Wee-Cheng gets dumped, kidnapped, and snatched in the mountain towns of Albania.
#48: Albania: Land of Teletubbie Bunkers; Surviving an Accident and What It Meant, Part II
27 July 2002
I travelled on yet another local bus to yet another old museum town of Berat, and from there to Fier, where I negotiated for a taxi to get to the Roman city of Apollonia. It was US$10 for a 45min journey and back through rather bad country roads full of potholes the size of bomb craters.
The classical site was no big deal but the surrounding countryside was gorgeous, spoiled only by the Hoxha regime’s massive vandalisation of Albania’s countryside through the building of 750,000 bunkers nationwide. Hoxha was paranoid of the prospect of an invasion by either the USA, UK, USSR and Yugoslavia, so he built concrete bunkers everywhere, especially along the coast. Most of the bunkers are simple igloo-like structures the size of a huge wheelbarrow, but there are also many big ones. In a bizarre way, many of these also resemble the atrocious abode of our more familiar teletubbie friends, whom I see more as a plague affecting TVs worldwide, Albania without exception.
Here on the coastal plains near Appolonia one even finds massive nuclear shelters – huge tunnel-like holes which can accommodate huge trucks and buses. The view is amazing if you stand on the hill in Apollonia and look at these strange bunkers and tunnels dotted across the land, right in this fertile agricultural countryside whose roadsides are dotted with mountains of water melons and vegetable vendors.
Gjirokastra was next. This is a beautiful town 6 hours by bus from Tirana, down at the deep southern end of the country. This is a region of dusty mountains and rugged slopes. Albania par excellence, the legendary land of ferocious tribes and honourable fighters. The epic land that captures the passion of Lord Byron, and many writers and poets. The mountains here are high, but not significantly taller than those found elsewhere in the Balkans. It was the vigorous tendency of the local tribes to defend their freedom that must have made these mountains seemed so much more formidable than they actually were. This is also the land of blood feuds, where a trivial disagreement sometimes lead to terrible cycles of vengeance in which one generation dies for the quarrels of another long past – many Albanian tribes are bound by a complex code of honour that requires them to avenge for deeds done on their ancestors by members of another clan.
Gjirokastra itself is a real museum town, perched on the side of a rugged mountain and crowned with a citadel. The Drinos flows through the valley beneath, with rough, barren mountains the other side of the valley.
After I was “dumped” by the bus off the highway at the lower town, I was promptly “kidnapped” by a taxi driver who wanted to drive me to the upper town, or Old City. Upon arrival at the square in the picturesque Old City up on the mountain slopes, I was then “snatched” by Mr Haxhi Kotoni, to his famous Kotoni B&B. I took a simple 10-euros room in his authentic traditional Albanian house – windowless on the ground floor, as such houses were built raised above the ground as mini-fortresses during the period of ancient blood feuds – with a wonderful view of the Old City and the Citadel. There was also a balcony where one can admire sunset and have a sip of great Turkish coffee. Look out for his visitors’ book – it is filled with wonderful testimonials from people the world over, though mostly international aid workers, diplomats and peacekeepers on R&R from Kosovo.
I decided to leave Albania by a direct coach to Ioannina, northern Greece. Well, an unfortunate accident occurred in which three people died in a car that crashed into my coach.
The car had appeared suddenly from a side road, and crashed into my massive travel coach like a paper against a brick wall. Even in the war-torn and supposedly dangerous Balkans, one forgets dangers because the momentum of living is too great, until like a cheetah sneaking behind and then jumping onto its targeted antelope one is immediately reminded of the ease with which life can be extinguished.
With the impact, the bus swayed across the highway, and then fell upright into a trench. A brief moment of shock and hesitation – brief images of exploding engines and a burning bus flashed across my mind – and then everyone scrambled off the bus. Then we discovered the car under the bus, totally flattened, with the driver’s head and left arm slumped outside the window, its occupants almost certainly dead.
A lady ahead of me simply sat in front of the bus and crushed car, wailing hysterically. I climbed out of the trench, my right foot scratched by some thorns as I struggled across the bushes. A sense of panic and hopelessness descended on me, like the dream of discovering that one was lost of an endless labyrinth of tunnels. For a few moments, I was deeply frightened of the road ahead. Fear has its own devious logic, a way of telling one that the clock could be turned back if one chooses the easier road.
I searched for the talisman of Guan Yin, a Buddhist deity, which was given to me by Mum on my first backpack trip abroad. There it was, in a side pocket of my day pack. I have never been religious, except to paychecks and the god of capitalism. But the moment I held the talisman tightly in my palm, I realised that I could not turn back, for my journey and its outcome should have nothing to do with this terrible accident. The journey had to go on, despite all.
And so I proceeded across the border to Greece. A short stay in the magical land of Meteora, where ancient monasteries graced the clear blue skies and strange rock formations. Then on to Athens where I continued to London. Here I am, on the threshold of the final phrase of my journey.
I am about to return home to Singapore, and I will do it the long way: via a three-month overland trip from London across Russia/Siberia, with side trips to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and then on to Mongolia, China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. More about that, in my next dispatch!