Superb Roman ruins, glorious scenery, good food and ridiculously low prices – Edward Reeves finds much to admire in the former communist state.
By Edward Reeves This is odd. I\'m sitting in a bar in Tirana, Albania, and there\'s not a gangster in sight. What there is is a 20ft-long counter packed with an array of enticing meats, a friendly man who grills them on request, and beer at 70p a glass. Everyone speaks English, and everyone is unfailingly nice. Could it be that there\'s a mismatch between Albania\'s reputation for – how to put this politely? – unconventional economic activity, and the modern-day reality?
After a week travelling the country with my mother, without so much of a whiff of trouble or a gangster\'s cheap cologne, I\'d say the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, our Albanian trip has turned us both into bores when it comes to this oft-ignored Mediterranean country\'s virtues as a tourist destination. For those of you with a short attention span, the upshot of this article is \"Go!\" But first some context. Our trip came about when I read that tour operator, Voyages Jules Verne (VJV), was returning to the country after a 20-year absence.
Back in the late Eighties a VJV trip was the only way to visit Albania, which was ruled by a paranoid communist dictatorship that issued a few hundred visas each year. My intrepid, left-leaning mother went not once, but twice, in 1986 and 1987, flying into Titograd in the former Yugoslavia (now Podgorica, capital of Montenegro) and crossing the border at 3am under searchlights, as wolves howled in the distance.
All books, magazines and other printed matter were confiscated by Kalashnikov-wielding guards and visitors had to walk through a sheep dip to kill capitalist germs. Welcome to Albania. How times change. We fly direct into Tirana to begin VJV\'s new \"Classical Tour of Albania\" itinerary – and there\'s not a sheep dip in sight. The airport is clean and modern, with an even cleaner and more modern tour bus waiting 100 yards from the exit.
Our guide, Elton Caushi, could be mistaken for an Italian art student. Young people, he says, acutely aware of Albania\'s reputation abroad, now avoid the dark, hired-killer look that was thought to be cool in the Nineties. There\'s no hanging about – VJV\'s bumpf makes it clear that Albania\'s geography and poor road network dictate long coach journeys (and warns there\'s a fair degree of walking). First stop is the 18th-century monastery of Ardenica, sitting on a hill that the communist regime burrowed into and covered in bunkers and gun emplacements (Albania is peppered with bunkers – there are thought to be more than 700,000 of them).
My mother didn\'t visit Ardenica on her previous trips – back then the church was used as a storeroom for military kit. The survival of its splendid iconostasis and frescoes, by two of Albania\'s finest icon painters, the brothers Konstandin and Athanas Zografi, is something of a miracle.
