Is Albania a dangerous place?

"Albanians are good people," my driver says in a Balkan accent that 15 ex-pat years in England failed to dissipate. "Albanians do anything for you. They help you. But just one thing," he warns. "Never cross an Albanian. He will never forget, and he will fuck you."

The bus from Gjirokastra had deposited me at an intersection 35 kilometres from my destination, the ancient hilltown of Berati, in a heat of as many degrees. It had skirted the mountains that divide the two towns and wound along the milky turquoise waters of the Vjosa river as close as it could indirectly take me, but from here, at Lushnja, the bus was going north and Berati was south.

I fumbled in Albanian to the conductor, "autobusi stacioni?" and he waved me down a rural road.

As I prepared to flag down the next bus, minibus or furgon, knowing it was unknown when one would appear, a Mercedes Benz pulled up. This was the second car to stop. I had declined the first offer for a ride because, though I'd done a great deal of it in my youth, hitch-hiking here hadn't occurred to me. Is it safe? But I'm clearly a visitor to the country, and it seems this is what's done. Albanians always take care of you.

"Albanians are good people," he says again as we coast past fields of some low-growing grassy crop, "but, like everywhere, there are good people and there are bad people. I hope very much you find only good people."

His name is Marius. He is a middle-aged local, stocky with dark, bristly hair, on a return visit to his family from Manchester where he now lives. He asks where I'm from, whether there is corruption at home and if Australian police take bribes. Albania was recently a lawless place after the demise of Enver Hoxha, the post-war Communist leader, in 1985 and the chaotic years of financial collapse and popular uprising after the Soviet Union dissolved. Though stable now, corruption remains endemic.

Then he asks me how I am finding Albania and the people.

I have found Albanians nothing short of helpful and hospitable. His comment that they never forget a betrayal, though, rings true. Blood feuds between families are a very real problem here. Clan warfare goes on for generations. If a man is murdered, the men of the victim's family are honour-bound to exact revenge by killing the perpetrator or, if that's not possible, a close male family member. Or descendant. 

Having not killed anyone, I figure I'm safe. I have met only good people, I tell Marius.

He pauses as though I said something naive. He warns me of 16-year-old gangsters with guns, and goes on to tell me that two Czech tourists were shot and killed near Shkodra last week. Shkodra is my next destination.

"Just one bad person and you won't want to come back. Please," he cautions me, "keep your money separate. Some in your wallet, some put away."

This is already my habit as a matter of prudence wherever I travel, but his sustained concern is making me uneasy.

Ten minutes along this road of scrubby farms and simple dwellings billowing in the heat we pull up at a palatial white mansion, where manicured gardens shade vine-bound gazebos, flowers and fountains.

"This is as far as I'm going," Marius says. "This is my cousin's restaurant."

"This is your cousin's restaurant?" I marvel, betraying it's impression on me.

"Would you like to have a drink?"

"Yes!"

Marius buys me a beer and we sit in the cool garden. I meet the cousin. A tall, grey-haired man, mid-fifties perhaps, in unassuming shorts and T-shirt, he reminds of Anthony Bourdain. Nonetheless, he has an air of importance about him. He is brought his lunch by his brother, but he sits at a separate table and doesn't eat with us.

"He's very influential," Marius tells me. "Respected. If you have trouble, you know... he has connections."

I make sure to go over to him to shake his hand and show respect before I leave, carrying my hat in my hand. He smiles, appearing pleased I've done this, and as I reach for his hand I find and unexpectedly grasp a wrist. He has offered his forearm. I've seen this kind of handshake before, in Ethiopia, when a man greeted one of the much venerated priests. This is a handshake reserved for people of high status. I don't miss a beat, smile and thank the cousin in Albanian: "faleminderit."

It seems I have responded well to the hospitality. Marius decides to drive me the rest of the way to Berati, and in the car tells me I am welcome to return to his family there anytime if there is anything I need—"They will help you". He then gives me his phone number.

"If you have any trouble, call me."

Trouble, he says. I am both reassured and nervous.

Gjirokastra

Inland from the Albanian riviera is the hilltop town of Gjirokastra. Over centuries it has spilled its inhabitants from the now abandoned castle down the hill; the stone houses topple onto one another's slate roofs. On the map the streets look like a star crack in a windshield. They spread like spokes from the town centre and are wedged together like an Escher staircase, bulging as if beneath the cobblestones are barrel vaulted ceilings of some troglodytic civilisation.

The modern town now spills from the foot of the hill like an upturned pudding, but the castle retains a hold on those who still live on the slopes. They are like ancestors in the clouds of time past looking down on their descendants below. The culture belongs to the hill. Indeed, the castle hosts a quinquennial folklore festival fostering the millennia-old culture of the Albanian diaspora.

Gjirokastrians are friendly without being effusive. They smile gently, almost shyly. Their handshakes are never shows of strength. Greeting is like breathing—effortless and ephemeral, unlike the enthusiasm of the American hail which compares as an overblown affair. Half the Gjirokastrian greeting is done over the shoulder in parting.

Until recently there wasn't much here to engage the visitor. Most of the cafes, hotels and souvenir shops that now exist to entice the tourist are just a few years old. This new economy hasn't sold out the heart of the town, though. Not yet. There are still little markets for the hillfolk's milk, people greet neighbours on the footpath from tables outside cafes at which they lounge for hours, and the local bus is still full of locals.

Transport in Albania

Two-and-a-half hours I've been waiting. The journey itself, from Saranda to Gjirokastra, takes only one-and-a-half. "The buses leave hourly," my host in Saranda told me. "Buses ply the route frequently," the guidebook reads, "until early afternoon, and later in summer." My host who is expecting me in Gjirokastra said there are buses all the time. So what gives?

The Albanian transport network is, like Albanians themselves, informal. There are just a few trains, excruciatingly slow, to only a handful of destinations in this mountainous country. In the communist years, rail was the only travel option for Albanians, but recently the train station in the capital, Tirana, was bulldozed and the rails asphalted over.

These days there is a robust system of buses and minibuses in every direction. The buses do in fact run to schedule; it's just that the schedule starts at 4.30am. (I am not a morning person; I'm a night owl. There are morning people and then there are Albanians. Albania is a nation of extreme larks.) Minibuses don't have a schedule; they simply leave the terminal when full ("terminal" typically being some empty ground at an intersection).

Even "minibus" is a loose term. In Tirana, after walking from one side of the city centre (where I was disgorged by a bus from the south) to the other side of the city centre (to the "bus station" for the north, a narrow parking lot beside a roundabout), I was approached by a stocky middle-aged man in jeans looking no different from any other man in the street who called out something I didn't understand. This was my driver, apparently. I told him my destination, Shkodra, and he nodded and waved for me to follow him. A few paces later we were at an unmarked station wagon. It was his car. I didn't want a taxi; the guidebook says a taxi would cost €50 for the two-hour trip.

"No, autobus për Shkodra," I said.

"Minibus! Minibus!" he insisted, nodding and pointing at his station wagon. I asked him how much (500 lek, about A$5) and I thought, well, if this is how it's done, let's do it.

Three other passengers crowded in and, despite being the tallest, I somehow got shafted with the middle seat. The driver started up and inched out into the horrendous Tirana traffic. It was 36 degrees. There was no air conditioning and only the front passenger had his window open. The driver blasted the radio—that all pervasive Euro club house music. After we got out of the traffic and up to speed, an air pressure vortex caused by just one window being open went wub-dub-dub-dub in everyone's ears. The driver was fidgety. He put on his seatbelt. He swerved. He turned down the music and opened his window. Then closed it again. Wub-dub-dub-dub. Opened it again. Swerved. Checked his phone. Turned down the radio. Closed the window. Wub-dub-dub. Blasted the radio. Opened the window. Swerved. Took off his seatbelt. Turned off the radio. And after one hundred and four minutes of overtaking on single lane roads I piled back out, gave him his lek, bid "ciao" and didn't care when I realised I'd left my nice aluminium water bottle in the car.

Finally, this bus that has been chocked next to the park in Saranda for two-and-a-half hours starts its engine. The tourist office said the last bus leaves at 2pm, and since "last" also seems to have meant "next", the least that can be said is that it's on time. Indeed, it is the only one; I called out to the sole minibus (an actual minibus) that passed me an hour ago with Gjirokastra displayed in its window and he could only shrug his shoulders, indicating with a finger that I would be the only passenger.

If only he knew I would have paid him €50.

Berlin in six hours and 70 years

Berlin. Call me when it's finished.

Construction, renovation, scaffolding, fencing, cranes, detours, ugliness. Everywhere I walk there are new buildings going up and a new underground going down.

I'm on a mere six-hour layover en route to Corfu from Paris. I've never been to Berlin, and have heard so many proclamations of love for the city that I had to sample it.

I've never actually "got" Germany. I love German beer but I hate the stodgy food. I have no affinity for the language. I don't care for cars, Kraftwerk or cabaret.

Granted, this is only my second time in the country (well, third if we're counting such brief blitzes as these; I took a day trip from Salzburg to Berchtesgaden in 2009 to see the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's fascinating mountaintop teahouse) but a week-long trip by public ferry boat five years ago to see the castles, towns and villages of the Rhine left me alarmed at my indifference. Much of it either seemed pretend, like a kind of Disneyland, or sterile, where flat soulless malls and assembly pavers filled bombed out centres once graced with pinnacled churches and cobblestone streets.

Now I'm staring in disbelief at these horrendous, riveted industrial pipes that pop up all over Berlin. The size of tree trunks and painted blue or pink, they thrust into the air and twist around buildings and blocks and over streets like a giant Tinker Toy oil refinery. The only other such pragmatic disregard I've seen for urban aesthetics is the vital but ugly system to funnel heat from Ulaanbaatar's powerhouse into the city centre from the outskirts so the residents don't all die in the frigid Mongolian winters.

Yet there are pockets here of deep beauty. The cupolas of the Neo-Renaissance Berliner Dom and the ionic columns of the Altes Museum flanking the lime trees in the 16th-century Lustgarten. The enormous Baroque churches of the Gendarmenmarkt, mirroring each other across the grand plaza of the Konzerthaus, where Beethoven's ninth premiered.

It occurs to me as I return to the airport that I may be missing the point of Berlin. It buzzes with birth and growth and vitality as the fifth German republic in a hundred years adds its own signature to the city's eclectic blend of architecture while galleries of young artists sprout inside extinct factories.

Or maybe I'm just delirious inside this 45 degree oven masquerading as a 45-minute airport bus.


Two views of Berlin

An American tour in Paris

Why do tourists humiliate themselves? Here comes an American-run tour, thirty strong, stopping and queuing for ice cream. Against the fashionable Parisian backdrop of women in easy backless summer blouses they've been decked out one and all in reflective yellow vests like a kindergarten class on a roadworks excursion.

The Paris Five

At the foot of the Pont Saint-Louis on the Isle Saint-Louis, across from the red awnings of La Brasserie de l'Isle Saint-Louis and beside the red-awninged cafe Le Flore en l'Ile, overlooking the Seine and overlooked by the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, at perhaps the most charming, most Parisian spot in all of Paris, I was arrested by five young men in their bare twenties—sporting van Dykes and waistbands that fell below underpants elastics—on flute, clarinet, guitar, two-piece drum kit and double bass, jamming in the long summer light on "Memories of my Father" like a seasoned jazz quintet.

Shakespeare and Co.

Books for sale plaster the walls of the most famous bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Co., a running maze of ceiling-high bookcases that tower to the ancient rafters in perpetual overflow in a two-storey, one-time monastery.

Upstairs is a reading room where the books are not for sale. Having been acquired as collections, often as estates, many are old and out of print.

In the corners are worn and cracked leather seats with collapsed cushions and shredded arms from the claws of the resident cat, and in one of them is me, reading passages from the out-of-print Selected Prose by Henry Miller amid the sparkling motes of morning light.

The sole window in the reading room is open to the fresh air and overlooks a small cobblestone path below that trickles out through a narrow garden and into the traffic of the Quai de Montebello. Beyond is the Seine, above it Notre Dame.

An old portable typewriter, maybe a Remington or a Royal, sits in front of the window atop a table where a young woman, consumed, captive to her notebook, scratches pencil scribbles into the morning quiet.

And suddenly a swarm of tourists who have heard of Shakespeare and Co. squall up the stairs and into the room, wheeling around us and clicking like chattering birds. They snap photos despite the signs requesting they not and pose in front of books they don't touch, spewing loud, vapid commentary and filling their iPhones with images of what their lives are not so they can be admired by those at home.

I am practically pushed aside by a vulgar American so she can pet the cat—"hey, kirty kirty!"—before she turns to her fat friends and yells "time-check! How are we doing for time? We need to make up ten minutes!" In waves they come, as they are drip-fed into the cramped aisles from their queue of uncouth on the cobblestones outside.

Then they clatter back down the narrow stairs and are gone. As the tempest clears and quiet returns, emerging at the foot of the bookcases across from me is a boy of nine or so sitting in an old wooden folding chair, unperturbed amidst the whirlwind, absorbed in a story.

There is hope for humanity yet.

The city of sorrows and living

Paris. It's one of the few places in the world I return to. This is my fourth time.

I love Paris. People ask me why, but it's for personal reasons that would be meaningless to anyone else. It was here where I had my heart, for the first time, truly broken. I was stood up on the Pont des Arts, the romantic pedestrian bridge which today is literally strained by that recent and tawdry phenomenon of love-locks. I sat in the Place des Vosges, sobbing a spectacle as I wrote a goodbye letter to the girl I loved.

Paris was cold. It was February and there was fog along the Seine. I was 26, I wore a second-hand woollen trench coat that the moths had started on, a narrow pin-stripe suit I found at the Salvation Army, and a new fedora I'd splashed out on.

My room was a crooked and peeling late night desperation at the top of five flights of dark, winding stairs. I was barked out of it in the morning in a language I commanded only in fragments, for using the shower, I think, without paying the extra francs.

I checked into the hostel on Rue des Bernardins under an assumed name instead and met a Dane who gave me ten francs on my last day there because I hadn't eaten in two days. I devoured bread and cheese gratefully, and cured it to something concrete with liquid yoghurt.

I played chess in the Jardins des Luxembourg. I eschewed the Eiffel Tower and wandered the lanes of the Quartier Latin. I shared strawberries with a stranger on a park bench and was invited to her house for coffee, where she practised her English discussing the recent election of a socialist parliament in France.

Today the thing I look forward to the most is tomorrow—breakfast of croissant, baguette, cafe au lait and jus d'orange at a table I shall own for hours.

It is the living here. The French live for now and eternity. They embrace artists, musicians and writers. What is the point of struggling every day like a rat treading water so you can one day enjoy your life? It is already here! And struggles will always come with it.

A warning on the Kettle Valley Railway

Wisdom on bears

About 7.30 in the morning I spot a bear fifty metres ahead of me. I must be downwind; it appears not to notice me as it emerges from the dense forest flanking the railway bed, saunters across my path, and slips back into the dark green shadows thick with deadfall. I halt immediately. Here's the thing with following a railway bed: there are two directions. You either go forward or you go back.

I've been waiting for this. I'm constantly seeing signs of animals, and indeed the animals themselves. There are deer prints all over the place, and a few days ago one strolled right through my camp, looking at me unperturbed from just metres away as I made my breakfast. On the trail I saw coyote scats, judging by all the undigested rabbit fur in it. There was a beautifully clear print of a mountain lion in the mud as I filled my water bladder at the river, and my uncertainty about other prints being cougar or bear was removed upon discovery of a big splat of bear poo fresh enough to still attract flies.

There is received wisdom on avoiding bears. One piece of advice is to wear a bear bell. This is simply a bell. You wear it like a cow. It goes "tinkle tinkle" and protects you from bears. You see, spooking a bear is something you don't want to do, because when they're spooked they can charge. It's usually a bluff because you've frightened them, but rather than putting your hands on your hips and saying, "oh, come on, now!" it's rather better to avoid the interaction to begin with. It's particularly easy to startle a bear in dense forest of thick green shadows. And sows with cubs aren't bluffing.

I do not have a bear bell.

Other advice, if you are on the receiving end of a charge, is to raise your arms above your head and bellow with all your bloody might to frighten it away. The frightened bear. You are trying to appear bigger than it. Than the bear. Bears stand on their hind legs at about eight feet.

This is why you have to hang your food so high in a tree when you make camp. (NEVER keep your food in your tent beside you, because when a bear comes inside in the middle of the night it will not make the distinction.) The dimensions for hanging your food are: ten feet in the air (so the bear doesn't simply pull it down) and six feet out from the trunk along the first branch, suspended by three feet of rope (so it doesn't simply climb the tree and pluck it like a sack of apples; black bears are exceptional climbers). So, the perfect tree has, as it's lowest branch, a stout projection at ninety degrees.

This perfect tree does not exist, by the way.

Grizzly bears can't climb trees but they are bigger (yes, bigger) so you have to hang it higher. And disregard that other stuff about bluffing, because grizzlies are territorial. The best thing to do is climb a tree.

This morning it's a black bear. With no choice but to press on, I pick up two stones to clack together and make a sharp sound that carries well ahead of me and walk cautiously forward. The bear is either disinterested in me or unaware and already gone.

I'm not in grizzly country. I don't think I would do this trek in grizzly country. This is what I tell the hunter I meet that evening who says to me, as I walk into a public campsite with a long branch I am using as a walking staff, "Is that all you carry with you? A stick?"

"You know, you're wrong," he says. "Last year my friends and I saw a grizzly with three cubs just on the other side of this lake. About two hundred metres from us. It stood up and looked at us, then behind it at her cubs, then at us again."

I wish he hadn't told me this story.