We arrived in Saranda yesterday
after a six-hour trip from Berat in a cramped furgon. It wasn’t the
most scenic of rides. The roads
are terrible, bridges are worse and the roadsides are covered with trash. Litter was everywhere even in the World
Heritage site at Berat. After our
driver added a liter of oil to the bus, he tossed the empty plastic container
on the ground.
During the communist days littering
was banned and there was a massive recycling program. Now the people say, “I am free. Look at what I can do!” as they dump trash by the truckload
along the roads and into the streams.
Albania isn’t an easy place to like.
Hotel Grand is one of scores of
hotels in Saranda, just a long swim across the Ionian Sea from the Greek island
of Corfu. During his communist
reign, Enver Hoxha, “Comrade-Chairman-Prime Minister-Minister of War-Commander
in Chief of the People’s Army,” commissioned the building of 60,000 (some say
700,000) concrete mushroom-shaped bunkers around the country as a defense against foreign
invasions. He also had barbed wire
fences erected along the shoreline to keep his people from attempting to swim
to freedom.
Fatimir, the taxi driver, picked us
up at nine in his old Mercedes, one of the thousands stolen in Western Europe
and smuggled down the coast – a lucrative business in the 90s when there were
only 2000 cars in all of Albania.
He probably overcharged us for the trip from Saranda to Butrint National
Park but it was still cheaper than renting a car. Not only is Butrint a national park, it is a World Heritage
site and is endowed by Lord Rothschild’s Butrint Foundation. Apparently it is this triple-protection
that keeps the site in its pristine condition today. Butrint was a Greco-Roman city set in a humid, almost
tropical forest that reminded us of Tikal in Guatemala or Cambodia’s
Angkor. We had the ruins entirely
to ourselves – the mosquitoes, and us that is. There wasn’t much we hadn’t seen before but it is nice to
know that the flooded site is being preserved. And it is the only liter-free place we have seen in the
entire country!
Most tourists arrive in Albania from
Corfu, get their passports stamped, spend a day or two and depart, having seen
the best that Albania has to offer.
We, on the other hand, traveled the length of the country to see
Butrint. Along the way we have
seen the worst of Albania. But we
have also met many wonderful people, the true measure of any country.
