Artikull rreth Shqiperise nga nje Anglez...
<span style="font-weight: bold">Wish you were here</span>
The Albanian government says it wants to attract more international tourists. The country is, after all, just a stone's throw from Corfu. But can it meet the needs of the modern traveller - and will Tirana's only cash machine cope? Tim Dowling ignored guide-book warnings of banditry, packed his Tosk and Gheg phrasebooks and headed for the sun.
Going anywhere nice this year? Why not consider Albania for your holidays? Reports that Europe's poorest and most isolated country is looking to develop its tourist sector are confirmed by Albania's tourism promotion minister, Silva Dracini. "Sure that we are," she says.
According to the latest official figures, 60,000 tourists have already visited Albania in the first six months of 2003, and that's before high season. "Most of them are from Kosovo," says Dracini, "but our policy is to have even more coming from European countries. At the moment this is difficult. I can only say we are aiming at this."
Much of the available information on travel to Albania seems designed to instil fear. Foreign Office advice mentions "the widespread ownership of firearms" and strongly discourages travel in the north-east of the country. The Lonely Planet website warns of "armed robberies, assaults, mobster assassinations, bombings and carjackings", exhorts visitors to "avoid all large public gatherings" and says it is inadvisable to travel outside the main cities, or anywhere at night. This doom-laden paragraph is missing from the latest edition of its printed guide to eastern Europe, but the book does suggest that "corrupt police may attempt to extort money from you" and the word "banditry" is used in passing.
As if that isn't enough to put you off, thanks to decades of spectacular repression at the hands of dictator Enver Hoxha, Albania retains a reputation as a Stalinist cultural oddity of almost wilful remoteness, despite the fact that its southern tip nearly touches Corfu, and its main port is just a few hours' ferry ride from the heel of Italy's boot. It is said that there are fewer than two telephones for every 100 inhabitants and just one cashpoint in the whole country. In Albania, they worship Norman Wisdom as a cultural icon. They shake their heads for yes and nod for no. They speak two languages, Tosk and Gheg.
Although Albania still lacks a few of the amenities associated with popular tourist destinations, such as a tourist office, 24-hour electricity and a reliable supply of potable water, things are said to be changing quickly. There remains, however, a dearth of information about the current state of play, a problem exacerbated by an apparently national reluctance to answer a ringing phone. The only way to find out what Albania is like right now, it seems, is to go and see for yourself.
There are no direct flights to Albania from the UK. You have to change planes in Budapest. At Albania's Rinas airport, a small building which, when we were there, lacked one of its walls, the queue for people with diplomatic passports is longer than the queue for ordinary foreigners, and many of the ordinary foreigners are themselves aid workers. Outside, taxi drivers vie aggressively for custom, continuing to undercut each other in price even after we've selected a driver, who assures us his competitors are "Mafia". Clutches of bedraggled children beg for coins along the dusty walk to the taxi. Actually, there were only two of them, and they were fairly well dressed, but perhaps that's all the current level of tourism can sustain.
The road to the capital, Tirana, is littered with half-built homes, some of impressive scale. The road itself is nowhere near as bad as I'd been led to believe: pitted and crumbling in places, but in much better repair than, say, the Van Wyck Expressway between Kennedy airport and Manhattan.
As you approach Tirana, it becomes clear that Albania suffers as much from gluts as shortages in goods and services. If roadside sellers are anything to go by, the nation is swamped with car mats. For reasons unexplained Tirana itself has an embarrassment of dentists, at least one every 10 metres. Traffic is heavy and chaotic, but drivers proceed gingerly, because most intersections lack traffic lights. Where there are lights, they rarely work, and where they do work they are ignored.
I chose the 14-room Hotel Diplomat from its website, which bears the welcoming slogan, "Fill like at your home". Newly refurbished and gleaming in the afternoon sun, it sits between two partially devastated apartment blocks. The staff are friendly and English-speaking, the rooms clean and well-appointed, with electricity, running water, telephone, air conditioning, minibar and satellite television. Frankly, I had hoped for less.
The 20-minute walk to the centre of town offers many prime examples of Tirana's celebrated potholes, although pothole is perhaps not the right word for a square metre of missing pavement offering access to a 4m chasm. The overgrown banks of the river are being torn up by diggers at the moment, so it's not looking its best, but the long blocks of drab Communist-era housing have recently been repainted in a patchwork of bright colours at the behest of Tirana's mayor, to sort of cheer everyone up, and the effect is rather pleasing. There's a lot of demolition going on, not counting the fair few buildings which are falling down all by themselves.
The heart of Tirana is Skenderbeg Square, home of two massive architectural one-offs, the Museum of National History, with its Stalinist mosaic frontage, and the Palace of Culture. There's also a sweet little Ferris wheel in the centre of the square, where the statue of Hoxha used to be, and a collection of electric toy cars to hire for the kiddies. One drawback for the tourist becomes immediately apparent: with a few exceptions, Albania does not like having its picture taken. Guards wave you away from the steps of the museum if you produce a camera. Some Albanians will do anything to evade the path of a lens, to the point of turning around and running the other way.
It is, however, a singularly unthreatening place to spend time. Young women go about alone and unmolested, exhibiting none of the modesty of dress described in the guidebooks. Tirana seems to be bursting with an improbable, if rather infectious, optimism - the streets are crowded with teenagers, the cafes are buzzing, new Mercedes creep along the Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, hoardings proclaim the arrival of Vodafone and one can see that efforts are being made to clean up the great drifts of rubbish and rubble - but there is also a certain amount of local impatience with the pace of progress. "From 1999 the situation is getting poorer," says Mr Pirro, proprietor of Pirro Souvenirs. "We are waiting for things to get better, but we are not so satisfied."
The waiter at the Hotel Diplomat, who has only just returned after five years in Barking, is more confident. "I'm very optimistic. In 10 years, 15 years, it's going to be a good place," he says. "If you are thinking of buying some land, do it now."
Albania's beaches are the main attraction for such tourists as come to visit; they run for hundreds of miles along the Adriatic and Ionian down to Butrint, where the archaeological ruins draw day-trippers from Corfu.
The next morning, we hire a taxi to drive us to the main port of Durres, about 36 kilometres west of Tirana. The road is dotted with hundreds of the more than 750,000 concrete pillboxes commissioned by Hoxha after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Corn is planted in untidy rows in front of every house. People are out walking cows as if they were dogs.
Durres is an older city than Tirana, and less damaged by Hoxha's architectural conceits. But here, too, dilapidation coexists alongside understated splendour. Durres has its own Roman amphitheatre, unrestored and overgrown, all but hidden behind a row of apartments. Bar Torra - a little cafe atop an old stone tower - could be in any Italian city. Just outside it Silvie Caraj and Avni Tahiri, from Kosovo, ask me to take their picture in front of a statue of Mujoulqinaku, Hero Poppulliti. They are the first tourists I've met.
The beach just north of town is composed almost entirely of hard-packed dust, concrete rubble, broken glass and twisted iron. The water is impenetrably murky for the first hundred yards out, before it shades into turquoise. The sea is nevertheless filled with local children, taking turns on a makeshift diving board. Families have spread out towels and pitched umbrellas on the hard ground. Further up, pedalos circle a rusting derrick in the bay, against a backdrop of unfinished hotels and apartment blocks.
It is the beaches to the south, however, on which Albania intends to stake its reputation. Along the coast, hundreds of hotels are being thrown up with unseemly haste. On the side of the road, sellers of towels, inflatables, sunglasses, bananas, umbrellas, sunblock and cold drinks form an unbroken line many miles long. At one point the beach is overshadowed by a long fence topped with coils of barbed wire and dotted with towers manned by armed guards. This makes for slightly uncomfortable bathing, although the fence actually encloses a Nato base, staffed by Italian soldiers.
Further south, we encounter a stretch of beach more crowded than any I have seen in Europe. At the water's edge Alsat television is filming the throngs of bathers. On discovering that I've come from England, they point the camera at me and ask what I think of Albania's infrastructure. I can't remember what I said, because a small crowd started to close in around me. "I lived in Kingsbury and then Wembley," says a woman in a bikini, "but my case was refused, so I have to come back." I say that Albania seems quite nice to me. "Yes, it's nice here, on the beach," she says, a little forlornly.
I meet Shira and Lina, cousins on holiday with their extended Albanian family, although Shira's accent is, I can tell, neither Tosk nor Gheg in origin. Where are you from? I ask. "Staten Island," she says. Really? What do you think of Albania? "I think they should clean it up a little more, fix it up a little more," she says. "But it was terrible before. It's gotten a lot better." Behind her there is a cow helping itself to the rubbish heaped up between two crumbling pillboxes.
"It's getting better for the rich people," says Peprit Domi, late of Sheffield and Euston in London. "Eighty per cent of the people, they are so poor. Twenty per cent, they are very, very rich." You can see what he means. A few hundred metres down the beach from the cow a magnificent new hotel stands in sharp contrast to its jerry-built neighbours, not least because it appears to be completely empty. Not a single deck chair on its meticulously raked stretch of beach is occupied. A black-shirted security guard steps forward as the Guardian photographer attempts to document the scene. He waves us over, introduces himself as Sami and poses for a few snaps. Sami (four years in Hounslow) then tracks down someone to give us a tour of the new Hotel Adriatik.
Bledi Aliaj, the hotel's young administrator, explains the Adriatik's history. "This was the old-regime hotel," he says, "exclusively only for the government at that time, and tourists from Russia and China. This was off-limits to Albanians." The Adriatik was partially destroyed in 1990, when the remnants of Hoxha's government collapsed, and then completely destroyed in 1997, during riots which erupted after the collapse of several pyramid investment schemes brought the fledgling Albanian economy to its knees. An Albanian businessman, Gafur Dudaj, has rebuilt the Adriatik, adding two more floors and a huge circular swimming pool out front. It's not quite finished - the imported Canadian turf is being held up at customs - but they had the president to stay last week, and things went well.
The hotel is managed by a German, Peter Bartmann, who overflows with optimism about Albania. "The opinion about Albania outside is very bad. It's not fair," he says. "Albania is like Spain 30 years ago." He is assured of the Albanian people's ability to lift themselves out of their poverty, but is dismayed by the lack of basic infrastructure and the endemic incompetence of officialdom. "Oh, it's terrible," he says. "We have to have our own generators. To fill the pool we had to make payments. It's the truth!"
Back at the Hotel Diplomat that night, I drink a bottle of Albanian mineral water ("Suffled how it gush from the source of the woods of Tepelana"
from the minibar and try to call home, but a recorded female voice repeatedly tells me - in Albanian and English - that the number I have dialled does not exist. I go down to the lobby and tell the receptionist what the recording said. She gives me a broad, happy smile and says, "She is lying, you can be sure!" If you want to see Albania, see it now. It won't be like this for long.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Wish you were here</span>
The Albanian government says it wants to attract more international tourists. The country is, after all, just a stone's throw from Corfu. But can it meet the needs of the modern traveller - and will Tirana's only cash machine cope? Tim Dowling ignored guide-book warnings of banditry, packed his Tosk and Gheg phrasebooks and headed for the sun.
Going anywhere nice this year? Why not consider Albania for your holidays? Reports that Europe's poorest and most isolated country is looking to develop its tourist sector are confirmed by Albania's tourism promotion minister, Silva Dracini. "Sure that we are," she says.
According to the latest official figures, 60,000 tourists have already visited Albania in the first six months of 2003, and that's before high season. "Most of them are from Kosovo," says Dracini, "but our policy is to have even more coming from European countries. At the moment this is difficult. I can only say we are aiming at this."
Much of the available information on travel to Albania seems designed to instil fear. Foreign Office advice mentions "the widespread ownership of firearms" and strongly discourages travel in the north-east of the country. The Lonely Planet website warns of "armed robberies, assaults, mobster assassinations, bombings and carjackings", exhorts visitors to "avoid all large public gatherings" and says it is inadvisable to travel outside the main cities, or anywhere at night. This doom-laden paragraph is missing from the latest edition of its printed guide to eastern Europe, but the book does suggest that "corrupt police may attempt to extort money from you" and the word "banditry" is used in passing.
As if that isn't enough to put you off, thanks to decades of spectacular repression at the hands of dictator Enver Hoxha, Albania retains a reputation as a Stalinist cultural oddity of almost wilful remoteness, despite the fact that its southern tip nearly touches Corfu, and its main port is just a few hours' ferry ride from the heel of Italy's boot. It is said that there are fewer than two telephones for every 100 inhabitants and just one cashpoint in the whole country. In Albania, they worship Norman Wisdom as a cultural icon. They shake their heads for yes and nod for no. They speak two languages, Tosk and Gheg.
Although Albania still lacks a few of the amenities associated with popular tourist destinations, such as a tourist office, 24-hour electricity and a reliable supply of potable water, things are said to be changing quickly. There remains, however, a dearth of information about the current state of play, a problem exacerbated by an apparently national reluctance to answer a ringing phone. The only way to find out what Albania is like right now, it seems, is to go and see for yourself.
There are no direct flights to Albania from the UK. You have to change planes in Budapest. At Albania's Rinas airport, a small building which, when we were there, lacked one of its walls, the queue for people with diplomatic passports is longer than the queue for ordinary foreigners, and many of the ordinary foreigners are themselves aid workers. Outside, taxi drivers vie aggressively for custom, continuing to undercut each other in price even after we've selected a driver, who assures us his competitors are "Mafia". Clutches of bedraggled children beg for coins along the dusty walk to the taxi. Actually, there were only two of them, and they were fairly well dressed, but perhaps that's all the current level of tourism can sustain.
The road to the capital, Tirana, is littered with half-built homes, some of impressive scale. The road itself is nowhere near as bad as I'd been led to believe: pitted and crumbling in places, but in much better repair than, say, the Van Wyck Expressway between Kennedy airport and Manhattan.
As you approach Tirana, it becomes clear that Albania suffers as much from gluts as shortages in goods and services. If roadside sellers are anything to go by, the nation is swamped with car mats. For reasons unexplained Tirana itself has an embarrassment of dentists, at least one every 10 metres. Traffic is heavy and chaotic, but drivers proceed gingerly, because most intersections lack traffic lights. Where there are lights, they rarely work, and where they do work they are ignored.
I chose the 14-room Hotel Diplomat from its website, which bears the welcoming slogan, "Fill like at your home". Newly refurbished and gleaming in the afternoon sun, it sits between two partially devastated apartment blocks. The staff are friendly and English-speaking, the rooms clean and well-appointed, with electricity, running water, telephone, air conditioning, minibar and satellite television. Frankly, I had hoped for less.
The 20-minute walk to the centre of town offers many prime examples of Tirana's celebrated potholes, although pothole is perhaps not the right word for a square metre of missing pavement offering access to a 4m chasm. The overgrown banks of the river are being torn up by diggers at the moment, so it's not looking its best, but the long blocks of drab Communist-era housing have recently been repainted in a patchwork of bright colours at the behest of Tirana's mayor, to sort of cheer everyone up, and the effect is rather pleasing. There's a lot of demolition going on, not counting the fair few buildings which are falling down all by themselves.
The heart of Tirana is Skenderbeg Square, home of two massive architectural one-offs, the Museum of National History, with its Stalinist mosaic frontage, and the Palace of Culture. There's also a sweet little Ferris wheel in the centre of the square, where the statue of Hoxha used to be, and a collection of electric toy cars to hire for the kiddies. One drawback for the tourist becomes immediately apparent: with a few exceptions, Albania does not like having its picture taken. Guards wave you away from the steps of the museum if you produce a camera. Some Albanians will do anything to evade the path of a lens, to the point of turning around and running the other way.
It is, however, a singularly unthreatening place to spend time. Young women go about alone and unmolested, exhibiting none of the modesty of dress described in the guidebooks. Tirana seems to be bursting with an improbable, if rather infectious, optimism - the streets are crowded with teenagers, the cafes are buzzing, new Mercedes creep along the Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, hoardings proclaim the arrival of Vodafone and one can see that efforts are being made to clean up the great drifts of rubbish and rubble - but there is also a certain amount of local impatience with the pace of progress. "From 1999 the situation is getting poorer," says Mr Pirro, proprietor of Pirro Souvenirs. "We are waiting for things to get better, but we are not so satisfied."
The waiter at the Hotel Diplomat, who has only just returned after five years in Barking, is more confident. "I'm very optimistic. In 10 years, 15 years, it's going to be a good place," he says. "If you are thinking of buying some land, do it now."
Albania's beaches are the main attraction for such tourists as come to visit; they run for hundreds of miles along the Adriatic and Ionian down to Butrint, where the archaeological ruins draw day-trippers from Corfu.
The next morning, we hire a taxi to drive us to the main port of Durres, about 36 kilometres west of Tirana. The road is dotted with hundreds of the more than 750,000 concrete pillboxes commissioned by Hoxha after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Corn is planted in untidy rows in front of every house. People are out walking cows as if they were dogs.
Durres is an older city than Tirana, and less damaged by Hoxha's architectural conceits. But here, too, dilapidation coexists alongside understated splendour. Durres has its own Roman amphitheatre, unrestored and overgrown, all but hidden behind a row of apartments. Bar Torra - a little cafe atop an old stone tower - could be in any Italian city. Just outside it Silvie Caraj and Avni Tahiri, from Kosovo, ask me to take their picture in front of a statue of Mujoulqinaku, Hero Poppulliti. They are the first tourists I've met.
The beach just north of town is composed almost entirely of hard-packed dust, concrete rubble, broken glass and twisted iron. The water is impenetrably murky for the first hundred yards out, before it shades into turquoise. The sea is nevertheless filled with local children, taking turns on a makeshift diving board. Families have spread out towels and pitched umbrellas on the hard ground. Further up, pedalos circle a rusting derrick in the bay, against a backdrop of unfinished hotels and apartment blocks.
It is the beaches to the south, however, on which Albania intends to stake its reputation. Along the coast, hundreds of hotels are being thrown up with unseemly haste. On the side of the road, sellers of towels, inflatables, sunglasses, bananas, umbrellas, sunblock and cold drinks form an unbroken line many miles long. At one point the beach is overshadowed by a long fence topped with coils of barbed wire and dotted with towers manned by armed guards. This makes for slightly uncomfortable bathing, although the fence actually encloses a Nato base, staffed by Italian soldiers.
Further south, we encounter a stretch of beach more crowded than any I have seen in Europe. At the water's edge Alsat television is filming the throngs of bathers. On discovering that I've come from England, they point the camera at me and ask what I think of Albania's infrastructure. I can't remember what I said, because a small crowd started to close in around me. "I lived in Kingsbury and then Wembley," says a woman in a bikini, "but my case was refused, so I have to come back." I say that Albania seems quite nice to me. "Yes, it's nice here, on the beach," she says, a little forlornly.
I meet Shira and Lina, cousins on holiday with their extended Albanian family, although Shira's accent is, I can tell, neither Tosk nor Gheg in origin. Where are you from? I ask. "Staten Island," she says. Really? What do you think of Albania? "I think they should clean it up a little more, fix it up a little more," she says. "But it was terrible before. It's gotten a lot better." Behind her there is a cow helping itself to the rubbish heaped up between two crumbling pillboxes.
"It's getting better for the rich people," says Peprit Domi, late of Sheffield and Euston in London. "Eighty per cent of the people, they are so poor. Twenty per cent, they are very, very rich." You can see what he means. A few hundred metres down the beach from the cow a magnificent new hotel stands in sharp contrast to its jerry-built neighbours, not least because it appears to be completely empty. Not a single deck chair on its meticulously raked stretch of beach is occupied. A black-shirted security guard steps forward as the Guardian photographer attempts to document the scene. He waves us over, introduces himself as Sami and poses for a few snaps. Sami (four years in Hounslow) then tracks down someone to give us a tour of the new Hotel Adriatik.
Bledi Aliaj, the hotel's young administrator, explains the Adriatik's history. "This was the old-regime hotel," he says, "exclusively only for the government at that time, and tourists from Russia and China. This was off-limits to Albanians." The Adriatik was partially destroyed in 1990, when the remnants of Hoxha's government collapsed, and then completely destroyed in 1997, during riots which erupted after the collapse of several pyramid investment schemes brought the fledgling Albanian economy to its knees. An Albanian businessman, Gafur Dudaj, has rebuilt the Adriatik, adding two more floors and a huge circular swimming pool out front. It's not quite finished - the imported Canadian turf is being held up at customs - but they had the president to stay last week, and things went well.
The hotel is managed by a German, Peter Bartmann, who overflows with optimism about Albania. "The opinion about Albania outside is very bad. It's not fair," he says. "Albania is like Spain 30 years ago." He is assured of the Albanian people's ability to lift themselves out of their poverty, but is dismayed by the lack of basic infrastructure and the endemic incompetence of officialdom. "Oh, it's terrible," he says. "We have to have our own generators. To fill the pool we had to make payments. It's the truth!"
Back at the Hotel Diplomat that night, I drink a bottle of Albanian mineral water ("Suffled how it gush from the source of the woods of Tepelana"
from the minibar and try to call home, but a recorded female voice repeatedly tells me - in Albanian and English - that the number I have dialled does not exist. I go down to the lobby and tell the receptionist what the recording said. She gives me a broad, happy smile and says, "She is lying, you can be sure!" If you want to see Albania, see it now. It won't be like this for long.
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