July 30, 2012
A journey in hell, part 1: Plav - Mreg (Albania)
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ALL THIS MORNING we have seen cars with American number plates. They're not American cars. They're local. They just have American numbers. So far just today we have seen New York, New Jersey and Michigan, several of each but with a leaning for New York.
Had we already been in Albania, I'd have said cynically that it was because the owners didn't want to let on where they were from. For almost all today we have been riding, and suffering, on the worst road any nation has produced.
The day started so innocently, too. We bowled along and down a valley beside a lake, the occasional houses showing signs of belonging to slickers from the city. Even when they ended and we found the road towards Albania, the fact that road crews had removed the surface and that we were riding on compressed dust and stones didn't trouble us. We had done that in Hvar and thoroughly enjoyed it.
But life was going to play a trick. For when the dust ran out, it brought us first to the exit checkpoint for Montenegro and then, a hundred metres further,
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the entry point for Albania. We preferred the Albanians. There were two of them there, one who had returned from a walk in the woods and another who looked not unreasonably surprised that anyone would want to cross the border on a road which, on the Montenegro side, had been impassable to cars for weeks because of tractors, diggers and dumpers. The lack of trade was why one had gone for a walk and why the other had a bed made up in the office.
We provided so much of a break from the tedium of doing nothing in an office with no electricity - in the absence of a computer we were just added to a list by pen - that we got free language lessons. We gave the words we had learned in Croatia and Montenegro and they replied with the Albanian, which we wrote down phonetically.
And then we saddled up and rode into our latest new country. And we rode on a perfect, smooth road, which surprised us after all we had heard about Albania and what we had had until then in Montenegro. To be fair, the tar gave out after a hundred metres, probably because of the nearness of a river which flooded in winter, but then it resumed when we got beyond the highest point the waters would reach.
The road bucked up and down at sensational angles, our gears crashing one way and then the other. We crossed a line of machine gun posts, concrete and like giant mushrooms sunk into the ground until only their tops remained. A letter-box slit offered just enough space to poke a gun barrel.
The emplacements stood only a handful of paces apart. They had long been abandoned. And we discovered later that they had never been used. Enver Hoxha, the resilient leader of Europe's last bastion of Stalinism, took fright when Russian invaded Czechoslovakia to end Dubcek's move to liberalism. Hoxha thought he could be next and built 750 000 of these posts, and more emplacements besides, to hold out his fellow communists.
We should have taken the hint and stayed away too. A signpost pointed us left and we were immediately on a steep, mud-and-stone path that was beyond riding.
Remembering the cols of rough road we had ridden to 2 000 metres in Romania, we pushed literally onwards, confident, then hopeful, then despairing that things would get better.
They didn't. Now and then we could ride. Mostly we couldn't. When we could, there was always the risk of falling. When we couldn't, it often took all the strength we had just to keep our bikes moving. For this wasn't just a stony path. This was a mule track on which rocks poked up vertically and brought tyres to a halt. Our backs ached, our arms grew limp from fatigue.
It took hours to reach the summit. We felt wretched. The scenery was sublime, towering walls of rock and valleys of rumbling water and fields of green and rock. But none of that could take away the pain.
Inexplicably, there was a bar at the summit. We sagged into chairs and ordered two drinks. Four men sat at a neighbouring table. They had driven to the top in rugged cars with foreign number plates, showing they were emigrants home for the summer. These two cars were from Britain and Germany.
The men took barely any notice of us and continued speaking in a language even less comprehensible than Montenegrin. But as soon as we had finished our drinks, the barman brought more. He gestured to a thickset man in a dark grey vest. We had seen him on the terrible struggle to the top. He had seen us, too, and the drinks were his reward for our achievement. No reward was more eagerly accepted.
We parted with thanks and began the descent. It wasn't much faster than the way up. Well, it was. Of course it was. But it was one of those descents which demanded a halt every so often to cool off rims burning from perpetual braking. Go at more than walking speed on a descent which would normally take you to 50 and disaster was guaranteed. On long stretches we just got off and walked, no longer able to control our bikes.
Mreg village was no more than a church and a few houses around a double hairpin. We began looking and then asking for a place to camp. Eventually we found Primavera, an Albanian woman who with her husband had long been living in France, in Lyon, and who had returned to build a house for her father in law. It was obvious that the arrangement held no thrills for her.
So tonight we are on a small patch of garden up a short steep slope from her vegetable patch. We ache. We are tired. And we will be asleep by 8pm. And then we will have to do it all over again tomorrow.
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