My head lolls out the window of the black passenger van whisking our group of 15 cyclists back to Tirana, the capital of Albania.
At the moment they are staring at the back of my head in surprise and horror because without warning I painted the passenger side of the van with the insides of my stomach at highway speed.
Fortunately, after two weeks cycling around this strange, little-known Balkan country, while not sure what to expect next, they are ready for anything.
This turns out to be a pretty good metaphor: Welcome to Albania.
We are exploring Albania in a big, clockwise circle that begins on the western shore of Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest, deepest lakes in Europe, and the border with North Macedonia, which turns out to be a country that I don’t remember from high school geography class. Admittedly, that was last century, but it’s still disconcerting to have lost track of an entire nation. (Eventually I learn the Republic of North Macedonia was part of the old Yugoslavia, and was only officially named as such in 2019, after 30 years arguing with Greece).
But this sort of thing is just the beginning of a trip full of the unexpected.
The scenery is very much worth the low price of admission: big mountains and wide valleys with steep hills covered in Jerusalem pine, olive trees, and vineyards. I mean it about the low price of admission. This is not nearby Croatia or Italy across the water, where everything is geared to what tourists are willing to spend. Meals here cost eight to twenty Canadian dollars, half what you will spend in Dubrovnik or Venice.
The weather is lovely: warm and dry except when it is not, such as mornings when you forget to pack your rain gear. Albania is a small country in a hot part of the Mediterranean, but local weather is more influenced by altitude than anything else. The lowlands have mild winters, averaging about 8 C with lots of rain. Mountainous regions have many snow days. Summer is hot; temperatures average 33 C and the humidity is low.
If you’re thinking this all sounds quite vegetable friendly, you’re right. Market stands abound with big, bright, fresh produce. The main agricultural products are tobacco, figs, olives, wheat, maize, potatoes, grapes, meat, dairy and honey. Bee hives are everywhere, and the lack of industrial pesticides and herbicides mean the bees are as happy as… well, bees on flowers.
Albanian roads are surprisingly great for cycling: smooth and pothole-free and without much traffic. This is pretty much the opposite of Victoria’s roads (hello, Shelbourne Street!) where my wife and I train for our cycle adventures, and a welcome surprise.
One afternoon after three or four hours in the saddle, only notable for having to dodge angry, barking dogs instead of the country’s usually docile, whimpering ones, we roll up to a small cable ferry that takes our group across the Ionian Sea to a peninsula called Butrint.
We’re somewhere in the south of Albania, about 20 km from the modern city of Saranda, opposite the Greek Isle of Corfu. I don’t remember seeing signs for Butrint, but suddenly we leave 2024 for the ancient past, with bus parking.
Butrint was founded in the 8th century BC by exiles after the fall of Troy. Yes, that Troy, the one with Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Achilles, and all the rest as told in the epic poem Aeneid. Also as told in The Iliad. And The Odyssey, Troilus and Cressida, etc. It’s a big deal, and I had no idea it was here.
The place is dripping with history: people have lived here for almost 3,000 years. Not the exact same civilization, which is a key characteristic of Butrint: all sorts of empires flourished here and are on display, beginning with the ancient Illyrians, then the Greeks, followed by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the Ottomans, with guest appearances by Virgil, Julius Caesar, Ali Pasha and Lord Byron.
It’s got everything, and it is in great shape, yet to be picked clean by tourists and privateers like Angkor Wat, Machu Pichu, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, all looted for their treasures, long ago.
Here you can still see (and touch!) richly coloured mosaics from the Byzantine Empire just a few feet from even older city wall stones covered in carved Greek letters, naming slaves freed by their masters more than 2,000 years ago. The stones are easily readable today.
Butrint is one of those open-mouth UNESCO World Heritage sites. What I mean is, walking around the place you find your mouth actually open in wonder and wow at what you can see and touch. Nobody is in the way; there are maybe 150 tourists scattered over its 200 hectares.
How is it possible that I’ve never heard of this place? It’s like this all over the country. Albania is full of wonders that were hidden from the outside world under a paranoid cloak of secrecy and exclusion, sort of like Oak Bay only with more torture.
You can’t visit Albania without seeing the “bunkerët.” I don’t mean you simply must go see them, darlings. I mean it is impossible to not see them. These concrete military bunkers – some 750,000 of them – are everywhere, from remote mountain passes to the middle of villages to olive tree-covered slopes overlooking the ocean. There is an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometre of land in Albania, which is about the size of Vancouver Island.
The bunkers are yet another crazy legacy of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist dictator from the Second World War until his death in 1985. The bunkers were never used for their purported “protection from outside attack,” which was all part of Hoxha’s paranoid cult of suspicion that closed the country’s borders for more than 50 years, bred a kind of surveillance culture that turned Albanian on Albanian, and led to thousands tortured and then jailed for decades.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Albania was the world’s second-poorest country. The cost of constructing all those bunkers was a massive drain on Albania’s resources, diverting the country from dealing with a housing shortage, poor roads and an even worse economy.
On the plus side, the bunkers do lend a certain je ne sais quoi to the overall apocalyptic vibe in Albania. The dusty concrete domes with black eye holes really work with all the empty, burned-out or half-finished buildings we found in every single city, town and village. I couldn’t help but thinking I was personally biking through the Half-Life 2 computer game, having joined the resistance to liberate Earth from the Combine, an interplanetary alien empire.
Imaginary apocalyptic visions aside, the psychological darkness you feel is real; another Hoxha legacy. Young people just don’t want to live in a country with no jobs and no hope, so they leave. Since the fall of Albanian communism in 1991, the modern Albanian diaspora has seen over 800,000 people leave the country, mostly settling in Greece and Italy and neighbouring Balkan states.
Our last day of riding takes us on an existential quest we come to call “the Mountains of Madness.” It’s a simple ride on paper, some 70 kilometres of excellent coastal road over the Llogara Pass. The experience is a little more complicated, repeatedly calling into question your reason for existing after climbing climbing climbing more than 1,550 metres from the seaside village of Himarë, then ending at the seaside village of Vlorë. The view of turquoise water is spectacular, but seriously, why am I here? Is the universe empty, cold and uncaring, or does God love me and have a will and purpose for my life?
For comparison, Vancouver Island’s Malahat Drive, which also makes me doubt my sanity and reason for existing, is just 25 km long and its summit is only 356 metres above sea level.
Both passes are beautiful. The main difference in what you experience is that the Albanian road is almost empty. We are passed by a couple of buses, a handful of cars, and the occasional group of motorcycles. That’s it. We’re alone on the road, surprised at our good fortune to be here on our own. It reminds me of cycling the Icefield Parkway between Jasper and Banff in 1986, before that highway became a conga line of tourists.
Eventually we finish our tour of Albania, which mostly finishes me with an unexpected tummy bug that makes its appearance on the van ride back to Tirana. Surprise! In the end, seven of our 15 fall victim to this lurgi, which my wife and I ride out in a rooftop Tirana Airbnb. On the plus side, we have our own bathroom, and eventually are able to make it out for exploratory walks.
Clearly, there are no zoning regulations in effect: corner grocery stores are next to housing complexes next to barber shops next to newly constructed churches and mosques. Sometimes there are sidewalks, sometimes the sidewalks suddenly turn into steep stairways down to businesses, homes, or big holes in the road. Everything is a surprise, usually delightful, always interesting.
Tirana’s downtown is busy with both car and foot traffic. Not everybody can afford a car, but those who do clearly see it as a status symbol worth keeping clean; car washes are everywhere.
A day or maybe two is enough to get the gist of Tirana. You will visit Skanderbeg Square, the usual big plaza found in the centre of most European cities. In this case named for a military commander who led a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, was the only man strong enough to wield his fearsome sword, wore a magic goat’s head helmet, that kind of thing.
Despite the obvious misgivings you have about all the stairs, you will climb the Pyramid of Tirana, which is not really a pyramid but a massive, ugly whitewashed concrete building constructed in the brutalist Soviet style in 1988 to be an homage museum to Enver Hoxha. At the time, it was said to be the most expensive individual structure ever constructed in Albania. Now it is a conference centre and big thing for the few tourists to climb.
Worth a visit is Albania’s Museum of Secret Surveillance, aka the “House of Leaves,” a dark building surrounded by high walls and the requisite bunker. This former obstetrics clinic – an early European example of progressive medicine and social care during happier times – became the temporary Gestapo headquarters in 1943 when the Germans took over that part of the world.
Soon after the Second World War, the Albanian Communist Directorate of State Security – the feared Sigurimi – took over the building, and used every room for one clandestine horror or another, hidden but known to Albanians and whispered about, hence the name.
The House of Leaves museum opened in 2020 to commemorate the country’s experience of Cold War secret surveillance, and is filled with chilling artefacts, photos and displays that showcase just how repressive and brutal Enver Hoxha’s communist dictatorship was. Not for the first time I wonder about Hoxha, who began his career as a primary school teacher. What happened? Then I remember some of my own teachers at elementary school, and think, yeah … maybe …
Numerous signs warn visitors not to take any photographs in the House of Leaves. I have no idea why, given the museum’s mission to publicly expose the brutal surveillance tactics used on Albanian citizens for 50 years, not to mention the torture, the confinement, the isolation, and the crushing cult of dictator worship. The irony of NO PHOTOS! seems lost on the people who run the museum. Perhaps another loss to chalk up to Hoxha.
An alternative to the House of Leaves is the nearby Bunk’Art 2, a downtown version (and one of the largest) of the bunkers you see everywhere. It leads underground to another museum that reconstructs the extremely depressing history of the Albanian Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1912 to 1991. Essentially it’s more Sigurimi-porn, more upsetting history about how the political police used to spy on and control the Albanian people.
Obviously, this stuff can be heavy going. So a good way to end your day in Tirana is to do what the locals do: xhiro. This is the surprising and delightful Albanian tradition of a sunset walk. The streets of Tirana fill with people in the evenings, walking, talking, smoking, and maybe having a glass of raki, the genuinely terrible alcoholic beverage made of twice-distilled grape “solids” common to Turkic and Balkan countries as an apéritif and/or industrial solvent.
I wish I had known about the drink earlier in our adventures in Albania. I’ll bet it would have been just the right shock treatment for the tummy bug, and made that final van ride a little less surprising for us all.
