Re: Turizmi
Ja se c'fare shkruhet per Shqiperine dhe turizmin shqiptar:
Albania
By Sara Wheeler
In the butterscotch light of late afternoon a Vlach shepherd and his mule were goading a string of goats up towards their summer pastures high in the Lunxherise mountains. Down below, a man hooked the blade of a scythe round his neck and walked purposefully from his hut, wordlessly leaving his wife, who was churning butter with a paddle in a wooden pail. I looked far out over the cadmium yellows and sage greens of the Albanian mountains and I thought, Where else in Europe is it still like this?
Albania is a country waking up after a very long, dark night. After almost fifty years of its own particular brand of communism, its people subsist on the lowest per capita income in Europe (I met a professor at the School of Medicine earning $130 a month). The country was effectively sealed off from the rest of the world by the megalomaniac dictator Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hodga). Hoxha was barking mad and a murderer to boot. He banned beards. He squabbled with all his erstwhile allies the Soviets, the Chinese, the Yugoslavs and he had thousands of his people sent to labour camps in the chrome mines for ten years for crimes like listening to the World Service on the wireless. Priests were buried alive. Young Albanians were shot for playing Rolling Stones tapes. Thousands died. Albania might be 200 miles from Italy, but as far as the rest of the world was concerned it could have been the Antarctic.
In the heart of the capital, Tirana, a 55-foot bronze statue of Friend Enver once kept his eye on his subjects, and when I reached this bizarre and heartbreakingly dramatic European outpost the vacant plinth was still standing lonely in Skanderbeg Square. Beyond the Stalinist concrete monster buildings radiating off Skanderbeg, and beyond the rows of handsome yellow house-offices put up by the Italians during the Occupation, half a million Tiranians live in concrete apartment blocks built during the communist era, graffitoed now and leprous with corrosion.
I found the city full of cafés and the cafés full of men, and the click of billiard balls came flying through the open doors of stygian basements. Finding out how much you weigh was plainly a popular pastime, and on the sidewalks men squatted next to pairs of weighing scales, charging a few leke for use. And everywhere the whiff of open drains, exhaust fumes and piles of decaying refuse.
Sheep were grazing in the scrubby central park (my toddling son rode one), but the rest of Tirana was a perpetual snarl of traffic. Yet when the communist regime fell in 1992 there were fifty cars in the capital and it was illegal for an ordinary citizen to own a motor vehicle. Now the country enjoys the highest Mercedes ownership in the world, almost entirely due to cars stolen from Germany by Albanian gangs and the Italian mafia and sold in the port of Durres, 20 miles west of Tirana, some with the red and white pennants of Bayern Munich still dangling merrily from the interior mirror.
Tucked in between Greece in the south, Montenegro in the north, Kosovo and Macedonia in the east and a large slice of the Adriatic in the west, Albania's land surface is about that of Maryland. To get around, we hired a car and a driver. We paid a hundred dollars a day for our man, which included all gas and his food and lodging. You can get a driver for less, but we wanted someone with sound references and we were prepared to pay for it. My partner and I were travelling with our two-year-old, and we took our own infant car seat, checking it in as airline baggage. I have learnt to do this, during the thousands of miles I have covered with my son; even in more sophisticated countries, baby seats mysteriously vanish when you pick up your hire car.
I cannot say that it was an easy trip. The fact that nobody speaks English is exacerbated by the fact that all the guidebooks are out of date, and much of the information we did extract from helpful passers-by turned out to be false. Maps became legally available to foreigners only recently, telephones often don't work and there are many power cuts. Confusingly, people usually quote prices in old leke, which means ten times the actual cost. While we experienced only friendliness from Albanians, it is impossible not to be aware of a general lawlessness. Shortly before our arrival, even the prime minister had his car stolen.
The three of us, and our driver Qazim, with whom we communicated in pigeon Italian (though the truth was that he was reluctant to speak at all), set off for the south over the semi-arid Krabbe Mountains and down to Elbasan along the Shkumbini valley, the latter wrecked by a Chinese-built steel mill, now mostly defunct, like all Albanian heavy industry. The small part of it in operation was exuding acrid orange clouds. In Elbasan the stained and boxy concrete apartment blocks were flowering with satellite dishes.
Out to the east, the road followed the Shkumbini to the shores of Lake Ochrid and Lin, a fishing village overlooking Macedonia. Three women were guiding donkeys freighted with corn along the viney Lin lanes, carding wool as they went. The working donkeys of Albania were popular with my son, who, rationally enough, asked keenly if we couldn't get one for the shopping at home in London.
On the lakeside road from Lin to Pogradec we ate red-speckled
trout at a fish restaurant on stilts. Even the sphinx-like Qazim was impressed. During Hoxha's rule it was illegal for ordinary people to catch this delicious fish (to ensure the conservation of supplies for Party bosses), and if you got found trying in an attempt to feed your starving family, you were sent to the camps for fifteen years.
Hoxha was convinced that Albania ran a grave risk of being invaded by western forces jealous of the country's success, and so he ordered the construction of hundreds of thousands of reinforced concrete domes with machine gun slits. These bunkers are a sinister feature of every Albanian landscape and a potent symbol of paranoia which will still be there in five hundred years.
In Korça, a town at the foot of the Morava mountains, we found an astonishing quantity of Ottoman detail hiding modestly among the concrete sprawl. The Turks occupied Albania for half a millennium and their hand is everywhere in the architecture, language, food, and the fact that 70 per cent of Albanians are muslim. I had no sense of being in a muslim country though. Women wore miniskirts in the cities and bikinis on the beaches, and I did not hear a single call to prayer.
We crossed a neglected, scrubby plain outside Korça to visit the old Christian village of Boboshtica where a dozen families were living off one cow each and an old woman in a lean-to was stirring a pungent vat of blackberry raki next to an open fire. It took ten minutes to get from Korça to Boboshtica, but it was like going back a hundred years.
At another village, Barç, a muslim one in the mountains on the other side of Korça, we were told that the only doctor had emigrated to Canada the previous month (who could blame her?). We spoke, in Greek, to two young men in jeans who had returned home for the summer from their jobs labouring on Athenian building sites. “It's like Pakistan here”, one of them said, sweeping a hand round the mud streets. Yet at six o’clock, the hour of the evening stroll throughout southern Europe, a couple of young women emerged from their shack in high heels and lipstick to pick their way among the cowpats.
All over Albania I met people with apparently irreconcilable feelings about their country: an attenuated awareness of national inferiority and an engorged sense of patriotic pride. They were embarrassed at being hoodwinked by the communists for so many years; but how were they to know?
We pressed on south through the Grammoz mountains, a remote, wolfy hinterland and established robbery zone. The dun shades of the flatlands rippled upwards, gradations of colour shifting through purples and opalescent ambers up to the last glassy mountain ridge. The air was heavy with wild thyme. We were stopped three times on the crumbling switchbacks by armed police, though they were less interested in protecting us than in rifling through Qazim's papers until they found something for which they could extort a fine. At Erseka there were two donkeys at the taxi rank.
Shortly we entered a huge and ancient pine forest, and in two hours passed only a group of men in equally ancient suit jackets gathered at a pyre to make charcoal. At an altitude of about 4000 feet we stopped for lunch at a village called Leskoviku. This place, sheltering under a bare, tawny shoulder of the Nemërçka range, was isolated even by the standards of the Albanian mountains. Horses and carts outnumbered cars in Leskoviku by some margin, and haystacks the shape of fat obelisks nestled up to the ubiquitous concrete. All Albanian haystacks wore tiny waterproof capes crowned with a tyre hat.
A large tractor-servicing factory just outside the village had been totally burnt out. The Albanian landscape was a living oxymoron: the advent of democracy triggered a construction spree and there were building sites everywhere, each unfinished structure displaying a ghoulish dummy to ward off the evil eye. Yet everywhere too were the decaying skeletons of communist collectivisation.
If Albania had a tourist industry, Gjirokastra would be one of its star turns. A splendid dark granite medieval and Ottoman fortress presides over everything else from a small hill, the slopes below crowded with nineteenth-century merchants¹ houses with heavy, pale grey slate roofs, the whole lot sitting like crumbs in a bowl of limestone mountains. It was a spectacular spot all right, but we did not feel safe in Gjirokastra and even the inscrutable Qazim militated for our early departure. The narrow streets up at the castle walls seemed particularly tense, as the Greek consulate was up there and an absurdly large visa-seeking crowd was eddying volubly round its walls.
It helps, if you visit Albania, if you are familiar with Asia. It will help you deal with the open sewers, the children picking through piles of stinking rubbish, the cash economy, the absence of any workable infrastructure and the paper-thin cattle and the trains, which are very much like Indian trains.
Turning towards the coast, we drove on to the palm trees of Saranda, where Corfu looms so near across the Strait you wonder why, in the dark days, they didn't all swim for it (it can¹t be more than a mile or two at the narrowest point), until you learn that armed security boats fished the swimmers out in order to despatch them - yes, to the camps.
Accommodation is reasonably easy to find in Albanian towns. We stayed in simple hotels, and sometimes in private rooms. You can expect to pay about twenty-five dollars a night for a double in a good place. In Saranda, which is as near as Albania gets to a resort, there were as many as half a dozen decent hotels, and they could all have been Greek: showy interior décor majoring on marble, paper tablecloths that waiters clip on outside tables, horrible music and flash cars lined up conspicuously outside. But the food was good.
South of Saranda the unpaved road ran parallel with the sea through miles of olive groves and petered out at Butrint, probably the best of Albania's many archaeological sites. According to Book III of Virgil's Aeneid it was founded by Trojan exiles in the twelfth century BC. The Romans were there, the settlement's strategic position on the east-west trade routes kept it going all through the Byzantine period, and by the fourteenth century it was part of the rich Venetian empire. When we got to it, Butrint was entirely empty. It was like being a Jane Austen heroine on the Grand Tour. My son, a keen hunter-gatherer, ate ants under the eucalyptus trees below the Bronze Age acropolis.
We proceeded north up what is fondly known as the Albanian Riviera, a perilous and magnificent coast road glued to steep mountains. Above miles of untrodden beaches (notwithstanding a few hundred bunkers, but to these I was now inured), the road eventually dipped down to Himara. There we holed up in a hotel on the sandy beach to rest after our mountainous excursions. The cafés on the front were permanently crowded with old men caressing worry beads, taking a turn at the open-air billiard table and pausing only to shout orders to wives labouring back from the fields. Two tavernas were so close to the sea that we were able to swim between ordering and eating.
Right at the top of Dhérmi, a seriously depopulated hill town to the north of Himara, we visited the tiny thirteenth-century church of Shen Maria, where the regular panoply of Byzantine saints and reptilian devils paraded across startlingly bright sixteenth-century frescoes. It was very quiet, and rods of buttery light beaming through the tiny, high windows cast chequered shadows on the flagged floor. It was a highlight of our trip.
You need a spirit of adventure in Albania. The proprietor of the small hotel at Dhérmi had promised fresh fish for supper. And indeed it was fresh. He dynamited it out of the water 30 feet out in the small cove right in front of the hotel.
North of Dhérmi the road leapt from zero to 3000 feet in minutes. The large flocks of glossy black goats on the mountainside were the only healthy-looking animals in Albania. A handful of holiday cabins tottered in a state of imminent dereliction, looted to death in1997 during the riots which followed the collapse of government-endorsed pyramid-selling schemes. Virtually nothing escaped this period of plunder - industrial sites, factories, schools, museums (people ran around brandishing hundred-year-old swords), state arsenals, hospitals and even gaols, from which all the prisoners escaped.
On the way back to Tirana, in the palmy main street of Vlora, a police van stopped in front of our car and half a dozen policemen piled out wearing black balaclava hoods with eyeslits. Bloodfeuds are so powerful in Albania that if a policeman shoots a criminal he is likely to be murdered in turn by the criminal's avenging family. So policemen sometimes patrol in disguise. As so often in this lawless, endlessly beguiling land, what should have struck terror in our hearts instead rang a note of bathos: as the sinister masks had no moutholes, the policemen were obliged to wear them half rolled up to allow the obligatory cigarette to dangle from their lips. Bloodfeuds are especially prolific in the highlands to the north of Tirana, the territory of the Gheg tribe, where clan loyalty is more powerful than toothless national law. And remember, this is 200 miles from Italy.
How long will it take before the package tourists debouch into Albania and turn it into another southern European resort destination? The government has begun work on Corridor 8, a planned highway from Durres down the Riviera. Whether Albanians will ever have enough money to complete the project is debatable. Inward investment remains poor, inhibited by frequently changing laws, along with several hundred other inhibiting factors, including endemic corruption and the instability of the Balkans in general. I think it will be a long, long time before Club Med ousts the donkeys grazing among the Albanian bunkers.
Informacionin e gjeni ne kete link:
http://www.travelintelligence.net/wsd/articles/art_542.html
