31st of March, 2010. Gjirokaster, southern Albania.
Right now from where I'm sitting astride the high stone wall of Kalaja e Gjirokastrës (Gjirokaster Castle), my view is nothing short of spectacular. I'm looking north along the wide Drino river valley hundreds of metres below me, the sun is slowly descending behind the Gjerë mountains to my left and is casting a golden glow over the snow-covered mountain peaks to my right on the opposite side of the valley.
Somewhere off in the distance, cowbells are clanging, sheep are bleating, and a group of children are laughing and calling to one another on their way home. A little further down the hillside, a plume of smoke is rising from a wooden shack, and if I closed my eyes, I would swear that I was standing outside the restaurant I was at in Tirana a few nights ago - whatever is being cooked on that open wood fire smells absolutely divine.
A spectacular view.
Gjirokaster is small - a lot smaller than I expected. Well, that's not entirely true. I hardly expected a thriving metropolis in the quiet hills of southern Albania. One feature that cannot be disputed is its unique topography.
While the tourists come for the picturesque old town, the majority of the 43,000 inhabitants live downtown in the modern lower area. In Gjirokaster, going downtown literally means travelling a good few kilometres down. The city is built into the steep sloping valley wall, and the old town is not only significantly smaller than the newer part, but also about 200 metres higher. The bitumen streets leading up from the petrol stations, schools and supermarkets of modern Gjirokaster are relatively flat for the first 100m in from the main highway running along the river, but the further you venture, the steeper the streets become, and the next few kilometres are uphill all the way, the gradient nearing 40degrees at times, until the bitumen turns to cobblestone and you reach the grey slate buildings of UNESCO World Heritage listed Gjirokaster. Here, rather than continue straight up the slope, most of the streets follow the contours of the mountain like waves, gently rising and falling every fifty or so metres. The only way you can continue your journey up the mountainside is on foot, using the steep old stone staircases, or by winding around for a kilometre in one direction, slowing to a crawl for a hairpin turn, then doubling back on yourself on a road running parallel to the first but about ten metres higher.
I very quickly realised that the 2EUR for the fifteen minute taxi ride to my hostel in the old town was definitely a good investment. In most places, especially smaller towns and villages, I rely on my feet to get me around, but the topography of Gjirokaster doesn't exactly lend itself to exploring the town on foot. I'd considered wandering down through the streets to the lower part earlier this evening, but since I only have one night here, I instead chose to stay up here in the ancient Minas Tirith-esque grey cobblestone old town and just enjoy the view.
Settlement in Gjirokaster has been traced back to ancient Greece - the name Gjirokaster comes from the Greek argyro (silver) and kastro (castle) - but there's nothing left now of anything from that time. The oldest remnants of Gjirokaster's history are the city walls I'm sitting on, which date back to the 3rd century AD. The majority of the old town isn't actually all that old, having been constructed in the 17th and 18th centuries when the area was under Ottoman rule - its status as a "rare example of a well-preserved Ottoman town" is what earned its UNESCO recognition in 2005.
Although I don't like to think about it, there's only one more stop left on this trip before I go back to Skopje to catch the flight north to Germany, which means leaving these quaint stone towns and the rural atmosphere behind until I next venture into the Balkans.
This trip has been so different to the other two though - to my Magical Mystery Tour around the Balkans in July and August 2007, and the Estonia/Latvia trip for Easter 2009. Maybe it's because Albania's tourism industry is relatively underdeveloped, in comparison to the rest of the Balkans, and especially in comparison to the rest of Europe. Maybe it's because travelling in off-season means I've had private rooms or the only occupied bunk in an entire hostel, and the owners at my beck and call, for most of the trip. Or maybe it's because Albania, unlike many of the other Balkan countries, was never part of Yugoslavia: Albania remained an ally of the USSR, but retained its independence. I don't know.
What I do know is that I absolutely love this country. I could quite happily spend another few weeks travelling around here - and would, if I didn't have this pesky thing called "work" calling me back to Berlin. In its own way, Albania is so incredibly beautiful. Maybe in the north it's different, but the south at least, Albania seems like it may be the Balkans as it once was, or even the Adriatic Coast as it once was - a few hotels here and there in the larger towns, but for the most part small fishing villages every few kilometres along white sandy beaches; further inland, jagged mountain peaks, sweeping valleys and isolated shacks dotted along the winding roads. As I said, I would love to accidentally on purpose forget about my flight home and roam around here awhile longer.
But watching Albania and its people and landscape from the window of a bus, or listening to roosters crow, sheep bleat and cowbells clang from up here on the fortress wall, I can't help thinking that while it's a beautiful country, I'm amazed that a country like Albania can still exist within the borders of today's Europe.
Life here must be so incredibly hard. I can see it on the faces of the people who live here. The people I see walking down the street, the men and women in the shops and marketplaces. The kids riding around dusty villages and along dirty littered city back lanes, stains all over their worn hand-me-down clothes, looking at me and my camera like I'm from outer space. Although being a female who most definitely is neither local nor married tends to raise some eyebrows around here anyway.
I've spoken to a couple of locals here in the last few days - Burim the young bus driver in Prizren whose German was better than his English, Miri the student from Korca who insisted he pay for my bus fare in Tirana and accompany me to within sight of the cable car station I was looking for, the taxi driver in Tirana who lived in London for a few years to earn money to send back to his family here, and the guide in the bus down from Tirana whose name I still can't remember who redefined hospitality. Coincidentally, all males. The majority of locals on the streets in Albania are males, or females in the company of males. From what I've read and been told, this is apparently partly due to the dominance of Islam in Albania. Either way, it makes me stand out like a sore thumb.
But aside from that, all of them told me a very similar story. Every single one of them was either working as many hours as they could physically handle in whatever job they had managed to find to get themselves and their family out of Albania, had worked outside Albania for several years and sent money back to their families, or like Burim, were dreaming of leaving Albania to follow their families who had already managed to leave, but unfortunately were themselves years of work away from getting their hands on the paperwork they needed to join them, much less the money to pay for the travel.
Writing that and rereading it, I realise how strange it sounds - to say that life in Albania is hard, when the two books I've read on this trip are set in much more challenging conditions. One is "The Poisonwood Bible", set in the Congolese jungle in the 1950s, the other is "A Thousand Splendid Suns", set in 1960s Kabul.
I think the difference here is that both of those locations - Congo and Afghanistan - are almost synonymous with some of the most horrible living conditions you could think of. Poverty. Famine. Civil war. Drought.
Albania's not quite in the same league as Africa or Afghanistan, but it's definitely well below the living standards you'd expect from most countries in Europe. Ramshackle houses, grotty little kids roaming the streets and toothless old men and women selling their wares in the marketplaces are something you could well expect to be confronted with in various African countries. It goes with the territory.
You don't expect to see that in Europe. If I turn around and look south from my vantage point on the citadel wall, about twenty kilometres in the distance is the Greek border. Greece - a member of the EU, of the Eurozone, of Schengen. If I turn to look directly west into the Gjerë mountains, my back to the valley, the other side of those mountains is the Adriatic Coast; 60km west of the Albanian beach is the south-eastern tip of the Italian mainland. EU. Eurozone. Schengen.
Travelling around the country, every so often I feel so sad that living conditions like this exist within the borders of the European Union. And every single time, I wish there was something I could do - anything - to help these people and their country. But short of what I'm already doing in supporting their local tourist industry and enthusiastically recommending other like-minded backpackers or explorers to do the same, there's not a whole lot I can do.
Apparently Albania applied for EU membership last year. Travelling around here, I can't envisage that happening in the next ten years. Maybe one day though.
And here's where I pass the baton to you. Take the plunge and venture to somewhere off the beaten track. France and Spain and Portugal are always going to be there. Scandinavia and Austria and Italy won't change all that dramatically in the next ten years. But Albania - I don't know how long this sense of having travelled back in time will linger once it gets out that Albania is worth the adventure. So don't just take my word for it. If you're in Europe and are even mildly interested in seeing first-hand what I've just described, including the magnificent view from up here on the stone wall of Kalaja e Gjirokastrës, explore the Balkans on your next holiday. Albania. Bosnia. Macedonia. Ok, Croatia and Slovenia if you're not quite as adventurous and insatiably curious as me. But go there, and go soon. Explore, relax, escape. Support the local tourism industry, spread the word, and help the Albanian and Balkan economies get on their feet.
Notes From The Road: Liberty Street & Church Street, NY 10006
26th of July, 2010. Lower Manhattan, New York City.
There are some places on this beautiful planet of ours that are quite simply breathtaking. They're rare, and they encompass all landscapes, climates, countries and continents, but the one thing they have in common is that they are awesome. Not awesome as it is commonly used today by anyone under thirty as a synonym for cool. Awesome as in commands the visitor to stand before it in awe. They demand respect. They literally take your breath away.
Most of them are breathtakingly beautiful. They inspire writers to wax lyrical over colour hues, artists to spend hours at the site with oils and watercolours and tourists to take cheesy snapshots of themselves with said wonder in the background - just to prove to family and friends back home that they were there.
This place is breathtaking, but it is not beautiful. There are no painters here. The writers write, but their stories are of tragedy and death, chaos and destruction, tears, lost loved ones and fallen heroes. Even the tourists don't linger - they come, they wander awhile, trying to imagine what used to be here. They take a few photos of what remains, then they leave the shadows and windswept emptiness in favour of sunshine and light.
Behind me is the Cortland Street subway station. In front of me is an immense construction site. Ten years ago, it looked very different. There used to be five tall office buildings and two immense skyscrapers here. Together, the seven buildings were known as the World Trade Center, the heart of the New York Financial District.
The eleventh of September, 2001, changed all that.
Ground Zero - actually being here - is strange. Like the other tourists visiting New York for the first time, I too am trying to imagine that this huge crater in lower Manhattan was once occupied by two of the tallest buildings ever built, and am finding it a little difficult, to say the least. Some guy flogging an A4 photo book with "Tragedy 9/11" scrawled in red across the cover told me as part of his sales pitch that if you want to get a sense of scale here, double the height of the tallest remaining building in the area, and you're getting close to the height of one of the twin towers.
You can't see much of the site - well, of the ground anyway. All that's visible are the umpteen cranes, each with the stars and stripes proudly, resolutely, defiantly fluttering in the breeze from the topmost point. The two-metre cyclone fencing barricading the area is completely covered with a long plastic banner advertising the visitors' centre, which I had no intention of visiting.
I remember waking up the morning of the 12th of September in Australia - it happened at about 11pm local time in Melbourne. A Tuesday. I watched Rove, then turned the TV off before Sandra Sully's face popped up on screen with the late night news so I could get some sleep and make it to my Italian class at 9am the following morning. My mum woke me up long before my alarm though - she said something, a strange look on her face, then turned the TV on in my room. Like so many people, I thought at first it was a new action movie, then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and the footage of the second plane. The coverage had been going all night, and there was no escaping it during the next few hours, days, weeks and months.
That was more than enough opportunity to hear all I ever wanted or needed to know about what happened. Not only does the visitors centre have a photo display and various other informative resources, but they also coordinate guided tours of the site run by volunteers - living victims: people who experienced it firsthand, or who lost their partner, sibling, parent or child that day. There was no way I was going to do that. I wanted to visit Ground Zero, to see the area, see what's left, try to imagine what used to be there. Then I wanted to leave the area and not return. If I wanted to know more from someone who was there, I could listen to one of the hundreds of interviews, read one of the many written accounts or watch one of the several documentaries or feature films. To see the look on someone's face as they talk about their memories of the buildings coming down around them, or as they remembered someone they lost that day, someone they dearly loved and sorely miss... I couldn't do it.
So I didn't. I sat on the steps outside one of the buildings around the outside. For an hour or so. I just sat there, thinking, writing, remembering, imagining. At one point, a fire engine roared past, sirens blaring, lights flashing, and a spectacular American flag emblazoned all the way down the side. I took a deep breath. Listened to the sirens fade into the noise of the city. Then I left.
If you happen to be in New York and can handle an intensely negative experience, go down there. Walk around. See the memorials. Pay your respects. Experience the site. It's worth a visit. But I won't go back.
There are some places on this beautiful planet of ours that are quite simply breathtaking. They're rare, and they encompass all landscapes, climates, countries and continents, but the one thing they have in common is that they are awesome. Not awesome as it is commonly used today by anyone under thirty as a synonym for cool. Awesome as in commands the visitor to stand before it in awe. They demand respect. They literally take your breath away.
Most of them are breathtakingly beautiful. They inspire writers to wax lyrical over colour hues, artists to spend hours at the site with oils and watercolours and tourists to take cheesy snapshots of themselves with said wonder in the background - just to prove to family and friends back home that they were there.
This place is breathtaking, but it is not beautiful. There are no painters here. The writers write, but their stories are of tragedy and death, chaos and destruction, tears, lost loved ones and fallen heroes. Even the tourists don't linger - they come, they wander awhile, trying to imagine what used to be here. They take a few photos of what remains, then they leave the shadows and windswept emptiness in favour of sunshine and light.
Behind me is the Cortland Street subway station. In front of me is an immense construction site. Ten years ago, it looked very different. There used to be five tall office buildings and two immense skyscrapers here. Together, the seven buildings were known as the World Trade Center, the heart of the New York Financial District.
The eleventh of September, 2001, changed all that.
Ground Zero - actually being here - is strange. Like the other tourists visiting New York for the first time, I too am trying to imagine that this huge crater in lower Manhattan was once occupied by two of the tallest buildings ever built, and am finding it a little difficult, to say the least. Some guy flogging an A4 photo book with "Tragedy 9/11" scrawled in red across the cover told me as part of his sales pitch that if you want to get a sense of scale here, double the height of the tallest remaining building in the area, and you're getting close to the height of one of the twin towers.
You can't see much of the site - well, of the ground anyway. All that's visible are the umpteen cranes, each with the stars and stripes proudly, resolutely, defiantly fluttering in the breeze from the topmost point. The two-metre cyclone fencing barricading the area is completely covered with a long plastic banner advertising the visitors' centre, which I had no intention of visiting.
I remember waking up the morning of the 12th of September in Australia - it happened at about 11pm local time in Melbourne. A Tuesday. I watched Rove, then turned the TV off before Sandra Sully's face popped up on screen with the late night news so I could get some sleep and make it to my Italian class at 9am the following morning. My mum woke me up long before my alarm though - she said something, a strange look on her face, then turned the TV on in my room. Like so many people, I thought at first it was a new action movie, then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and the footage of the second plane. The coverage had been going all night, and there was no escaping it during the next few hours, days, weeks and months.
That was more than enough opportunity to hear all I ever wanted or needed to know about what happened. Not only does the visitors centre have a photo display and various other informative resources, but they also coordinate guided tours of the site run by volunteers - living victims: people who experienced it firsthand, or who lost their partner, sibling, parent or child that day. There was no way I was going to do that. I wanted to visit Ground Zero, to see the area, see what's left, try to imagine what used to be there. Then I wanted to leave the area and not return. If I wanted to know more from someone who was there, I could listen to one of the hundreds of interviews, read one of the many written accounts or watch one of the several documentaries or feature films. To see the look on someone's face as they talk about their memories of the buildings coming down around them, or as they remembered someone they lost that day, someone they dearly loved and sorely miss... I couldn't do it.
So I didn't. I sat on the steps outside one of the buildings around the outside. For an hour or so. I just sat there, thinking, writing, remembering, imagining. At one point, a fire engine roared past, sirens blaring, lights flashing, and a spectacular American flag emblazoned all the way down the side. I took a deep breath. Listened to the sirens fade into the noise of the city. Then I left.
If you happen to be in New York and can handle an intensely negative experience, go down there. Walk around. See the memorials. Pay your respects. Experience the site. It's worth a visit. But I won't go back.
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