August 3, 2012
Preparing for war: Barbullush - Tirana
IF YOU haven't got a job in Albania, or you've got time on your hands, you set yourself up as an ice tea salesmen. All you need is a bike with a basket, a squeaky hooter and a jug of drink. And you ride around tooting your horn, which in Albania seems to carry the status of street-traders' cries of the 19th century.
We passed two of them, or crossed with them, rather, as we left the Dutch to their miserable camp-site, rode through bustling little Barbullush and out into the flat countryside. Our road ran through orchards and smelled of wild flowers. It headed rather too enthusiastically towards a sheer face of grey rock but then had the grace to turn gently left.
And it was after that turn that we saw once more how seriously Albania thought it would be invaded by the Soviet Union. For here, all along the inner edge of the cliff ridge that separates Albania from the sea, were grey concrete domes of gun emplacements and, more striking, square tunnels big enough to accommodate a railway engine, driven into the stone and on out of sight. These, presumably, were where Albania stored its arms, its tanks, ready for the Russians. Everything pointed inland because there were other preparations, invisible on top of the cliff, that faced the sea. What we were looking at were the second defences for those who managed to scale the ridge and make it down to the plain.
Further inland, a handful of kilometres, our quiet road expanded on both sides into a huge aircraft runway. There was no pretence. This was where huge military planes could land and take off. And now it lay, in surprisingly good state, abandoned. Trees had grown around the simple white control tower.
Well, we started a war of our own after that. Or suffered one. A war of attrition. We did our best to find a quiet way towards the capital, Tirana, but there isn't one. Furiously fast traffic brushed our left ear. Every so often we had to ride out our lane to dissuade some anxious Albanian from using it to overtake in the opposite direction.
For while, a couple of hours, we rode the old highway, alternating in just two or three kilometres between fine, smooth tar and then compressed dust and stone and exposed rock. There was no pretence at keeping the road passable; three times we skidded to a halt as a simple dip across the road turned out to be a 50cm trench.
The new road to Vora had a shoulder, an unexpected and welcome blessing, and the autoroute-busy road from there to Tirana had the old road beside it to service companies in the electronics and allied businesses. We can't say we enjoyed it but it could have been worse. And, unless you count the Ruritanian experience of San Marino, we are now in the first capital city of our trip.
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