So how does one gauge the personal difference between these âtwo August' dates? I'm not the person I was then: I know myself better now. In ancient times the Greeks' vision always extended inward as deeply as it did outward. They were interested equally in psychology and geography. The Oracle was right. I have indeed travelled far.
DAY 406 (3 AUGUST): ITHACA
The ferry from Patras drops anchor at the quay of Vathy, deep inside a fjord-like inlet on the northern shores of Ithaca. Ever since Odysseus' ship came in, this fabled island has symbolised the place of rest at the end of a long voyage. Being several thousand kilometres short of my goal, I trust this isn't an omen.
Oppressively hot nights are to be expected at these latitudes in August, along with the tourist throng. We are in the euro zone at high season: it is unrealistic to expect bargains. But my dander is up when, despite his staff telling me there is a room left (at 8 pm), a surly hotel owner refuses to consider reducing the tariff from 60 euro a night (about A$100) to something more in the price range of a long-distance traveller on a budget.
After a brief but artistically controlled tantrum, I repair to the calmer environs of Kantouni, an outdoor restaurant soothed by the lapping waves of the Ionian Sea. So friendly are the restaurant staff, and so hot the night, that I wonder whether this wouldn't be an occasion for calling the hotelier's bluff and sleeping out on a stretcher bed in the courtyard. The waiter consults the patron, and says this should be no problem if I'm willing to wait until the last diners leave at midnight. I've checked out the ablution facilities: no problem there, either.
At 10 pm, on returning to the hotel to collect my bags, I meet the hotel owner in radically changed mood. Fawning over me now, he says, âThirty euro. You have 30 euro? Welcome to my hotel.'
After a moment's hesitation, I choose a room in preference to the courtyard but go back to the restaurateur to apologise for changing my plans. He explains the hotel owner's change of mood: the last boat came in an hour ago. Until then, if the hotel honcho thought he could secure a paying guest at 60 euro, he was playing the game for profit. This is the high season and he is in business, after all.
DAY 410 (7 AUGUST): PREVEZA
Preveza is famous throughout Greece for its delicious sardines. So tonight I enjoy one of the best meals of the journeyâsardines and red wine drawn from genuine hogsheads situated in the on-site cellar of Amvrosios restaurant.
The only jarring note is struck by the restaurateur who, on learning that I am heading north to Albania, appears to go into shock. âYou will be robbed!' he warns me. This side of the border it's a familiar refrain. I order another wine and put such remarks down to experience. Theirs, not mine.
DAY 411 (8 AUGUST): PARGA
This will sound morbid, but you would be surprised at the number of people who want to go to the Underworld before their time. Here in western Epirus one leaves the town of Parga by speedboat, heading first along the Ionian Sea and then up the River Acheron to the beach resort of Ammoudi. From here it is a couple of kilometres by road, and 100 metres through tall grass, to a spooky underground vault. This is believed to have been the gateway to Hades, where the deadâand nowadays package touristsâgo.
Chapter 19
CURSE OF THE BALKANS
Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached the zenith of ⦠medieval expansion
.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN
B
ALKAN
G
HOSTS
AUGUST-OCTOBER 2002
When you look at the fractious history of the peoples who have occupied Europe's south-east down the ages, you realise that, notwithstanding the wars of Yugoslav disintegration last decade, this region is actually living through one of its most benign and outward-looking eras.
Your average Serb may not yet like your average Croatâalthough there are plenty of examples of love breaking out across the racial divideâbut the predominant feeling I got, from Macedonia to Bulgaria, was one of grudging tolerance. You might not entrust your neighbour with the family silver but you recognised him as someone with broadly the same aspirations as yourself, someone who in any event had been here more or less as long as your own folks and was in no hurry to leave. There are grounds for believing that, as the European Union extends its proverbial hand to such countries as Bulgaria and Slovenia, rubbing along with the neighbours will increasingly be seen as preferable to rubbing them out.
SerboâCroat is a language that unites peoples often seen as visceral enemies, even if it is called Serbian in Serbia, Croat in Croatia and Bosnian in Bosnia. Religion can unite even as it divides â the Muslims of Albania may have more in common with their co-religionists in Sarajevo than with their fellow Albaniansâbut that is a curse not confined to the Balkans (ask anyone in the Middle East).
Of all the countries visited on this odyssey, none came as a more pleasant surprise than Bosnia. Some of the most positive and heartwarming signs of humanity in today's world are to be found on the streets of Sarajevo and Mostar. The winter of their discontents has been a long time thawing, but now is the season of regrowth. There is no better time to visit a place that has been through hell than when it has emerged from the ruins and planted its feet confidently on the road back to normality. It is like seeing a drought-stricken country come to life after the rains. In these days not only is it safer to be in Mostar than, dare one say it, Miami, but the reception you get from the locals will justify your choice several times a day.
Like the gentle rain that droppeth, the mercy of a visit to the Balkans is that it is twice blessed. The visitor will be refreshed to see that not only does life go on after a man-made catastrophe, it goes on getting better. The people are overwhelmingly hospitable. These are people who know how great it is to be alive. As a wheelchair user in the Balkans told me, in one of those statements that turns your customary way of looking at things on its head, âThose people who think we need their charity to maintain our self-respect are the real disabled ones.'
ALBANIA: 12â25 AUGUST
DAY 416 (13 AUGUST): GJIROKASTRA
A free visa is granted on arrivalâlet's face it, Albania doesn't have any incentive to put obstacles in the way of people wanting to come here.
Long a byword for inaccessibility, Albania reveals why in the first minute I spend on its soil. At Kakavija, the border with Greece, you know you've entered Albania because here the smooth bitumen hardtop degenerates into a mosaic of rutted tar strips that barely deserve the name of a road at allâand, a few kilometres later, even that is gone and we're on the gravel.
Everything about Albania sets it apart: the people speak Tosk and spend leka. Vying with Moldova as the Continent's poorest country, it is no joke to point out that the country's biggest export is Albanians: they flee by the boatload to Italy whenever possible, and have become Greece's primary cheap labour force. This is one of two European countries with a majority Muslim population but mosques are few and far between, and churches even more so. Under the 40-year rule of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, this became the world's only officially atheist state, and open displays of religious devotion are still almost unknown.
In the perpetual pointlessness of a Gjirokastra evening, I fantasise about being an advertising copywriter for a Tirana tourism agency. My biggest poster, just white words on a pitch-black background, would read: âVisit Albania, the Land of Absence. Whatever you're looking for, it isn't here.'
This town has 28 bar-restaurants (I had plenty of idle time for counting them) but none stays open after 6 pm. In this almost food-free zone, I eventually track down a
souvlaki
(but xenophobia cuts both ways and, rather than call it that, the Albanian shopkeeper insists it is a âhamburger'). Just as I am handing her a banknote that she indicates is much too large to change, a stranger steps forward and offers to help. Indicating I should wait a little distance away while the souvlaki-burger is prepared, he hails an old friend along the pavement and hurries over to embrace him. By the time my food is ready, the shopkeeper is demanding to be paid, and the âhelpful' stranger is nowhere to be seen. Welcome to Albania. (There is a happy coda to this: ten minutes later, the man is careless enough to be seen with friends at a coffee shop, and sheepishly returns the dosh.)
Outside the police station yesterday evening, I thought I'd stumbled across a scoop, with hundreds of men pushing against the compound gates and rattling them, police glowering from the inside. A popular uprising against government corruption, perhaps? No. A schoolteacher I met in the street who practised his English on meâonly after a reflexive look round to see if the coast was clearâexplained, âThey are all applying for exit visas. But first they must pass through several stages, and they want to go inside to pay corruption money to the police for another signature (on their forms). This one signature will cost them US$45.'
Assuming that, as a professional man, he might know these things, I asked him what the average monthly salary in Albania was. âUS$45,' he replied without pausing for breath. Unemployment, he continued, was a staggering 90 per cent.
DAY 418 (15 AUGUST): FIER
On the bus trip today to this 250 000-strong town, I was reminded yet again how one can travel to another time by travelling to another place, when I saw an old farmer with a grizzled weather-beaten face using a bullock to plough his land. Not since China many years ago have I seen such a sight.
In some parts of southern Albania, donkeys are still the most common form of road transportation. The communists banned all private ownership (of anything), so hardly anyone has been driving a motor for more than ten years, and it shows.
Women carry a heavy burden, too: some I saw bent double under hayricks two metres tall.
At the hotel where my presence has sullenly been tolerated (the paranoid society that Hoxha cultivated has not reverted to normal nearly 20 years after his death), I am getting used to the restaurant kitchen closing in the middle of the evening mealtime with the announcement that
everything
is off.
DAY 420 (17 AUGUST): FIER
Disaster strikes at one in the afternoon. Crime scene: Fier railway station. Motive: to steal whatever is in my blue backpack. Offence: to snatch said pack from the ground where I have placed it to assist those helping me up into the goods van to get a hand-hold on my chair.
Once on board, I know immediately the bag has been stolen and raise a hue and cry. A policeman on the spot disappears without trace. Heads protrude from every carriage. One passenger reports seeing a young man with a beard fleeing the scene. Quarter of an hour later, the police arrive in force.
The only silver lining to this dark cloud is that just a minute before boarding the train I transferred my passport from the backpack to my sports bag. That's safe and, with the nearest Australian embassies in faraway Athens and Belgrade, its presence halves my woes.
At the police station I'm presented with a form but refuse to make a statement until they get serious enough to find an English-speaker who can explain it to them. A legal interpreter is roused from his Saturday-afternoon slumber.
Then it's back to the Hotel Fieri, where the hard-nosed manager initially says the place is full (a blatant lie, room keys as thick as bedbug colonies cluster on the wall behind reception) but eventually relents under police pressure.
This evening I pass lonely and dejected in my room, not even bothering to go down to the restaurant to see what's off the menu.
DAY 421 (18 AUGUST): FIER
No word from the police for nearly 24 hours, but then the still unfriendly manager informs me upon my return from an hour's stroll in the town that two officers called to see me. Outside the police station, where I have to battle past yet another throng of locals desperate to depopulate the country, a paramilitary-looking type brandishing a sidearm hassles me until my case officer, Detective Sergeant Idris, appears.
In the office he tells me, âWe have good news.' The old heart leaps. âMy bag has been found?' A frown. He takes from his drawer my trusty camera (but seven rolls of film from Greece and southern Albania will never see the light of the darkroom now); my digital watch which prophetically gave up the ghost just a week before the disaster; and a bookmark (but not the book it was marking).
Enter Ilana, a redheaded devotee of the Albanian dreamâto live in Italy. She translates while Idris's superior, Commander Aslan, tells me the thief sold the camera illegally, which is how they tracked him down, but apparently failed to recognise my Sony shortwave radio for what it was and so left it in the haversack when he threw it into the toxic local canal.
âYour bag will flow down to the Adriatic,' young Ilana assures me, in the evident belief that somehow this will come as a consolation. Fier being 30 kilometres inland, I nod acceptance that one could not seriously expect scuba divers to recover it.
The small fortune of 3800 leka (A$50) that the accused found in the bag went on vodka which is why, when the police found him staggering beside the canal, he invited them to take him into custody rather than making a run for it. At this gap in the conversation, Idris and his squad usher in Lawrence Nika, 34, whom âwe have been working with'. Nika has a slight limp, which may be the result of the police âworking with' him, or maybe not.
I know this makes me sound like a bleeding-heart liberal but Nika is a pitiable figure. Criminal since fifteen, without education or friends, he is so pathetic that, while I really would like to feel angry, such a precious emotion would be wasted on him. My brain has seized on something in the way they introduced him, and won't let go. They said he was also known as Niko. I look straight at him and repeat the word. âNiko.' He grunts his recognition.
âMama, papa?'
âAthina.' My suspicion is confirmed.
âYou will be robbed!' the Ithaca restaurateur had warned me, backed up by a rousing Greek chorus. They were totally rightâbut what they didn't say was that it would be by someone of Greek parentage.
DAY 422 (19 AUGUST): FIER
My robbery has made today's main Albanian newspaper, delivered fresh from Tirana. In a column featuring a natty graphic design of an artist's impression of handcuffed wrists, my name is spelt right and Fier police are given great credit for what sounds like the rare coup of actually making an arrest.
The police now inform me there is more âgood news': those missing film rolls have been found. But, despite a personal plea to the Procurator's Officeâthe procurator was on his way to lunch, and waved me asideâthey cannot be returned to me until the ânecessary formalities' are observed. (As of the time of writing, they are yet to reach me.)
DAY 424 (21 AUGUST): TIRANA
Europopark, an Austrian-owned hotel, is the height of luxury in a capital conspicuously devoid of it. However, as I find from experience, the toilet-roll holder in the designated conveniences at Europopark repeatedly snaps from the wall and collapses to the floor at the slightest touch, giving a whole new meaning to the term âdisabled toilet'.
Predictably enough, a room at Europopark comes at a cost I'm not prepared to pay, but luckily one of the reception staff recommends I try the Stephen Center, an American-run Christian outreach coffee shop next to the main city market that has been known to rent out rooms. Normally I would be wary of placing myself in the hands of evangelists in a land that already has its own established religious creedsâeven if they were suppressed for 20 yearsâbut Albania is not Ithaca, and the thought of sleeping outside here is too ridiculous to contemplate.
DAY 426 (23 AUGUST): TIRANA
Tirana Zoo is the most depressing sight in these fifteen months of getting about Eurasia. This concrete jungle reeks of stale faeces. The first cell âhouses' a mangy grey wolf, the second a mangy grey owl. The dinginess is accentuated by an old drunk who totters along behind me, gibbering. A second mangy grey wolf, this one more like a Tasmanian thylacine, frantically paces back and forth along the four metres of concrete wall at the back of his cell. The pursuit must be as literally maddening for the wolf as it is distressing to the onlooker. He cannot get away, but I'm glad to.
DAY 427 (24 AUGUST): TIRANA
Today is my last chance to see what Albanians have made of Enver Hoxha's legacy. Unlike Brezhnev, this communist dictator didn't fake his wartime exploits but his heroic wartime resistance has long since been submerged in the public memory by his brutal repressiveness for 40 years after the war.
One way to summon up Hoxha's ghost is to visit the Genocide under the Communist Terror room at the National History Museum. The names of 5157 people killed by his regime are etched in stone here: another 30 383 are listed as persecuted.
MACEDONIA: 25 AUGUSTâ1 SEPTEMBER
DAY 430 (27 AUGUST): OHRID
Ohrid is landlocked Macedonia's apology for a seaside resort, so it gets quite giddy during the summer season when swarms of urban
arrivistes
descend on its tepid shore. Thankfully, I have arrived days too late for that frenzy and days too early for the international poetry festival, so pottering around town really is restful. After Albania, you need ârestful'.