August 5, 2012
Travelling hopefully... without a map: Tirana - Librazhd
TIRANA BEING only small, it isn't hard to get out. And entirely different from riding in. Where the day before yesterday we had ridden for an hour on a service road for office blocks and sales centres, today we climbed through a contradiction of luxury hotels and butchers' shops where cows were strung upside down from poles and gutted in the street.
After an hour we came to the climb of the day, rising more than 600 metres, the heat above 35 even though it was only mid-morning. And 20 minutes into our grovel, we had a surprise. For ahead of us were two more touring cyclists.
In the way of these things it took ages to catch them, for there was barely a snail's difference in our speed. But they stopped for a break in an opening to the right and we got to them.
They were two Japanese riders on over-loaded bikes. It was hard to tell their age - mid-20s perhaps - but he tried to make himself older with a wispy beard he will regret when he looks back on old photographs. She was shorter with a broader face. He talked with a nervous, hair-trigger laugh and she was more placid.
"We have come from Germany," the man said. "From Frankfurt. That's where we flew to. And we are going to Turkey. After that, it depends on the winter season."
They had ridden across Switzerland, down through Italy, then from Croatia into Slovenia. And they seem to have done it without maps. For all they had of Albania was a leaflet which showed six of the main towns and a line running between each to suggest a road. Since one lines led to Macedonia, that was the one they were following.
"Would you like to take a photo of our map?" we asked. "It's not that reliable but it may be better than yours." He got out his camera and snapped in all four corners and the centre.
"This is our first tour on bicycles," he said, "so we are very new."
We left them catching their breath and rode on through half a dozen convoys of wedding cars going our way or in the other. It was Sunday and Sunday is wedding day in Albania. The population is young, many people roughly the age of the return of democracy, so there must be a good trade in bridal shops these days.
It is the custom in much of Europe, including in France, to drive in convoy to the town hall, where the marriage takes place, and then to a blessing or reception. And convention demands you do it with your hand on the hooter.
In Albania, more recent tradition demands the leading car have a cameraman sitting out through the passenger window to film the antics of those who follow.
We got to the top in an hour. Just before the summit was a tribute to Bilal Agalliu, "the legend of Albanian cycling." I don't like to say it was a memorial because there were no dates to suggest he was dead. But the caption beneath his photo did say he had been national champion 16 times, so far as we could work out.
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
We were sitting in his shadow when an episode showed it is better to be a bicycle than a horse. For, along the gravel track that shadowed the road and was probably the original crossing came a man of 60 sitting sideways on a grey horse laden with wood. The horse knew where it was going because it was a journey it had made many times. But it stumbled where it had to step down a bank of about half a metre and, panicking a little, got into a short and uneven trot.
The man, sitting sideways, slipped off and half wheeled, half stood, arms and legs like a starfish, until he stopped himself falling hard on the packed gravel.
The horse stopped and the man stood up, furious, and shouted at it angrily. The horse stood placidly, which is what horses do but which seemed to annoy the man even more. He kicked it in the ribs. Not a crushing kick but not, if there is such a thing, a kind kick either.
That didn't quell his temper and he streamed off invective again until, frustrated at words not being sufficient, he gave the horse another kick, got back in the saddle and disappeared down the hillside.
The plateau across the top was more magic, the sort of airy, green-and-rock hills that typify eastern Europe. At some stage, and I'd love to have been there, huge forces had thrown the land into chaotic, anarchic hills and dales that had no relation to each other.
And then the road sent us off down hairpins past close-trimmed grass to the city of Elbasan. Beneath us for a moment we saw the vast arena of the old steelworks, 1950s industry which once employed 8 000 but no longer met safety and pollution standards and rotted awaiting demolition.
It can't always have been like that. The man from the Times of London said in 1911 that he had seen "the population celebrating Bairam in the central space, wonderful primitive merry-go-rounds with gypsy minstrels (flute and drum), pushed round by men with poles; also a cartwheel poised on a tree top; pekhilvans wrestling, mostly refugees from Dibra, thus gaining a precarious livelihood."
There was none of that when we paused on the outskirts for sandwiches. But there was a bright-faced boy of nine on a gold-painted BMX bike. He caught sight of our loaded machines, glanced, feigned not to have noticed, then came back for a second look. I gestured him over.
"You go all this way this way?" he asked in intelligent and polished English, running his fingers along the map we showed him. "You do all that on a bicycle? Wow! That is very long."
After that he followed us everywhere we went and talked about us to his friends. When we came to leave, he prepared to ride with us.
"You want to do this one day?" I asked.
"No, I don't think so."
"I bet you will."
"Perhaps, yes, maybe. It is good."
We reached the turning for his house. He spun off to the side, waved and called goodbye He kept on looking back until we lost sight of each other.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 2 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |