the chance to see even a little bit of a European country whose modern history has been so strange, and which until a few years ago was an aggressively atheist state, where clerics and intellectuals were interned or killed, where visitors from outside often had their hair cut or their skirts lengthened at the border, and where the natives themselves were kept in complete ignorance of the outside world and forbidden to travel?
Within the last decade that whole edifice fell apart. Now, the country is trying to enter the modern world. But there is very little tourism. Hoxha ordered the people to build 300,000 igloo-shaped bunkers and pillboxes with gun-slits, in a paranoid fit after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. They are the first feature of the landscape - line upon line of them bordering fields and roads - to strike the amazed visitor. They are far too massive to remove. But they're broken, and full of rotting garbage. "Many Albanians," the guide book says sadly, "treat their country like a giant garbage dump, the aluminium cans, cellophane candy wrappers and other debris of capitalism joining the tens of thousands of broken concrete bunkers and dozens of derelict factories left behind by, communism. It's hard to believe this country will ever be cleaned up."
But I would go back to Albania tomorrow, even though it is immediately evident that the long dictatorship wiped out any civic sense there may have been. Anything that can be broken is broken. The street lights have no bulbs. The windows of hotels and offices are broken, and ragged curtains catch in them. Jerry-built apartment blocks sit in the middle of fields, their balconies crammed with the logs that the people burn for heating.
But such people! In Greece, Albanians are looked down on, and, when we bought tickets in Thessaloniki to go up over the mountains to the Albanian town of Korea, the Greek ticket-seller looked at us as we would look at tourists arriving here to spend their holidays at a travellers' halting-site. At the border, on the Greek side, neatly dressed officers called ragged Albanians forward one by one from the pens in which they waited to get in to the richer country. On the Albanian side, there was no light in the battered immigration building. Water dripped down the concrete walls, and the hatch was made of a piece of cardboard. It was $5 each to get in to Albania. No-one else was trying to get in.
By then, we knew that everything was going to be alright. The boys going back to their Albanian homes in the bus, laden with things to trade and sell, had looked after us from the start. They were small and worn-looking, young as they were, but they had tried to talk to us, smiled at us, watched out for us as various policemen ordered us here and there. They were poor. They had no magazines or soft drinks. Some of them wore home-made trousers. When the Greek bus-driver went in to a cafe high in the mountains for his lunch, they waited outside, standing beside the road, But they shared their bread with us. When we came dawn from the border into their country their spirits got high. They weren't despised immigrants any more. They were gracious hosts, in their own country.
The first sight of Albanian breathes - not just poverty, but enforced backwardness. There are a few cars, and a petrol station or two on the main road, but people get about on donkeys. At the first village - horses and hens in the road, people with nothing to do, sitting on the steps of the broken war memorial - Greece was minutes away by road and a century away in development.
The concrete pillbox-shaped bunkers were dotted everywhere. "To stop the bad people who come to steal our country," a man explained to us sunnily. There is no money now to do anything about the "parabols". Anyway, they're a thing of the past. And once we got out of the bus onto the teeming streets of Korca, and began to meet people, we realised; that this is a country on a high of relief and happiness at leaving the past behind. "We have come out of the dark. It is light now, is the kind of thing people say, grinning all over their faces, shaking your hand because you have come to visit.
A little boy, a street cigarette pedlar, led us past the grim communist-era tower-block hotel to an ancient "han" - a gallery of rooms over a cobbled yard, where caravanserais of merchants would have put up in former times, their animals tethered to the wooden posts. On the door of one of the lock-ups, where once a trader would have kept his store of goods, there was a hand-painted sign. "Computers," it said. But the town electricity was off as often as on, and there was water for only a few hours in the afternoon, and the awful smell from the Turkish-style toilet told you that if there ever had been sewers, they were not operative now. There were little glass kiosks in the centre of town, where private entrepreneurs were selling kebabs and plastic flowers and toys. But the computer era is very far away.
Our room was wooden-floored, with cracked window-panes, looking out over rutted, muddy waste ground where a kind of market happened, with stalls selling beige conical bras, tapes of Albanian music, tin stoves. We had two lumpy beds, a jug of water, spotless rags for towels, and enthusiastic service from a team of fascinated women and girls. The room was $4 a night. A meal of rissole-type things in a kiosk was $4. The most marvellous breakfast in the world next morning, in the Communist Hotel - fresh yoghurt, eggy eggs, stewed plums and the excellent coffee which is the best legacy of the Italian occupation - was $3 each.
The prices are pre-modern, but the people are not. We walked the old alleys of the town, past old Ottoman-style houses half-hidden in their courtyards. An old lady peeked at us shyly from a gate. "Vous parlez Francais?" she asked, in an elegant accent. And in a bar where coffees and a raki and a mineral water came to $1, the man spoke Italian. This was a prosperous and sophisticated town, once. Today, it still has a smoky, battered vitality, and a unique mix of ancient mosques, gun emplacements, ducks crossing cobbled streets and chic new bars, and families come in on pack-horses from the great plain around, or down from the mountains.
The plain, the guidebook told us, was formerly a marsh and it had been drained in the 1950s by the professional people and religious who had lived in a huge labour camp nearby. And died there - many buried alive for infringements of camp discipline. Ten miles from Korea, out on a causeway between fields, our taxi-driver discussed with other men who had gathered where exactly the camp had been. They were amazed to be asked. But then, we were the first outsiders ever to set foot in this impoverished hamlet. They didn't know, anyway. There was no mark, not even a cemetery. It was as if the atheism of Hoxha's Albania had killed even the links between generations.
Up in the hills, in a Vlach village where that rare language, come down from Roman legionaries, is spoken, the atheism had left its mark, literally, in the form of graffiti gouged in the priceless surface of 18th-century frescoes. The tall Vlach shepherds in their great cloaks tend flocks that graze between fallen Byzantine walls. The streets of this obscure village are wide and paved - a legacy of Ottoman times, when Proskopova was a city of 50,000 people.
Now it slumbers in its grassy uplands - a place so remote that during the war it was much used by the British for parachute drops to the Albanian anti-Nazi underground. The ancient churches here have been used to shelter cattle. They are half-ruined, surrounded by thickets where wild cherries gleam. Rustling streams run through this ghost of a town. A man asked us in to his house, and his daughter served us creme de menthe and tiny coffees. He had been 15 years in a labour camp. The orthodox priest in the exquisite church with the frescoes put the dollars we contributed under an icon. Water dripped down the walls. This is where UNESCO should be.
What luxuries the Albanians we met had, they shared with us. The taxi-driver - $25 for him and his car for a day - got out and bought us walnuts from a man who was harvesting them. And when we stopped to ask for directions, the man who answered sent his daughter running to the house to get two fine apples.
To judge by our couple of days - if the local people alone made a tourist destination, then, Albania would be the most attractive destination in Europe.
BUT you need a rare sturdiness to manage a place where everything public is just broken but abused. In Pogradec - a tourist resort on Lake Ohrid where King Zog and then Hoxha had villas - we could have stayed for a few dollars in a rest-home for the military. But by then we needed running water and a toilet. Badly. The Chinese-built hotel had running boiling hot water, steaming out of broken pipes, in the bathroom. It was better than nothing. A German Christian evangelist troupe was running a cheerful prayer meeting in the bleak community centre, and a local man involved told my friend: "There is no work in Albania. The people are in despair. Total despair."
But as dusk fell on the trashed streets of the little resort, and the people came out to shop and walk around and call to each other what struck the visitor was their liveliness and good humour even though the sight of women covered in icing sugar, making Turkish delight in an ancient basement, made you think: who can afford sweets, here?
The kiosk had one postcard for sale. It said "Happy New Year". A hamburger was made of 5p am. Rugged, aggressive, boys tried to hit the cormorants in the lake with their slingshots and ran up and down the cracked terraces of the hotel as if they owned it, which in a sense they do. But at midnight, the altogether strange sound of an Albanian folk-ballroom orchestra arose from the derelict ballroom, where the locals were dancing the Saturday night away.
And in the morning, the matronly waitress in the empty, Soviet-style dining-room wrenched back the faded curtains and let the sun in with a flourish onto our new cheese, plums, coffee.
On a flawless autumn morning we walked through golden poplar woods along the lakeside, out of Albania - a hopeless huddle of old trucks around a customs-shed - and across no-man's-land into the former Yugoslavia. Suddenly there were luxuries: white markings on the roads, bus-stops. There are lots of postcards on this prosperous side of the lake. It took a while to notice what was wrong with them. Where the great range of the mountains of Albania is in reality, in the picture postcards, they've been airbrushed out! It's not there, apparently, this land of Illyrian tombs, Ottoman villages, rose-bushes, mass graves, street currency dealers. But it is there: a place uniquely full of rewards for the traveller who is hardy, and at the same time, open to magic.
Going boldly...
WE flew Dublin-London Thessaloniki by Olympic for about £300 return. There are many flights from London to Tirana, the capital of Albania. The daily bus from Thessaloniki to Korea took seven hours on the day we travelled.
The charge for entering Albania with an EU passport was $5, but it may vary at different border crossings. American dollars were acceptable everywhere. The Blue Guide to Albania by James Pettifer is absolutely outstanding. The section on Albania in the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe is very helpful.
