Travels and travails in a land ground down by communism
Albania is often in the news, usually for the wrong reasons. Lately it has been because of its link to the battle between Kosovo and Serbia; before that this unfortunate country has had plenty of its own upheavals.
Only a handful of kilometres separate Albania from the Greek island of Corfu, yet as Robert Carver explains, decades of isolation imposed by the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985 after 45 years of tough communist rule, resulted in it being light-years from Europe.
Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, Carver's aim was to traverse the country, culminating with him penetrating the feud-riven interior known as the Accursed Mountains, an area where few foreigners have dared to venture.
Carver's timing was immaculate: he travelled during the spring and summer of 1996 when, during a brief transition between communism and anarchy, anything looked possible.
The idea for the journey seems to have been sparked by an interview Carver had with the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. He had asked Fermor where he would go to get off the beaten track if he were 18 again. Fermor said Albania.
Setting out from Greece, the omens were far from rosy. One Greek told him: 'Don't trust them [the Albanians] at all. They smile and they smile . . . then they rob you and kill you.' In the event, he found a country where people were so ground down by communism that their energy was spent ensuring their own survival rather than engineering a premature end to a foreigner's life. One bakery was known as 'Death Breadshop', apparently because so many had died of starvation while queuing there.
In the past 10 years of communism, each family had one litre of oil, milk, sugar and meat per month. Frequently, there was no electricity and the water could be off for days on end.
Here was a land where a cheque or a credit card was unheard of, and where no one had heard of Sigmund Freud or knew what a hippy was. In short, it was a land that time forgot.
Carver's vividly drawn tableaux show the incongruity of this isolation when compared with the presence of elegant Italian stuccoed buildings left over from Italy's occupations of the country this century and that sipping espressos - which Carver reckons are the finest outside Italy - is almost de rigueur despite the abject poverty.
Carver's first guide was Gabriel, a teacher in his 40s and a 'democrat' whose views at times seemed to border on authoritarianism. He was one of the few Albanians who had travelled overseas, but had a bad biographi or file - we do not know why - which meant he and his family had lived in fear from the communist Sigurimi, or secret police.
From Carver's account, Gabriel is portrayed as one of those pavement cafe intellectuals who would have been more at home tucked away in a cosy Prague bar rather than surrounded by the dilapidated concrete wasteland he calls home in an anonymous Albanian town.
Yet even as one of Albania's few educated elite, his thought processes were set rigidly in communist dogma. When asked why he did not organise a raffle to raise money to buy glass for his school's windows, he replies: 'This is the government's job. It is a scandal.' As Carver comments, for Albania to dig itself out of its abyss would have required its people to take responsibility for their own destiny, which they were ill-equipped to do.
It irks, therefore, why he should keep repeating this for no apparent reason.
Then there are the occasions when the author is appalled to find he is being ripped off for meals and drinks. How naive to think it would be otherwise, especially given the writer is a well-seasoned traveller. It appears to have slipped his mind that his US$10 (HK$77) daily spending money is more than some locals might earn in a month.
And noticeably, much of what Carver tends to report as fact is based on hearsay rather than attributed sources.
Even so, the account is largely entertaining, with some thought-provoking interludes - such as when the author meets Britain's man in Albania, referred to as Carruthers, who appears to have stepped from the pages of a Graham Greene novel.
They meet initially at an embassy function, one of those cringing get-togethers where you imagine the Brits speaking in frightfully clipped tones about how bad things were when they were in Mogadishu, with the locals trying to unravel their elongated vowels.
The story of Hoxha's double also makes a lasting impression.
This unfortunate had received plastic surgery to make him look like Hoxha. Apparently, when Hoxha died in 1985, his double was released, only to find himself reviled by the population wherever he went. He then discovered his family had been shot just after he had been selected for his high office, to ensure it was kept a secret.
With an attempt at self-mutilation only partially successful, he lived out his days in a gulag where the prisoners had never seen pictures of Hoxha.
And then, of course, there are the wonderfully evocative descriptions of the Accursed Mountains themselves. Here Carver is in his element, giving full rein to his observations of one of Europe's last wildernesses.
Many may consider that a book about Albania holds no appeal for them. Yet the country's position at the crossroads of Muslim and Christian Europe, combined with its recent turbulent history, makes it a fascinating place.
As to fears for Carver's survival, the closest he seems to have come to returning home in a box was during a bus trip when his fellow travellers were searching for a target to test their firing skills. But his fears were unfounded: they preferred to use a large boulder to show off their appalling shooting ability. Had they discovered how the writer was to portray their country in his book, they might have wished they had chosen a real target.
