A Vacation Report From Albania : After 45 Years of Isolation, This Small Balkan State Is a Fascinating Land of Paradise and Hardship--a Place of Incomparable Natural Beauty, Where ‘Services’ Can Be Unpredictable

The fine white sand stretches for 75 yards. Two stone formations nudging into the water form a secluded cove where the bluest water imaginable laps lazily against the beach. Above the cove, groves of olive trees stretch toward the heavens. The turquoise sky is cloudless. The golden sun is beaming.

I close my eyes, tip my head back in the cool, crystal-clear water and for a moment think, “This must be Greece. Where’s my ouzo?” But as I pop my head above a gentle wave, my eyes open on a ruggedly beautiful land that nonetheless has symbolized isolation and political tyranny for nearly 50 years.

Albania.

The world’s most Communist nation--and Europe’s last unbeaten tourist path--only recently opened its crumbling doors to outsiders for the first time since World War II. Even my pristine beach, where I am virtually alone, even though it’s one of the most beautiful in Europe, displays reminders of Albania’s bleak history.

Sitting above the rocks, like heavily armed sentries, are two round, steel-reinforced concrete machine-gun bunkers. Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist dictator who ruled Albania with an iron fist from 1944 until his death in 1985, had 600,000 such bunkers scattered throughout the country to protect against outsiders. Any outsiders. Albania was the world’s first officially atheist state, a nation so Communist it broke ties with the Soviet Union and China for what Hoxha called “revisionism.”

No citizen could leave; no one except Albanians and an occasional Communist dignitary could enter. “There were two jails,” says Gezim Karapici, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Tirana, in the Albanian capital. “One materialistic prison, and the other was the border of Albania.”

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That, finally, has changed. After massive civil unrest two years ago against Ramiz Alia, Hoxha’s successor, the Communist government fell in open elections. The Democratic Party took over in the summer of 1992.

It also took over massive problems, but Karapici is one of many Albanians who sees a way out through tourism. He says Albania’s beaches are better than anything in Greece. The mountain scenery as stunning as anywhere in southern Europe.

I tend to agree. Albania can be a tourist attraction. (But, make no mistake, it isn’t yet.) In a world where McDonald’s are popping up around Red Square, Albania is one of the last bastions of unspoiled beauty. I’ve seen many versions of beauty spoiled, and a few slivers of real paradise, in my travels. But Albania had always been a strange obsession. When people would ask why I’ve always wanted to see it, I always replied, “How much do you know about Albania?” Their usual response: “Nothing.”

That’s why I went. Of the 44 countries I’ve visited as an adult, I found Albania by far the most fascinating, the most unspoiled.

But to find paradise, be prepared to find hardship. In Albania, natural splendor crashes head on with poverty unmatched anywhere in Europe. Beautiful beaches lie below crumbling, dank villages. Spectacular mountains rise over broken-down hotels. Emerald rivers are reached only by narrow, dangerous, pock-marked roads. Undeterred, the new minister of tourism, Edmond Spaho, declares, “Tourism is one of the priorities of the government.”

Spaho is short and stocky with a mop of dark, curly hair and very tired eyes. He’s slumped in his chair. He looks like the guy who was assigned to rebuild Rome. In Albania’s first year after Communism in 1991, he says, 25,000 “tourists” visited. That includes foreign investors, professors and foreign-aid officials. It does not include anyone off an American Express bus. In a week’s stay in June of last year, I saw one other tourist: an Englishman visiting a woman working with disabled children in Korce, near Greece.

So why bother visiting Albania, roughly the size of Maryland and squeezed between Serbia and Greece?

Hoxha didn’t leave Albania many gifts, but Mother Nature did.

Start with that secluded cove I occupied on the Ionian Sea near the village of Lukove in southern Albania, and two more untouched, white-sand beaches a few miles north. Southern Albania looks like Greece when Odysseus--not Norwegian Cruise Lines--sailed its islands. From the coast road high above, the sand stretches like a white rope for about three miles. There are no hotels. No houses. No souvenir stands.

Nothing.

Ed McCuskey, chairman of the board of TransMark International, a Texas-based development firm, wants to invest $20 million in Albania’s dormant oil industry. He was visiting Albania for his fourth time in a year when I met him in Tirana’s Hotel Dajti, through the American husband of the interpreter I had hired. “As you see the country,” McCuskey says, “think of the trip from the Maui airport to Kaanapali Beach. Look at the terrain of this country and don’t think you aren’t seeing the same thing.”

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But Albania has more variety than Maui. I take a two-hour ferry ride up the Drini River to the village of Fierze. Water, smooth as green glass, curls through a deep canyon lined with nothing but trees and craggy cliffs. That’s it. No restaurants. No boat docks. No water-skiers. Nothing.

After docking in Fierze, my driver precariously conducts myself and two others--interpreter Arta Dervishi and her American-born husband, Terry Cooper--along a mountain road for two hours. Without them, I might not have been able to see Albania’s true beauty, because traveling independently through this still-bedraggled country is extremely difficult. From my home in Denver, it took three weeks of digging just to find anyone in America who had visited Albania. Finally, I came across Jack Morrison, the owner of a California-based adventure travel company, who, even though I planned to travel independently of a tour group, helped me arrange for a driver and interpreter.

But back to our mountain drive. From my high-ground vantage point, I gaze down and see the Valbones River, an offshoot of the Drini. The Valbones looks like a Swiss tourist poster. Slicing through this canyon in a series of inviting rapids, it’s the most beautiful aquamarine river I’ve ever seen, and on a 93-degree day too much to resist. We park the car, scramble down a gravel cliff and plunge into cool, rushing ripples.

The day isn’t through. Another hour’s drive leads us to the town of Valbona. Here, about five miles from the savagery in Serbia, the Albanian Alps are spectacular. The village of 800 is nestled in a semicircle of 8,000-foot mountains towering above the town. This is tribal country. For centuries, Albanian ethnic groups used the mountains to fend off attacks by Romans, Turks, Bulgars and Byzantines. Even Hoxha failed to crush these fierce people. I meet Cel Hysi, a deeply-tanned, 26-year-old with bushy black hair, a goatee and wild, piercing eyes. He looks like someone who rode with Genghis Khan.

He invites us through a wire fence toward his house, a small stone compound with brightly colored, hand-woven rugs scattered in the immaculate living room.

Over homemade bread and boreck , an Albanian staple made from dough, eggs and cheese, he tells how his brother-in-law is in jail for shooting another tribesman during a blood feud. Hysi has other problems. And his problems are also problems for Albanian tourism. Hysi is a waiter at the Valbona Hotel a few meters from his house. The Valbona has been closed for four months. Only 5 years old, its windows have boards on them. Dirt covers the floors inside. The yellow paint is already peeling. The new government, strapped for money when the Communists left office, stopped funding the hotel.

Which brings me to the state of Albania’s tourist infrastructure when I visited last spring. The existing hotels were probably the worst I’d ever seen. Buses ran less frequently than the toilets, which wasn’t often enough, and Dodger Stadium seemed to have more restaurants than Tirana. Every structure seemed to be either crumbling, peeling or broken. The carcasses of broken-down factories littered the countryside. Since foreign currency is accepted more than the Albanian lek, I walked around for a week with $800 in American cash in my money belt. Albania’s most expensive lodging, Tirana’s Hotel Dajti, charges $70 for a single, $90 for a double and hot water is irregular. In fact, water is irregular. One visitor told me he had water for exactly four hours a day. Down the street at Hotel Drini, the hallway was locked from the inside by a beat-up glass door. I had to wake a tenant to let me in the hall so I could see a room. There seemed to be no water there either.

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Early in my visit, my driver took me to Gjirokaster, Hoxha’s hometown in southern Albania. The charming cobblestone-covered village overlooks the wide green valley below. A castle rises over the city. An art gallery has friendly local artists who are eager to discuss their work. Gjirokaster is a budding tourist center, but unfortunately in the Hotel Cajupi, a squadron of flies greeted me in the lobby. I dragged my index finger along the second floor, and it came up pitch-black. Cost: $29 for a double with no bathroom.

Although I’m sure I would have survived any of these establishments, and subsequent reports from travelers indicate that things are improving steadily, I had made other arrangements. My interpreter asked a family in her Tirana neighborhood if they would move out of their modest apartment and live with relatives for the week. I paid them $25 a night, nearly the equivalent of an Albanian’s average monthly salary of $35.

I did stay in one hotel, the best I saw in the country, the Butrinti, in the southern Albanian city of Sarande. Just off the coast from Sarande is the tourist-crawling Greek island of Corfu, yet the Butrinti’s 90 rooms were half empty the night I stayed there. “We don’t get so many people,” desk clerk Fatbardha Cako says. “I’ve been with tourists coming from Corfu, and many don’t know anything about Albania. Many are afraid because Yugoslavia is so near.”

No matter. It isn’t easy getting to Sarande, anyway. Traveling in Albania can be expensive and dangerous, hence the advisability of a driver. One bus a day leaves Tirana for Sarande, 200 miles to the south. One a day leaves for Bajram Curri near the Drini in the north. Only one bus a week travels the beautiful coast road. None would dare take the poorly maintained mountain road we took into the Albanian Alps.

Even the one main road that runs through Albania is badly in need of repair. It has been for, oh, about 2,000 years. That’s because it is the same one the Romans used to invade Greece. The road my driver took to reach the beautiful beach near Lukove was a 30-minute zigzag from the coast road down a gravel goat path. The buses that do run are about half the size of a school bus, many with windows long ago broken out. Late arrivals hang from the side by a single hand. The good news is that the 10-hour drive to Sarande costs only $3.

Hitchhiking is impractical since the Communist regime banned all private automobiles, and though they’re now allowed, they’re few and far between. The Albanian language still has no term for “traffic jam.” For example, one Thursday at lunch hour, I walk down the middle of six-lane Stalin Boulevard, Tirana’s main drag. In my path are only four cars. In Albania, horse-drawn carts are still king of the road.

And renting a car is exorbitant. Hertz has an office in Tirana but charges $680 a week or $45.50 a day, plus 38 cents a kilometer. My driver, Sefer Cenoimeri, was a former driver for the Communist government. I paid him $420 for the week, and it was worth every penny.

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Eating in Albania is enjoyable but frustrating. Until a year ago, restaurants in Tirana didn’t even have signs. You had to know someone who knew where to go. Today, signs advertise restaurants but there aren’t many. None lines Skanderbeg Square, Tirana’s huge central gathering place. But Albanian food is delicious and the nation’s best bargain. Rarely will a full meal top $10.

The Ottoman Empire, its capital in what is now Istanbul, controlled Albania from 1479 until 1912, and Albanian food greatly resembles Turkey’s. Shish kebab is a staple as is qofte , a delicious spiced meatball. Raki , a savage Albanian whiskey, is served with most meals. It’s also safe to drink tap water--which comes from the mountains that cover three-quarters of Albania.

But Albanians don’t eat out much. They can’t. When the Communist government fell, the oppressive yoke of manual labor dropped. With unemployment benefits guaranteeing 80% of their paycheck, thousands quit their jobs, and today unemployment hovers around 60%.

The new government’s resources are limited. But there is hope. The people aren’t depressed. Despite a mailed warning from the U.S. State Department that “robbery, mugging and pickpocketing is a problem” in Albania, I found the Albanians’ friendliness unmatched anywhere in the world.

People, including soldiers, stopped me on the street to take their pictures. They didn’t want money. They didn’t want a snapshot. They just wanted to see a camera work. Communication isn’t a big problem. English is the Albanians’ second language.

Albania’s innocent look as it opens its arms to outsiders adds to its charm. In one week, I sunbathed on a deserted beach, broke bread with a mountain tribesman, heard prison stories from hunger strikers, matched raki shots with an 82-year-old farmer, bathed in a mountain stream and posed on a tank I found stalled on the highway.

And then I wonder. Would all this be possible after a McDonald’s is built in Skanderbeg Square?

GUIDEBOOK

All About Albania

Getting there: Airlines flying to Tirana include Greece’s Olympic Airways (about $1,050 New York-Athens-Tirana), Swissair (about $1,750 L.A.-Zurich-Tirana), Alitalia ($1,700 L.A.-Rome-Tirana) and Austrian Airlines (about $1,260 New York-Vienna-Tirana). The Hungarian airline Malev charges $1,010 from Los Angeles with seven-day minimum stay (about $150 more in the summer high season). Tours: Albania now allows individual as well as group travel by Americans; no visa is required. You can ease the logistic strains of getting around by going with an organized sightseeing tour or an adventure trip. Chicago-based Vega International Travel Service (telephone 312-332-7211) has three-day trips from Vienna to Tirana, Durres and Gjirokaster for $398, not including air fare. Travcoa (tel. 800-992-2003) of Newport Beach offers a 21-day luxury overland trip starting in Athens and going to Delphi, Albania, Corfu and Italy. Price is $6,295, not including air. Boston-based Kutrubes Travel Agency Inc. (tel. 800-878-8566) has two 10-day bus trips available. One begins in Durres and costs $2,260, including air fare from Boston; the other, into the northern Albanian Alps, costs is $2,367, including air. Mill Valley-based White Water Magic Unlimited Adventures (tel. 800-869-9874) offers two-week white-water rafting, trekking and overland tours starting May 7. Price ranges $2,500-$3,500, not including air. Tirana-based Albanian Alpine Trekking (fax 011-355- 42-23516 in Albania, 903-581-2111 in the U.S.) has seven- to 10-day treks in May to northern Albania, and in late June around Valbona. Land portion is $1,000, including hotels and connections. Individual trips: Both White Water Magic Unlimited Adventures and Albanian Alpine Trekking usually can provide names and numbers of drivers and interpreters. Arrangements also can be made through Altourism (fax 011-355-42-27956 or 011-355-42- 34359), Albania’s tourist agency.