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On the Road in Albania - Bring out the Fried Goat Entrails!

Staring across the sparkling waters of lovely Lake Ohrid to the mysterious mountains on the Albanian shore, blood feuds and Kalashnikov rifle barrels were the upper-most images I held in my mind. The country has long had a reputation for being on the brink of beyond, a black hole on the map of Europe that is little-known except for the strong whiff of negative stereotypes. It certainly didn't help that we'd heard all the horror stories from the local Macedonians back in Ohrid. No buses or trains ran over this part of the border; the only way in was to walk, carrying your bags with you. The border point sits on a beautiful mountainous stretch of coastline along the side of the lake that is shared by the Albanians and Macedonians; old bunker emplacements from the days of dictator Enver Hoxha were visible among the trees clinging to the hilltops on the Albanian side. A quick stamp in the passport and we were in, no chaos of surging crowds or fast-talking fake goods hawkers like I'd expected at such a border post. We were casually approached by one ageing taxi driver who was parked just past the border gate; he tossed aside his cigarette, cracked a smile full of yellow teeth and addressed us in Albanian at a rapid clip. He offered to take us to the nearest village, or if we were willing, all the way to the capital, Tirana. A friendly Finnish couple who had also just crossed the border agreed to share the taxi fare straight to Tirana with me. The motor-mouth driver offered to take us there for about five Euros each, which seemed remarkable given that it was a four hour trip. His car was a rusty old Mercedes, a common sight on the country's roads; supposedly the import of stolen cars from Germany was a major part of the economy back in the 90's. We agreed to the deal, holding up our fingers to show him the amount we were willing to pay. He loaded our bags into the back, we got all four doors tightly closed, and we were off like a jet airplane heading down the runway. With the gas pedal mashed to the floor and dangling a cigarette out the window, our new friend Alek talked away at us in a steady stream of Albanian for much of the trip, it didn't seem to bother him that we couldn't respond with more than shiny smiles. When he eventually tired of trying to make us understand his views on global politics, he called someone up on his mobile phone so he could carry on with a more receptive listener. He kept stabbing his cigarette like a pointer to show us passing points of interest, like hundreds of spherical concrete bunkers embedded into a hillside, bony skeletons left in the desert. There were amazing numbers of them, sometimes hundreds grouped together in complex geometric patterns across the dry, rolling hillsides. They were envisioned by Hoxha as the first line of defence for the isolationist nation if it were ever to come under attack. Every able-bodied male was given a Kalashnikov and was expected to jump bravely into his assigned bunker when the time came. This has led to the rather alarming statistic that nowadays every third person in the country owns a Kalashnikov; it has also presented a problem for modern Albanians who have bunkers present on their land - they are almost impossible to destroy, and are now considered a general nuisance. Some of the larger ones have been converted into homes, but most sit marooned and forgotten as eyesores in every corner of the country, from flat farm fields to craggy mountain passes. Alek was particularly keen to show off the giant grey steelworks in the soot-covered city of Elbasan, as it turned out to be his hometown. We got out at the side of the road on a barren hilltop above the steelmills for photos and a breath of something like air. Most of the trip involved climbing up one side of a mountain, and then descending down onto the plains on the other side. Alek had a habit of overtaking scrap metal-filled trucks and horsecarts full of hay on blind corners at high speed; he seemed to know what he was doing, so we only shouted out at him when certain death seemed particularly imminent. We arrived in Tirana in good time, entering the city through the outer districts of thrown together makeshift houses, most with a tin roof, fibre-board wooden walls, and a dirt floor. Apparently the city's population has tripled since the end of socialist times (to 700 000) and illegal housing developments have mushroomed around the capital. The roads were sometimes more akin to obstacle courses, and Alek spent as much time driving on the sandy shoulders as in the lanes. When we reached the city centre, the buildings were of a more permanent nature, but the roads remained much the same. He took us right through the main square of the city, a huge plaza with a giant Albanian flag flying and a triumphant statue of Skanderbeg, the national hero who led a revolt against Turkish invaders. A huge socialist-realist painting depicting the proud 2000-year history of the Albanian people stood out on the front of a museum. We couldn't find our hostel at first, since there are basically no street signs or house numbers in Albania (apparently they were all ripped down and sold as scrap metal in the crisis days of the 1990's). The central square and the main boulevard in Tirana were the only places with signs in place that we could see; the boulevard is named George W. Bush boulevard, named in his honour after he visited the city in 2007; Kosovar Albanians have a soft spot for Americans as well, there were large building-sized pictures of Bill Clinton there to remember his help in ending the conflict against the Serbs in 1999. Eventually we found the hostel with the help of a guidebook map and the local knowledge of Alek, who somehow knew all the names of the dusty streets even without any visible signs. We got out and saluted Alek and paid him our fare, with a good tip. He gave a spirited wave with his mobile clamped to his ear and drove off on the return journey to his home in Elbasan. We wondered how often he made this sort of trip with foreign travellers, and if it could be a daily event in the summer season for him, this trip half-way across the country and back again.

The following afternoon, having mastered the Albanian phrase for "I want to go to..." in the Tirana bus terminal, I found myself in the small town of Kruja, perched on a mountain north of Tirana (it was the castle stronghold of the hero Skanderbeg in his fight against the Turkish hordes). I wanted to spend the afternoon walking the beaches in Durres, and needed to go by Furgon, the local word for a minibus. Driving down the mountainside in a fully-packed Furgon, holding on to the seat for stability, I got into a sign-language conversation with one of the passengers sitting next to me. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Albania, and many people would try to communicate with me, usually without using any spoken language (Italian is the one foreign language most Albanians learn, due to the huge numbers who go to work in Italy). He was a blurry-eyed security-guard who sometimes protected the Albanian president, he was doing his best to tell me. I didn't believe him at first, he seemed to be making drunken boasts, so he took out his security badge for the Albanian parliament to show me. It had a boyish image of him next to a picture of the parliament in Tirana. Then from his belt he pulled out a gun (!) and proceeded to aim it out the window of the minibus in full-on James Bond style, for my viewing benefit. He then shoved it recklessly back into his belt loop, and went on to tell me about his cousin in Toronto like nothing had happened. I was rather relieved when he vigorously shook my hand and got out in the next village; the last I saw of the Albanian 007 he was headed for the local pub, in search of a martini I suppose.

On my last evening in Tirana, I wanted to try some traditional Albanian food, as few restaurants offered it. Heading out into the streets with the Finnish couple, we followed the directions we'd been given by the hostel folks until we stumbled over it down a side-lane. In the low-lit restaurant we sat on padded benches slung around a large round table. Our waiter, who turned out to be the owner and one of the country's most celebrated film directors, spoke to us in Italian as he hoped we might understand him better. He didn't bother us with the menus, but promised to bring a proper Albanian feast. He brought a steady stream of hard-to-identify dishes to our table. The highlights of the meal (and I wasn't informed of exactly what we had eaten until it was too late) included boiled sheep's heart (rather rubbery, I didn't like it), and roasted goat intestines on a skewer (which I did like actually, until I heard what they were). We left feeling that we had properly experienced Albanian cuisine, certainly not a meal I would like to have every night, but a wonderful change from the ordinary!

A Memorable Evening with the Russian Border Police

Crossing borders in the former Soviet States is usually unpleasant and time-consuming; being woken on a train in the early hours of the morning by grumpy guards and snarling dogs is the norm. During the time I worked in Russia I got used to the procedure, and had all my visa paperwork and residency documents properly prepared, with additional photocopies of each to hand over if needed. During a trip to the Baltic states I got into quite a conundrum due to the constantly changing working visa regime and the Russian/Belarusian open border agreement. It's a story involving travelling illegally across Belarus, bribing sleazy border guards, and spending most of the night locked in a jail cell at a Russian border post. It is truly one of the craziest experiences I've had while travelling.

I booked a train ticket from Moscow to Vilnius after being assured by a travel agent and a major travel website that the train would not pass through Belarus, but would take a northern route through Latvia instead. I boarded the train in the evening, expecting to arrive in Vilnius in the morning. I awoke in my bunk in the middle of the night and happened to pull up the shade and look out the window; imagine my horror when I saw a platform sign for Minsk station! As there is no border control between Russia and Belarus, the train had continued across the border in the night. I was in rather a difficult situation of course, as I had entered Belarus without a Belarusian transit or tourist Visa. A few hours later the train arrived at the Lithuanian border, and the Belarusian border guards came on the train. They took a quick look at my passport and said 'problem'. They led me down the train corridor and put me in the little room used by the conductor. Finally a guard came in who spoke passable English, and he informed me that I had broken Belarusian law, and that he should take me off the train and detain me. Then he said that if I would be so good as to hand over 100 dollars in cash, he would look the other way and forget about the whole thing. What could I do? Being arrested in Belarus was not something I really fancied, so I had to pay him the bribe. It all felt rather unclean, but I handed him the money, he shook my hand and sent me back to my carriage. I then continued safely across the border into Lithuania, happy to be on EU territory. However, this meant I had no Belarusian stamps in my passport, and no exit stamps from Russia in my passport or on my working visa papers. I wasn't sure what difficulties this might cause when I went to re-enter Russia again.
When I did reach the Russian border again, eleven days later on a Tallinn to Moscow train at about ten in the evening, the Russian borderguards took a glance at my passport and immediately started asking me where my most recent Russian exit stamp was, and about many other exit stamps as well. Sweat started flowing. They took my passport off the train to check with their superiors. The minutes were ticking past, and the train was due to leave shortly, when I saw through the window the borderguard coming back flanked by two uniformed soldiers. I had a gut feeling that I knew who it was they were coming for. They came to my carriage and told me that I needed to collect my things and come with them. I took my bag down from the overhead bin and we got off the train, which then pulled away from the station and disappeared into the night leaving the four of us standing on the platform. The borderguard spoke English at about Elementary level, and he said 'come', and he took me into the border patrol station, a concrete block sitting in the darkness. I decided from the start not to speak any Russian to them whatsoever, as it would give them too large of an advantage in negotiating, so they had to make the effort to speak English to me. I was taken up the stairs to a long hallway with many unmarked doors, and the guard opened one of them and led me inside. The room was divided into two parts, one half containing an old wooden desk and a metal chair, and the other half was a cell with white-painted bars. An iron-frame bed with a stained, ratty old mattress sat in one corner of the cell, and a pile of rough military-issue sheets and blankets sat on the chair. The guard asked me to sit in the chair while he opened my bags and spread out all of my things on the desktop; my dirty travelling clothes and dog-eared books were thoroughly inspected for whatever it was he hoped to find; finally satisfied that he hadn't found any incriminating evidence among my socks, he shoved everything back inside.
Two more guards entered the room, one of them most certainly the boss, who started asking me questions rapidly in Russian. I made it clear that I didn’t understand him at all (which wasn’t far from the truth anyway) and one of the younger guards painstakingly tried to translate his questions into elementary English. I was asked about every detail of my time in Russia, if I was there for spying or terrorist activities, even if the name given in my passport was really my name, or if I held Belarusian citizenship. They found faults in my working visa papers, such as that my attached identification photographs were several millimetres too large, and were cut with uneven borders. Pointing out to them that they had been cut that way by the person in the visa department in a Moscow government office didn't seem to help matters. Because of the kind of working visa I had, I needed to renew the validity of the document every four months. Every time that happened, they gave me a new visa page, and took away the old one. Unfortunately the old visa papers are where border guards usually put entry and exit stamps, and without the old visa paper it looked (to them, at least) like I had been repeatedly leaving Russia without getting any exit stamps. That I did get the stamps, and that they were on my old visa document then sitting in a file in a Moscow registration office seemed to be a concept they couldn’t believe. Neither could I, but I also couldn’t believe that the foreigner registration laws could be applied so inconsistently and that nobody in the little room, aside from me, really seemed to know what the latest laws on the issue were. I had been warned that legislation changes made in Moscow sometimes took quite some time to trickle down to the provinces, and here it was slapping me in the face.
I also had to explain to them the small matter of my Belarusian border crossing, something that was not easy to do in elementary English. At one point I found myself teaching them English words to make myself understood, such as repeating 'today, I think', followed by 'yesterday, I thought', so I could tell them using the past tense 'I thought the train didn't go through Belarus'. During all of this the boss continued to stare at me with great suspicion while this was translated back to him by his interpreting guard. The other two were younger and much more relaxed, they seemed like new recruits who were still learning the ropes and hadn’t developed an appropriately menacing stance towards incarcerated prisoners yet.
At about three in the morning they managed to contact the 24 hour emergency number my school had for teachers, and spoke to a very sleepy visa manager to verify the identity of the Geoff Brown person they were holding, 'if that WAS his real name'. I finally had them convinced I posed no threat to Russian national security by about 4 o’clock, so they begrudgingly stamped all my documents, made me sign a statement that I had not done anything illegal when crossing borders, and admonished me never to cross the border without getting a proper passport stamp.

Staggering out into the night, they put me in a taxi to go and find the one hotel in the little bordertown of Ivangorod. The driver dumped me and my luggage out on the pavement and drove off in the darkness, leaving me in front of another concrete block with no lights visible. I wasn't sure it was a hotel at all, but I went up and tried the door handle, and it swung open easily. I climbed the stairs to the lobby carefully in the dark, and managed to wake up an old woman who worked there. We did our best to understand each other and to fill in the check-in form. I wasn’t sure what information some of the spaces on the form were requesting, so in the end she threw up her hands and accepted it half-finished. She handed me a key, and I climbed the stairs, still in the dark, to find my room at the end of the corridor. I was holding out a desperate hope that the key would open the door easily, something that is usually not the case with older Russian locks. I breathed a sigh of relief as it turned easily, and I walked in and shut the door with relief. Finally I had a room, and I collapsed onto the narrow creaky bed and was almost instantly asleep.

I slept soundly for four hours... until I was awoken by a brass band playing outside my window. It was victory in World war II day, and the band were playing on the town square as part of a parade. 'Welcome back to mother Russia' was my uppermost thought. It was impossible to sleep after that, so I got up and tried to take stock of the situation. I knew I would have to spend the rest of the day in the town waiting for the next Tallinn to Moscow train to come through late that evening, and had no idea what I would do with myself for the next eleven hours.

To pass the time, I visited an old cemetery near the border, on a hilltop covered with thick forest. Among the trees were thousands of graves, many of which were neglected and overgrown with bushes and weeds. The grave plots were marked out by painted metal fences that encircled each site; often a bench was placed inside the fence where relatives could come to sit and visit with their ancestors. I saw a family of parents and children sitting at a grave, making an afternoon visit to a loved one. Some graves had small metal platforms where relatives could leave offerings for the deceased - biscuits, painted eggs, prayer candles, rice poured in the shape of a cross, and cups of water were all common offerings that had been left by the Orthodox faithful. Most of the older graves were marked with metal Orthodox crosses, often with a picture of the person affixed. During the Soviet period, members of the Communist party were buried with rectangular headstones of carved granite or metal, with red metal stars crowning the monuments. Many of the stars have been removed or cut off since the fall of socialism in 1991, either by relatives or vandals, leaving a thin metal spike in the place where the star was once attached. Only a few stars remain there in Ivangorod, on the older, untended graves, with the red paint now flecked and peeling off. The whole cemetery gave that impression, in a state of slow decay and returning to the natural state of the forest it sat in. It seemed that there were far more people slumbering in their grass-covered graves on the hill than living in the sleepy town below, leading me to believe that many young people had left the region to seek a better life elsewhere, leaving their ancestor’s graves to sit quietly in the forest, patiently awaiting their return.

That evening, I walked back along the road I had traveled the night before by taxi to reach the train station. It was a surprisingly new building with a fresh coat of paint, certainly the newest in the town, probably to keep up appearances for the benefit of the majority of train passengers who would never do more than glance out the window here at the border. I sat in the empty waiting room as the light grew long in the fields across the tracks. The train was late by over an hour, and it was after eleven before the train pulled in and I saw the border guards go out to do their duty. The guards had put a stamp on my train ticket that would allow me to take the train without needing to buy a new ticket. When I finally went to board the train, the conductor glanced at my ticket and said 'nyet', while trying to wave me away. Imagine my state of frustration. At that moment, one of the border guards I knew (I'm on a first-name basis with five or six of them) passed by, and I got him to explain the situation, and the conductor was forced to let me on. However, my ticket was for a sleeping carriage, but since all the sleeping carriages were full, the conductor gave me a seat to sit on for the twelve-hour overnight trip. She really didn't like me or my ticket, so she gave me the seat next to the bathroom, rather smelly on a Russian train, and noisy, since people were going in and out of it all through the night. The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, with the chorus of Moscow's theme song playing over the loudspeakers - 'Moscow, greatest in all Russia'. Welcome home, indeed.