28/07/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

The coastal plain was ringed to north, east and south by dramatic mountain ranges rising to 2700 metres and harbouring vast blue lakes. The Ministry of Tourism identified so-called 'Priority Tourism Zones' for early development: principally around Pogradec on the indisputably beautiful Lake Ohrid, and on the coast near to Saranda and Durres.

Here, according to the Minister, “all other economic activities shall be subordinated to tourism.”

There were six designated National Parks where flora and fauna, including brown bears, wolves, lynx and wild boar, were to be protected.” Hotels and winter sports facilities were to be constructed in the mountains. Dance, music and local handicrafts would be developed as attractions in themselves.

Back in 1993, foreign investors were already being encouraged to participate in the ten-year plan with tax-free breaks, tax relief and low land rentals. These were all noble and ambitious ideals. The problem with Albania was that the country was still firmly locked in its own troubled past.

Spaho did admit that the development of the tourist industry would be dependent on development of infrastructure like the airport and the country's dilapidated and skeletal road system. Under the Hoxha regime, private cars had been banned and the roads were now crumbling under an explosion of traffic.

I visited Albania throughout the 1990s and then returned in 2005 to accompany American tourists to Durres, Tirana and the Roman ruins at Butrint, near to Sarande. With the exception of a vastly improved road between Durres and Tirana, there was little to see in the way of infrastructure development, apart from mushrooming petrol stations. To visitors from the US, the country remained incredibly primitive.

Then, as now, driving was a seriously dangerous undertaking. It was bad enough and crazy enough on the potholed roads during the day, but at night it became a veritable nightmare as unlit horse-drawn carts, bolting cattle, wandering goats and donkeys and pedestrians, all with no apparent road sense, seemingly came from every direction. 

Horn and accelerator appeared to be the only controls in serious use and large numbers of cars were unlit at night due to a chronic shortage of spare bulbs, and all those over-zealous policemen unaccountably disappeared; probably to the nearest bar with the day’s takings.

Every few hundred yards, there seemed to be a car or truck broken down at the side of the road. Preventive maintenance was an unknown concept and spares were virtually impossible to maintain except at makeshift roadside stalls.

Outside the capital, hotel accommodation was dire. In the once beautiful and fascinating southern city of Gjirokaster, not far from the Greek border, the hotel, optimistically described in the 1993 Blue Guide to Albania, by James Pettifer, as ‘an acceptable place to stay’, was indubitably the worst hotel I had stayed in anywhere in the world.

Large parts of the floor in the room were mysteriously missing and around midnight the local wildlife emerged to disport itself. In the early hours, they were joined by the most enormous crickets I had ever seen who lined themselves up on our bed-head chirping merrily and loudly. I gave up the unequal struggle and retired to the balcony with my girlfriend, Megan, for the rest of the night, watching the beauty of the dawn as it came up over the narrow, steep streets which climb up to the Turkish-built Citadel.

The whole hotel stank evilly. The contents of the wastepaper basket could not possibly be described. All the toilet accommodation was unaccountably locked - although this may have been in lieu of cleaning the facilities judging from the smell which wafted out when I ill-advisedly tried to peer through the keyhole. It was necessary to climb down three floors to visit indescribably filthy facilities shared without privacy by both sexes.

Our driver wisely opted to sleep in the car, after removing the wheel trims, wing mirrors and anything else that moved. Armed with a can of Mace gas he went to sleep, only to be awoken by the local police demanding $5 for the right to sleep in the car.

We were rather luckier. A policeman armed with a Chinese-made AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle - which he engaged in noisily stripping down and reassembling - spent the night on the landing outside our room. I was thunderstruck not to be charged for this service in the morning. Which went to show just how quickly I had adapted to Albania.


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