I had hoped to see lots of beautiful places in Albania. I did see some. I've described Berat. The town of Gjirokastër was even better. It is spread across the ridges and gullies of a large hill, with the obligatory fort on top. Nothing in the fort, except some pits in the cement that the short, stocky custodian with an animated face giving me a guided tour in a little Albanian plus a lot of Albanian gestures, which I found even more incomprehensible than the Albanian language, said were the result of ``Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!'', unless ``bam'' means something very different in Albanian, and some walls here and there where people were either shot, garrotted, hung, or had their throats slit--again the incomprehensibility of the Albanian gestures. All this happened in World War II, or maybe World War I, or maybe even in Ottoman times. There were also some high vaulted chambers where apparently the Turkish soldiers slept and--the gesture here is the index finger of the right hand pointing into the palm of the left hand--either slept under umbrellas or sat on one-legged stools or engaged in some unspeakably perverted sexual practice in the privacy of their own barracks.
But the rest of Gjirokastër was wonderful. The maze-like streets were of red, black, and white brick-shaped cobblestones. The houses were one-story and of stucco on their uphill side, but on their downhill side had two stories of stone below, looking like small fortresses, with windows not much larger than a rifle could fit through. The roofs were mostly of slate. You would wander down a narrow lane closely hemmed in by shops all built of the same stone, and reach the end for a magnificent view of the length of the Drino River valley.
But the high point of the trip was to be the village of Thethi, in the far north. I had read about it in Edith Durham's High Albania, the story of a lone Englishwoman's trek in 1908 through the mountain villages of the ``Albanian Alps''. For Durham it was a visit to a previous era, and perhaps for me it would be too.
In Tirana I had walked through the National Museum, a very nice, well-laid-out, modern museum, highly informative even though all the descriptions were only in Albanian. In one room I saw a picture of a hauntingly beautiful village in a deep mountain valley, whose houses were all three-story stone towers. I asked the woman who was following me around turning lights on for me--I was the only visitor at the museum at the time--where it was, and she didn't know, but I imagined it must be Thethi.
When I first arranged this trip, I worked through the Kutrubes Travel Agency in Boston, specialists in Albanian travel from back in the days when it was difficult, and, it turned out, not entirely up to date on the realities of Albanian travel. I tried to do things on my own at first and called information in Washington to ask for the Albanian Embassy and was told there was none. So I called the United Nations mission in New York, and was given the ambassador's home phone in Silver Springs, Maryland, and I called him to ask about visas. He said they weren't set up yet to give visas, but if I sent him the basic information, he would make sure a visa was waiting for me at the Tirana Airport. This seemed rather chancy to me, so I decided to work through Kutrubes.
I paid them $50 for a visa, plus a $30 handling charge. The cost for the required jeep, a driver, guide, hotel, and meals was $180 a day, pretty steep, but I decide if I could use that for one day to go to Thethi and back, it would certainly be worth it. My plane was to arrive in the early afternoon, and I would go directly from the airport to Shkodra, two hours to the north, spend the night there, go to and from Thethi the next day, and then return to Tirana the third day, and begin my tour of the south on my own. Well, you guessed it--that two hours to Shkodra the first afternoon would count as a complete day, for $180, and so would the two-hour return to Tirana on the third day, even if I wasn't going to use the hotel. So now the price was $540, plus the visa and handling charge, for a total of $620. Very steep. But this was Albania, the land forbidden to Americans for fifty years, and I wanted to see the best of it. I swallowed hard, and sent my money in.
The week before I left, I called Kathy Kutrubes and asked her to send me a copy of the fax she had originally sent to Albtourist, so I would have a piece of paper to wave if there was trouble at the airport about my visa. She did, and when I read it I was shocked to see that she had neglected to say anything about Thethi. It only mentioned two nights in the unremarkable city of Shkodra and a car and driver for three days. I called her back and insisted she fax them immediately specifying that the car and driver were for a trip to Thethi, and send me a copy of the fax as well. I got that fax two days before I left, and was a bit dismayed that she listed a town called ``Bajram Curri'' as a possible alternative to Thethi, but I didn't know anything about that town, and for all I knew, it was as nice.
When I arrived at the airport, the first surprise was that visas were no longer required of American citizens. A quick stamp, and I was through Passport Control. But what about my $50?
There were no driver and English-speaking guide waiting to whisk me off to Shkodra in a jeep. There was only an Albanian-speaking cab driver with my name on a piece of paper and instructions to take me into Tirana.
At the Hotel Tirana I spoke with the Albtourist agent, Agron Agolli. He spoke perfect English and was a very friendly, helpful man. He said he had never heard of my plans to go to Thethi. He had never received the second fax--the fax machine had been down the last ten days. This could well have been true. There was no way, he said, that he could get a jeep on this short a notice.
I knew I had to be flexible to travel in Albania, so we sat down and I quickly rearranged my entire plans. I would travel around the south for the first three days and then return to Tirana to get the jeep and driver that he would have arranged in the meantime. He agreed to that.
I explored Tirana the rest of the afternoon, a pleasant town with overly broad avenues and monumental architecture rising out of fine evergreen parks. The statue of Enver Hoxha had been torn down, and the pedestal was painted with the name of ``George Bush''. The next morning I went to Berat, and then to Gjirokastër, and the day after to Saranda, the ``Albanian Riviera'', and Vlorë. The morning of the fourth day I took the bus back to Tirana.
Mr. Agolli had not yet found the jeep for Thethi--had he tried?--but if I gave him two more hours, he would. I returned two hours later, and he announced that Thethi was impossible; no driver would agree to drive that road. He had noticed on the fax that Kathy Kutrubes had listed Bajram Curri as an alternative, so he had arranged a driver with an ordinary car to take me there instead. Oh, and by the way, the English-speaking guide that I had paid for was not available.
Now I could have refused all this outright, and returned to America to demand my money back from Kutrubes. Law suits, and all that. But these were my last three days in Albania, and I wouldn't be back, and maybe Bajram Curri was just as nice as Thethi. I decided to make the best of a bad situation. The driver, Agim Bano, and I got in the car and drove off for Shkodra, stopping at the fortress of Kruje on the way, where the one Albanian hero, Skanderbeg, had held off the Turks for twenty-five years in the 1400s.
The next day, on the way to Bajram Curri, there was one thing that was exceptionally beautiful. During the Communist era, Albania had built three large dams on the Drin River, and above the second the road discontinued and we had to take a ferry for two hours, a ferry loaded with oil, timber, grain, and watermelon trucks, a few private cars, and several donkeys. It followed the course of Lake Komani, between narrow spectacular cliffs, almost like a Yosemite valley that had been flooded, past slopes that had isolated corn fields balanced on them, with no visible means of access, the occasional peasant family working the fields. The most remarkable incident was when the ferry suddenly veered toward shore and docked at a rock at the base of a steep slope covered with nothing but scrub. About half a dozen men got off, the last of them what looked like a frail old man in traditional dress and a red cap, who had to be helped gently off the ramp. Before the ramp was raised again, the men were on their way up the hill on an invisible path, the old man out in front, and by the time we started to back away from the shore, they were well up the slope, the old man far above the others, not seeming to hurry, but stretching his lead with every easy step. The tough old Albanian mountain peasants, I thought.
We disembarked at Fierza, at the far end of the lake, and a short drive took us to Bajram Curri. I couldn't believe my eyes. This was no mountain village. It was a modern and very ugly city. You could see the mountains in the distance, but it was not in the mountains itself. Agim looked at me with a kind of ``What now?'' expression; he didn't know what I had wanted to come here for.
When I was first introduced to Agim the day before, he had seemed rather cold (Later I would think of him as quiet and dignified.), and I was dreading spending three days with him. I gave him a pack of Marlboros right away to sweeten his disposition, but that didn't seem to work, and in fact I never saw him smoke. But as we went along, he seemed to warm up a bit. He had bought me a coffee while we were waiting for the ferry. I hardly knew enough Albanian to crack jokes, but I had learned that the word for ``ferry'' was ``traghetto'', so when I saw two boys paddle up in a rowboat made out of scrap metal, I pointed and asked him, ``Traghetto?'' He laughed for the first time. On the ferry he seemed genuinely anxious that I should find the canyon beautiful. (He needn't have worried.)
So now in Bajram Curri, he was quite distressed when he saw my disappointment. He drove to the ``tourist'' hotel--no tourist was staying there--to see if they knew of any options. There we were told that 27 kilometers away on a ``good road''--``rrugë e mirë'', I had learned enough Albanian to pick out the phrase, a beautiful phrase beginning with a heavily trilled ``r''--there was the picturesque village of Valbonë. I consulted my map. It was definitely in the heart of the high ``Albanian Alps'', one valley over from Thethi, although over a hundred miles from Thethi by road. For all I knew, it could have been Valbonë that I had seen a picture of in the National Museum. My spirits lifted, and we set off.
The road through town was not good. It was rutted, potholed, scored by gutters, and it was hard for Agim to go more than 10 miles an hour. It often happens that roads like this are worst in the towns, where they are most heavily used. I tried to say this to Agim in Albanian, and I prayed it would get better as soon as we reached the countryside.
Instead, what pavement there was ended abruptly in a mass of ruts. It was obvious Agim didn't have the clearance in his car to go the next hundred meters, let alone 27 kilometers. Agim asked a passerby and learned the road got no better.
I took a few pictures, since this was the far point I would reach, of the nearby corn fields and the steep blue mountains in the distance, and got back in the car to turn back, resigned.
We returned to the hotel, and the men who had said it was a good road stood at the entrance laughing at the joke they had had. Agim walked through them, silently fuming.
Agim tried as best he could to salvage my trip for the next day and a half. At the hotel he got them to open their special banquet room and give us a lunch of beefsteak and French fries. He drove the long way back, on a moderately scenic road. The next morning he took me to Shkodra's historic but abandoned Lead Mosque and to the purported grave of Skanderbeg in Lezhë (In fact, Skanderbeg's body has long since been parceled out into relics), and he humored me when I wanted to stop in the village of Bushat and take pictures of peasant houses. He helped me get a picture of a woman in traditional dress, which I had seen a lot of in the north, in and among all the blue jeans and Batman T-shirts.
But I hadn't seen Thethi and I hadn't seen Valbonë. I had spent $620 to see something I could have seen by bus for $4.