Albania Border Crossing
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
63
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Sveti Naum / Albania Border,
Macedonia
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Another difference from Treskavec is that this monastery has its own hotel and restaurant. There are peacocks in the garden and the church has a small entry fee. It contains (some of) the bones of St. Kliment and those with sensitive ears say they can hear his heart beat in his tomb. I listened to my walkman too much, back in the day, and my ears weren't up to the task.
From the monastery it was difficult to tell exactly where the way to the border was. Two Albanian men pointed the way out. One realised that he could not communicate vocally and gestured. It was confusing; normally people talk and gesture, even if they know you can't understand. Vocalisation is a way to get emotions across, despite different vocabularies. We stood confused for a moment and then followed him, because he did have an air about him that suggested he knew what he was doing. He had a short cut. One of the two men had come to Albania to pick up the other, but he left his car on the other side of the border and walked across to pick up the other.
We left Macedonia without incident, and a few hundred meters along we came to the official border. There were two signs opposite one another. One said welcome to Shpqiri (Albania) and naturally the other said Welcome to Macedonia. They had both been shot through, from the Albanian side of the border! About the same time, we heard something that sounded a lot like thunder. But the day was sunny, 24 degrees, and cloudless. It had the ring of artillery to it. Welcome to Albania, indeed!
The Albanian customs personel took 10 Euros from each of us and let us in. Instead of catching a taxi, we had the stubborn idea of walking to the next town from where we could catch the bus to Tirana. It didn't look very far.
We walked along the road and a few hundred meters down, the fellow who gave us directions to the border control and his friend zoomed by in an older model mercedes. The road sloped downhill and it was an easy walk for at first. We passed old bunkers from the days of Enver Hoxa. Enver was the (extremely unpopular) president of Albania for the longer part of the Cold War and he had a bit of a paranoiac bent: he had 700,000 bunkers built in his country, just about everywhere, just in case war came. Hoxa wanted to be sure the bunkers were good so he made the guy who designed them (they were mass-produced) stand in one during a tank bombardment.
Thankfully for Albania, no civil war ever happened here. Communism in this country made life bad enough. They were Europe's poorist country for many years. Today the bunkers are a nuisance, being all over the place and in the way. More than a few point out over lake Ohrid and some of them were falling off their cliffs after years of neglect.
The rest of the countryside did not look much better off. We saw people working in fields without the help of heavy equiptment and the road was in dreadful condition, about five meters wide and consisted of ashphalt turning into mud. Most of the cars on the road were Merecedes, possibly as high as 75% from our unscientific survey of the cars we saw along the walk.
Some of the houses along the lake looked nice, either newly painted or erected. The beach front wasn't so welcoming, being covered in trash and the odd ruined bunker with rusty rebar poking out. A black limosine was parked in someone's driveway. It had New Jersey plates.
After about five kilometes of walking, a fellow driving by offered us a ride to the bus stop for four Euros. Since we realised that we didn't know exactly where the stop was, and that it was also pretty hot out, we accepted his offer and hopped in. He took us to a stop and presently a minibus came along. We hopped in and were driven to Tirana.
