I left Kotor in the rain just as a few tourists were arriving. It's never going to be a Montenegrin Dubrovnik, but it is a real, living place and all the better for it. Local businesses predominate and it creates an atmosphere entirely of its own.
We ascended through the mists on long and winding roads. The geography gives a clue to how Montenegro survived absorption into either the Ottoman or Hapsburg empires, although Kotor, interestingly enough was part it of Austro-Hungarian Dalmatia. We went through two capitals, Cetinje, the royal capital of independent Montenegro where all the museums were shut, it being Sunday, so I didn't stop; then on to the ugliness of Podgorica, formerly Titograd, the current Republican capital.
There are no bus or train services even to the Albanian border: Shqiperia, the land of the eagles may as well have simply fallen off the end of the world as far as Montenegro could care. I broke a cartel of taxi drivers down to 25 Euro to the border.My driver laughed when I said I was going on holiday there. "They're crazy people" he said, although he had never been there. In fact I had yet to find anyone in the Balkans who had been there.
Still undaunted, even though the road was becoming little more than a badly maintained country lane, and the low clouds added their own sense of Wagnerian doom, we arrived at the border and parted.
I must not have been the only person to have felt a little frisson when I crossed into Albania at Han-i-Hot. The Albanian customs officer was friendly enough, entering my travel intentions in a paper ledger, and apologising for my having to pay 10 euro as an entry tax. I think we was pleased to see a Briton at what must be one or Europe's most tucked-away border points.
Once firmly on Albanian tarmac, two locals engaged me in a ludicrous game of extortion for a taxi to Shkodra, there being no bus, of course, until a man in a private car turned up, trumping their avarice with an offer of a 15 euro fare.
We headed towards Shkodra on a road which the Albanians had at least tried to improve as opposed to the one the Montenegrins had allowed to dribble out. "Come to Albania- it's not as bad as you think it will be" went through my head as a possible advertising slogan, but I became dimly aware of the number of rusting husks of cars abandoned just off the roadside and the fact that seemingly one-in-two of the cars actually on the road were Mercedes-Benz.
Shkodra, unsurprisingly was even worse than Podgorica, but never one to be downhearted, I boarded a minibus full of Albanians to make the journey down to Tirana- this is how Albanians travel across the country, so in the absence of a Mercedes Benz, I felt rather priveliged. I chatted to the man next to me on desultory Italian after he discovered I was English- "Liverpool, John Lennon" he said first of all, before pointing out a castle Skanderberg, the national hero had built just outside Shkodra.
The journey south was thankfully uneventful, although the condition of the road varied dramatically. More and more ex-cars lay rusting on the side of the road, but the countryside was populated by many rather large houses, often brightly painted and some looking well-to-do. Some lay incomplete, families having moved into the ground floor whilst the upper floors remained a shell. I felt I was getting to like the place, as I have done in each of the countries I have ambled through. The only problem has been my timetable which has forced me to keep moving...
Tirana arrived upon us, in its outer limits charmless and disorganised, rubbish piled at the side of the street, but as we approached the centre, I found that the driver spoke a little Italian too. I paid him an extra 3 Euro to take me to Skanderberg Square and told him how I felt. Perhaps I went over the top, but I wouldn't be surprsed if there were to be, this evening, an Albanian minibus driver saying to his wife over his dinner "you know, I met a mad Englishman today on my minibus. He told me that I had made his dream come true by taking him to a city that he had wanted to see ever since he was a little boy." They would have cried, or laughed into their soup. Or both. Yes, probably both.
Skanderberg and me.
Et'hem Bey Mosque
