Thursday, December 10, 2009

Today’s stats:
Distance traveled today: 54.90 km
Total trip distance: 2610 km
Max speed: 43.08 km/ hour
Average speed: 16.24 km / hour
Total time biking: 3:23
Total days biking: 45
Spending: 77 euros

Windows clattered and garbage bags flew as we left our apartment this morning, the wind was so strong.

“So you sleep good?” Simo, the waiter from the night before, said as we entered the restaurant. He brought us two cups of Turkish coffee, before starting to scribble on the back of his order pad.

“So you don’t make mistake.”

He was mapping out directions to Albania.

The two men drinking tea at the table next to us start discussing the directions in Serbian, with Simo acting as the interlocutor translator. They argued amongst themselves for a while before we tried to recap in English.

“Just a minute! Just a minute!” one of the men said. Back to Serbian. Finally, we (they) agreed on a route.

After 15 minutes of maps and discussions, Simo said: “Don’t worry, It’s not complicated.”

“You only have about 3km of uphill,” the man in the striped orange sweater said. “When you see a car, grab on,” his friend with the nice blue eyes said. “We in Montenegro don’t like to work hard,” Simo joked.

“And where can we find a post office?” Richard asked. This began a whole new discussion. Is nothing simple around here?

“Now, repeat to make sure you understood,” Blue Eyes said.  Hands in the air indicated Richard had passed the test.  “If you get to a village where no one speaks English, call Simo and he will translate.” It was as if we had never traveled before.

“Have you been to Albania before?” we asked. “Is it nice?” They all laughed. “You’ll see for yourself.”

We got talking about future plans, and Beirut. The man who bought our second round of coffee said he liked only Armenia Street in Beirut, because in the rest of the city: “Too many Muslims.”

After the coffee came a round of rakia, equivalent to Italy’s grappa or Portugal’s aguardente, made naturally from grapes. “The best,” in fact. Even better than Italy’s, Orange Sweater insisted. Simo asked if I wanted one too, being a woman and all. I said I’d take a small one. But when he came around the corner, he had a tray of four equal sized shots. “That’s not small, Simo!”

“You are not half a man. You are a woman!” was his response.

“Živeli,” we all said – cheers! Here's Simo:

By the time we had left, we had had two Turkish coffees and two shots of rakia (good for circulation, apparently), all before 10am, none of which we were allowed to pay for. 

When we finally got on the road, the sun was out, and I stripped down to a tank top for the first time in God knows when. Not far from our path, in Bar’s old town, or Stari Grad, was the Maslina, a 2,000-year-old olive tree. We took the Bar-Ulcinj road, but before the tunnel, turned left to get to the Muriqani border crossing. It was a steep climb for 2-3km, but after that, a beautiful small country road all the way to Albania.

Picnic lunch:



Near the border, things began visibly changing. We passed our first minaret. Muslim cemeteries were abundant, with graves marked with a green crescent. Albania has a huge Muslim majority, and we were beginning to see its influence.

Then things just started getting funny. We passed a woman wearing a pink bathrobe down the street. Then the police station which had its very own herd of sheep grazing in the front yard.

Then finally, the moment we had been waiting for, for so long. Crossing the border into Albania was like watching a curtain raise over a whole new world – a overwhelming, stimulating new world:

We approach, some butterflies in the stomach. A little nervousness. This is it. This is the real thing. The men lurking past the customs check have dark faces, topped with a head of black. Their black leather jackets only accentuate the darkness.  In Richard’s imagination, they are the Sigurimi, former secret police; in reality, they are unofficial taxi drivers, waiting for customers. The smell of sheep, of cow manure. Bunkers at every other house, left over from the paranoia of Hoxha’s years as dictator. Children running out of their homes to practice the few phrases of English they know. “Hello. Do you speak English?” Nearly every single person on the main road waves, smiles, calls out words of encouragement. They are impressed with us. We are with them.

The road is newly paved and perfectly smooth. The sun is out. The mountains stand grandiose in the distance.

Minarets at every corner. Women in scarves or bonnets covering their hair. Pigs and roosters on the street. A soccer field made solely of mud – no grass, no lines. Smoke emerging from little chimneys. Scooter and bicycle-run carts and wagons as taxis. Young boys and old men on bicycles with baskets and umbrellas across the handlebars. A man cycles by with a baby in one arm. He loosens his grip on the baby to wave hello with his hand, while continuing to ride.

The azhan sounds. It doesn’t feel like a Muslim city, but it is, in its very own way. No one speaks English. The lake doubles as a garbage can. So does much of the side of the road.

Nowhere else have people been so friendly, but we are initially too scared to stop and talk to anyone extensively. At the one-lane bridge crossing the Bunë River to Shkodra town, the gypsy kids are waiting.  I can see them swarming Richard, tugging at his water bottle, the only thing they can get their hands on. I keep my hand over the camera in my pocket. A wooden bridge to the other side. More chaos. Music blaring out of shops. Workers carrying sheets of metal on their shoulders in the middle of the street. Bicycles everywhere, riding in the opposite direction. Tires, shoes, cabbage, everything for sale on the sidewalk. Cigarettes out of plastic bags. Cell phones on cardboard boxes. I can think of nothing but Africa. Except that in Africa, no one ever threw anything at us. We pass a home with a balcony full of kids playing. They scream out words in Albanian and out of one of their hands sails some object – a small piece of wood maybe – in our direction. A sign of affection, perhaps? We find a hotel for 20 euros. The showerhead hangs over the toilet. This is Albania.



Wait, let me backtrack. Yes, Albania is undeveloped – “the Yemen of Europe,” as Richard calls it. But it’s nowhere near as bad as described. And it’s a mixed lot. In Shkodra, the fourth biggest city, we found banks, restaurants open late, fancy hotels, parks, teenagers in trendy clothes, and lots of Mercedes-Benz. Here's Richard posing before the Rozafa castle of Shkodra - "quickly, before that gang of boys gets us":



Albania is a country in transition. After four decades of communist dictatorship, followed by a few years of social unrest in the 90s when the communist regime fell apart, and a 1997 rebellion that saw tanks patrolling the streets, Albania is now evolving into a capitalist-oriented, tourist-friendly place.

For dinner, we went to a beautiful stone restaurant that serves typical Albanian food. The owner approached us, wearing a white embroidered shirt, and red sash across his waist. “What do you want to eat – traditional?” Yes, we answered. And some Albanian wine, perhaps. We were expecting him to come back with some suggestions. But that was it. We never saw a menu or price list. We were never asked what we liked or didn’t like. First, some raki as an aperitif – mine cherry-flavored. Then some appetizers – stuffed grave vine leaves, fried cornbread, meat-filled pastry. Food just kept landing on the table. A selection of pickled vegetables; a dry, crumbling white cheese; flat bread; and meat of all kinds, grilled on the wood-fire oven. First wild boar sausage, then wild boar meat, then veal, then lamb. Each deliciously juicy. Every time the waiter deposited another item, he would say: “Good eat!” Best of all was an earthenware pot of a moist, soft cow’s cheese, boiled in oil and herbs and served hot.



The food was organic by default, the owner told us, because it all comes from the region, and farmers here can’t afford pesticides.

After dinner, we sat with Gjon Dukgilaj, the owner, and discussed the history of the restaurant, Albania and religion. More raki and tea arrived. He broke walnuts for us to eat as we spoke. Then he showed us around the restaurant, where he has innumerable old artifacts – swords, a weaving loom, traditional Albanian costumes. It’s a bit of a museum actually and he’s a bit of an anthropologist. “You know,” he said in all seriousness, “we were the real Egyptians.”

His theory is that when the sands overtook Egypt in Pharoanic times and the land became uninhabitable, the people migrated to Albania and their descendents became the Illyrians, who once populated the Dalmatian coast. Only in Albania did the Illyrian language – and to some degree the people – survive invasions, colonization and occupations by the Greeks, Romans, Slavs and Ottomans.

So his theory is that the Albanians’ ancestors are Egyptians. His proof?

In the ancient Pharoanic language, there are words that have no translation in Albanian. Ra, for example, was the last Pharoanic king, and means “fallen” in Albanian – “It’s a purely Illyrian word”. The Albanian people near-worship the serpent, adorned by the foreheads of ancient Egyptians. Albanian women similarly wore it, routinely until the 1960s. Gjon (pronounced John) went so far as to say that the Albanian flag – commonly accepted as an eagle – is actually two serpent heads.



Besides, he said, no one knows the roots of the Albanian language, one of the oldest in Europe. Maybe the Egypt connection provides some answers. After all, it was an Albanian, Mohammad Ali Pasha, who founded Egypt.

We strolled back to the hotel past a group of loud teenagers. The door to the hotel was unlocked and there was no reception, no guard, nothing but a narrow staircase and the shitty little key to our room. We already felt more comfortable in Albania, but Richard jammed a table behind the door just in case.