Friday 27 September 2024
He compared Albania to other countries he knew saying “You have that which is found neither in Greece nor in Italy, a profusion everywhere of the most magnificent foliage. You have majestic cliff-girt shores; castle-crowned heights, and gloomy forests; palaces glittering with gilding and paint; mountain passes such as you encounter in the snowy regions in Switzerland.”
On this road trip we’ve travelled to many of the towns and regions he visited including Gjirokastër, Himare, Vlorë, Apollonia and Berat (where they have signs honouring him). The Albanian National Tourism Agency have featured his paintings in a promotion of the Via Egnatia Roman route which goes from Durrës in the west to Lake Ohrid in the east before continuing on through North Macedonia, Greece and Turkey.
Albania today seems to be a country struggling to move on from its complex past, trying to modernise but constrained by lack of investment.
Many aspects of the country reminded us of our first time in Turkey in the 80’s. The local minibus transport system - called ‘furgon’ is very similar to the traditional ‘dolmus’ in Turkey. They can be hailed from virtually anywhere, don’t particularly run to a timetable, stuff in as many passengers and their baggage as possible and take a very roundabout route to its final destination. Trains are virtually non existent. We found driving standards in Albania to be almost as bad as Turkey, and that takes some doing! Impatience leads to dangerous overtaking and undertaking, vehicles tailgate you, drivers stop in the middle of the road, without warning, to chat to friends, they double or triple park to pop into a shop and at roundabouts half give way to traffic already on it and half don’t!! We coped with most of it but avoided driving into the capital Tirana because, in all honesty, my nerves couldn’t take much more!
The food is influenced by eastern cuisines and menus feature dishes we are familiar with from Turkey and Greece. There’s loads of lovely bakeries and fruit and veg shops, all reasonably priced, and a range of well-stocked supermarkets.
It’s a small, very mountainous country, (highlighted beautifully in the raised relief map on the wall of one of the campsites we stayed in) resulting in the area available for tourism development being quite limited. There aren’t enough tourist attractions to accommodate the domestic visitors arriving by car and foreign visitors on excursions from their hotels. The attractions that already exist don’t have the infrastructure to make it a stress-free experience, the roads are truly awful in places and car parks far too small. The levels of littering is also very off putting - a few areas seem to be tackling it but not enough.
In 14 days we travelled 753 miles and covered most ‘drive-able’ areas. We’ve seen some amazing places and the people are really friendly and welcoming. The country needs resources investing in it to enable it to develop rapidly, yet sensitively, if it wants to compete for tourists with neighbouring countries especially Greece, Montenegro and Italy.
Edward Lear wrote about Albania “There is luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard living and filth on the other.” That seems as true today as it did nearly 200 years ago. We’ve enjoyed our first visit - perhaps we’ll come back in 10 years or so to see how things have progressed - once my nerves have recovered!
And breathe ……
