Why I wanted the adventure of it, and I’d a waded neck deep in blood.
—Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn

In Vlore last week, with an English bloke from Birmingham named Stuart, I made it my goal to hitchhike.

Vlore is a crowded line of sunburned concrete buildings on a flat plain between mountain and sea, whose welcome sign states earnestly: “Vlore, because you’d forget anything else.” Anxious to leave, to find a real beach, and to attempt the humble art of hitchhiking, we marched an hour out of town along the coast on the only highway south, and we held out our thumbs, which to the hospitable and generous Albanians, coming from two obvious Westerners, is a beacon of need. The third car to see this, a red Jeep, stopped and drove us under a ridge and around a cove to Orikum, from whence we trekked away from the coast and across an empty plain towards a line of mountains. A car stopped and offered the last two spots on the back seat to Stuart, me, and our backpacks, for an oppressive ten minute ride, at the end of which the mountains were a lot taller and Sarande still a long way away.

We revised our destination from this distant goal to Dhërmi, about halfway between Vlore and Serande on the Albanian coast, which on the map looked no more than fifteen miles away. “We’ll be there by nightfall,” said Stuart. Unfortunately the Llogara Pass, which on the map is nothing but a cluster of letters, is in reality a topographical obstacle course, threaded by a road, which on said map looks straight, that winds and climbs and falls on a roller coaster maze, and in many places collapses from the two lanes of potholed pavement to dirt and chaff.

After walking a mile or so, a laden oil tanker rumbled to a stop before our thumbs, and we climbed up into the cab with Fatmir of Fier. Together we drove up into the pass and watched the panoramic mountains and pristine forests pass by through windows sealed shut, roasting in the heat that this mechanical malfunction produced. Fatmir spoke only a few words of English, but on his cell phone he called his son, a student in Vlore, to talk to us. For the last stage of the trip we sat in silence as Fatmir coasted down the switchbacks on a forty degree hillside a kilometer high, crowded with derelict bunkers and a military base that had a guard painted on the wall, down into the valley of Dhërmi and the Drymades beaches.

We started this long, strange trip from Berati, a Turk town enclosed in similarly vertiginous geography. Stuart and I were both staying at the backpacker’s hostel there, along with two Australians and a Californian whom I had met before in Tirana. Albanian tourism is a small and close-knit affair. The hostel opened only a few years before, part of a budding tourist sector in this country, and had yet to appear in any of the guidebooks which are a traveler’s Bible. The locals just call it Scotty’s, since Scotty, a Brit from Newcastle, is the sole proprietor of the currently-being-renovated building.

Scott conscripted some local labor to help build a bamboo fence around the practical plot of lemon and fig trees and grape vines that his hostel, like most Albanian houses, has for a backyard. The worker was an old Butrintian, a relative of the Albanian who supplied the bamboo, and finished only half the fence after a day of work, despite a vow to get done the whole thing. Scott responded by giving the man 500 lek less than the agreed on wage. This drove the venerable worker into a berserk furor against Scott’s unconventional management, and the long-winded tirade included, amongst other protestations, a complaint that Scott had failed to furnish him with raki. The offended party then refused to take any of the reduced money, a term which Scott readily accepted and was summarily withdrawn from the bargaining table. The Butrintian then took his reduced salary and left to complain to Scott’s neighbor, who called the hostel later.

Business works differently in Albania. Lowering a payment is a grand offense. This custom, which Scott supposes is a legacy of socialism, contributes to an uncompetitive, unsustainable, and plain lazy work ethic. The Albanians take on a contract, do a shit job of it, and accept their guaranteed payment without any regard for reputation or future opportunity.

Anyway since Stuart the Englander and I were going to Serande on the same Thursday, we went together to the bus station, and there being no buses to Serande until 2 — and understand that there are no posted schedules in Albania, where bad roads, constant construction, and the aforementioned work ethic mean buses rarely show up on time; the station manager in Berat had to write down 14:00 on a slip of paper for us stupid Westerners — we boarded the bus to Vlore on the sea, from whence we came to Dhërmi.

The tourist season was about to start in Dhërmi, a small and rapidly-developing coastal resort. Rapidly developing here means there are ugly concrete towers everywhere, empty amplifiers for the ubiquitous grumble of jackhammers and drills and industrial awakening, but Dhërmi was quite modest in its construction, having only a small, steep strip of beach to develop. Being so early in the season, it was really only the seasonal and service workers there, doing some vacationing of their own while they prepared for the summer throngs. Stuart and I found a nearly empty beachside hotel, bargained down the price to 1000 lek, and went to get cheap grilled fish.

On Albanian food: It’s always fresh, because they don’t import anything and have no such marvels as supermarkets. This limits selection — seafood to the coast, produce to the season — and enforces on Albanians a pragmatic and practical diet based around what is available. When I was there this meant unripened figs, lime green and sour and disgusting, but in summer months buckets of fresh-picked cherries and grapes and citrus fruits descend on the cities, all cheap and delicious for having never been frozen and thawed by Walmart. So this mullet fish I ate was really good.

The next day we walked around on the pebble beach and the porous ruins of rocky formations, and then climbed back up the hill to the highway, perched above the town. We had to walk a ways across the cliff and through a sunny town where donkies rested in the rubble between the concrete layers of half-finished buildings, until a truck heeded our distress. “Holy shit dude,” I exclaimed. “It’s Fatmir.” It was indeed our friend Fatmir of Fier, driving the same route as the day before, who was inexplicably ecstatic to see us climb into his cab again. He could only drive us a few kilometers, he explained in hand signs, after which we would have to get out.

Body language is not as universal as humans might think. The Albanians, as you may have heard, do shake their head for Yes and nod for No, but the shaking of the head is more of a rocking from side to side, and the nod is a violent upward motion accompanied by a clicking of the tongue. For Food, instead of pointing a single finger toward an open maw, they drive their flattened hand straight into their mouth. On the road we saw many drivers who could not accept us into their cars, but nevertheless felt generous enough to not just look away; they shrugged and pointed down, and the latter of these gestures eluded our translation.

Fatmir’s much more complicated transmission also remained indecipherable, almost up to the time when Fatmir stopped his tanker truck and pointed at the door. He drove off on a dirt road to somewhere, but we still had a ways to go. Mountains obstructed the road almost all the way to Serande, so even an hour broiling in Fatmir’s mechanically sealed cab had not carried us far on the map. The hour being late, we worried that we might have to betray the hitchhiking spirit which had so recently invested us, and catch the night bus on its way down the coast.

Luckily, another trucker pulled over for us. He took us a few miles, then got out with us, and, leaving his truck, hailed an air-conditioned tourist bus and shuffled us aboard. Stuart and I sat in the back next to someone’s abandoned gear. The owner soon returned and sat down, then offered me a water bottle, which I refused politely, pointing to my own. The man waved his bottle and said a few words I didn’t catch, and then said, “Scotch.”

I asked, “Raki?”

He said, “Raki,” and this time when he offered the bottle I took it and drank some of the foul homemade brandy inside. Stuart pulled out a similarly inconspicuous water bottle full of Turkish ouzo, and pretty soon these were circling our tiny backseat cabal.

The Albanian, whom Hemingway would describe as already tight, taught math at a secondary school in Tirana. The bus was full of his coworkers, most of them drunk but not quite so much as our friend. One of the gang, a young woman, yelled over the loud speaker, which also blared some 90s hip hop and Albanian ranchero. The bus stopped a little after sunset and let us all out for a break of coffee and cigarettes. Mr. Math offered us cigarettes and since his mode of offering was to put the cigarette in your mouth I saw no way of refusing, but Stuart said no since he had just quit, which Mr. Math seemed to understand. We went inside and sat down at a table with Mr. Math and a gym teacher. We ordered espressos, and the math teacher ordered us raki, then paid for it all with a grin.

Up into the bus we went, and away into the mountains, and after Mr. Math’s raki was gone and the Turkish stuff half consumed, a teacher of electronics began to yell at us from the aisle. The gym teacher, who spoke English, said, “Your ouzo smells very bad. You must put it away.” Whether this man was a teatoller or simply, like most Albanians, hated Greece we never knew.

It was dark when we arrived in Serande, and Stuart and I got a room at the same unnamed hotel — unless you count “Hotel” written in chalk on the water tank as a name — as the drunken instructors, which was just up fro the port on the city’s crescent bay. Far more than being under development, Seande was in the throes of a constructive revolution. Unfinished and gaily painted concrete slabs sprouted from the hills like fungii, amid growing piles of trash. The guidebook said that the locals had recently stopped dumping untreated sewage directly into the sea, but that the water was probably still too filthy to swim in. On our way back to the hotel from a small sandwich shop, we ran into Mr. Math, who was leaning against a railway on the sidewalk. He grinned when he saw us, and his dilated eyes shone with wild energy. We said Hi, and he responded by siezing my arm and leading me down the street toward the city, saying, “Disco!” I escaped from the vice of Mr. Math’s determined embrace, and two other teachers came out from somewhere just as he was going for Stuart.

They asked us where we were from, and did not react at all when Stuart said England but were overcome with affection when I told them my home was America. “Bush, Bush!” they cried in adulation as they raised their thumbs toward the heavens. George W. Bush, much despised in his own country, is a hero among the Albanians, for he affirmed their respectability with a personal visit and supported the independence of ethnically-Albanian Kosovo from the evil Serb. When it came to the current president, the teachers glowered comically and gave him two thumbs down. “Obama!” They spat the word. “Obama negro! Kapoot!” (Albanians, in addition to being unexpectedly magnanimous, are extraordinary racists.) They explained that they were looking for a disco, and we followed them until they ducked into the nearest bar full of old men.

The next day we bargained for a football at a market and walked around. Stuart tapped a box of cigarettes with his foot, wondering if providence would grant him some. Later we observed a peculiar Albanian tradition that I call Walking Time, which I have defined through observation and conjecture. It generally occurs between 6 and 9 in the evening. Everyone in town and from the surrounding area puts on their best reproductions of American name brand clothes and heads to the boardwalk, where they find an unmarked pedestrian circuit. They walk down the main streets and circle back on the parallels, stopping every once in a while to sit and watch the other walkers, or to chat with someone they know. A few people stop for coffee or beer in the cafés, but this is generally a penniless social function; most of the people you see in cafés or restaraunts or bars are the owners, who suck down the stock while waiting for customers. The girls travel in flocks, overseen by a grandmother chaperone who interviews any would-be suitors before they approach the young ladies, and who ensures that they are home by 9. The young and old men stay out later, but are generally home by 10. Without money there is nothing to do, except Walking Time.

It was Saturday, and we ate dinner at the hotel. Nobody spoke English and there weren’t any menus, so our order was: fish, salata, pasta. What we ended up with was a rustic feast: A huge grilled fish each, head intact, on a plate with spinach; a pile of cold and flaccid french fries doused in olive oil and oregano; a mean salad of tomatoes and cucumber and cheese; a plate of overdone mussels; a loaf of bread; and a plate of olives. It is said that you can go to any rural house in Albania and point at one of the chickens that pester the yard, and for €10 receive a home-cooked meal. I don’t know if they would even charge you for it. Albanians have a reflexive culture of hospitality that defies their means.

A cruise ship came in that night, and the next day disgorged a boatload of pale-faced tourists in Khakis and Ray Bans who gawked at poverty, bought a tiny coffee, and left to sit by the pool. We watched them get lost from a beer tent near soem old ruins in the center of the town, and we were sitting in there when Stuart commented on an incredible handlebar mustache. I looked up and saw a red-faced man in his 50′s, in a grey sweater, sweatpants, and sandals, with a wicked handlebar mustache and a pile of grey hair over a long, lined face, who was talking with some of the Missouri tourists in a loud, wet, sandy voice, and I knew it was Bob the Drunken Irishman, whom I had heard legends of in Tirana and Berat.

After dark, when we started looking for him, I remembered some other things about him — that he frequented a bar called Princes — so we went there and asked the bartender. All the staff started saying “Bobe” and “Bobby,” and one said, “Irish,” and they pointed down the street. We followed the road to a strip club, which had a sign that said Lolita next to a neon 80s vixen. I was sure Bobby was inside, but before we went to check he came walking down the adjacent street and went into a bakery. Our hastily developed plan was to stand in front of the bakery and hope Bob started talking to us on his way out, but he just walked on by with his hot dog so we had to follow him. We trailed him for a few blocks before I thought of something to say. Then I ran up to him and said, “Hey are you Bob? I met your friend Joel in Tirana.”

Joel the Australian had first told me about Bob, and Bob brightened at the mention of him, and even more at the thought of getting beer. “Buy us a beer and I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said.

Bob led the way to a basement bar and sat down at a table. “Full of criminals, but good people. Oh for fuck’s sake, what the fuck is going on?” He started yelling in Albanian about the location of our beer, then had trouble remembering where his eight kids were. His Tom Waits growl carried a fierce Welsh accent, for although his parents were Irish he was a Drunken Welshman through and through. He had on the same sweater and sweatpants as earlier, and wore a red rubber band on one arm and a shattered watch on the other, which had no hands to mark the time. He offered us cigarettes, which Stuart and I refused in turn, and I noticed his three fingers were stained yellow, and his mustache burned black over the lips. Bob always had a blue plastic bag full of documents, and he set this down on the table and pulled out his Albanian deportation notice, which he said he intended to frame.

The Welshman told us stories of a million things, of criminals and women and deals gone sour, of beating up private investigators and spiting California corporations, and then the bartender kicked us out — “Have good sex!” shouted Bob — and we went to the beer tent. The buses were unloaded gangs of women from Durres and some other coastal cities, but we just sat with Bob. We got some Albanian draft beers and Bob again offered cigarettes. This time Stuart said, “I’ll have a fag,” later adding, “I didn’t want to buy him all that beer for nothing.”

Serendipity they call it: making fortunate discoveries purely by chance.
—Bob of Wales

The next morning we got up after 10 and headed toward the bus station. Bob had invited us to have coffee with him at sunrise in some café behind the port authority, where the waitress had her tits hanging out or something, but we missed that. We ran into Bob anyway. He was walking down the street with a sweating bottle of beer in his hand.

“Boys!” he said. “Come over here. The bus? Nah, that doesn’t leave till 11:30. Plenty of time. Hey Bajram! Tom, Amerikanse. Stuart, Englaise.” Bob started yelling in Bajram’s face about a club he had shown us the night before. “They wanted five-hundred lek for a bottle of beer! Five-hundred lek! I offered 300 lek but the owner’s cousin was there and he said no. He doesn’t know anything about fucking business. He buys those beers for a hundred lek. If he sold them to us for three-hundred lek, that’s two-hundred lek profit. But he wouldn’t, so he gets zero lek. Bajram knows how to do business. He worked in Corfu for four months, and his misses speaks seven languages. He speaks five. He sells these beers for a hundred-and-fifty lek, but he sells them to me for a hundred, since he knows I’ll drink fifteen of them in a day.”

Bob went on and on about this, and about how he intended to punch someone in the face, and about some hotel we should go to where there were a lot of hot girls, and about this bar he designed and how on Monday mornings the hot high school girls go there, and he’s kind of a father figure to them because he’s nicer than their dads and wears sandals, and finally it got close enough to when the bus departed to politely excuse ourselves.

Stuart and I decided that Bob is what happens when you travel too much. Both of us had encountered strangely haughty long-term travelers before, caught up in the preponderance of their glamorous privilege. Stuart heard from some Ukrainians of a Lonely Planet writer who, when asked, said, “I’m originally from England, but really I’m from my backpack.” Travel can be added to Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll — which Bob yelled in Albanian — as an activity which, in excess, can turn you into an asshole.

After leaving Bob we got on a minibus crammed full of Albanians that sped off south on a winding one lane road, and only one time had to slam on the breaks to avoid careening into a bus coming the opposite direction. It stopped at the peninsular ruins of Butrint, which bears the monuments of every major Mediterranean empire: a Greek theater, Hellenistic gates, Roman walls, a Turkish palace, and a Venetian fort, all on top of Illyrian ruins. The Albanians, who like to utilize their archaeological remnants, had opened a bar on the Acropolis, and a nice hotel in an old mansion outside.

On Monday we took the bus to Ksimil, where there are pristine beaches, and rented a yellow pedalboat, which we sailed out to explore each of the three islands. We helped two sunburned Albanians, who had picked up two baby seagulls and a shirtfull of eggs, retrieve their dolphin-shaped pedalboat on the third island, rammed another Albanian pedalboat off the coast, and hunted some animal on the second island. Nautical adventures complete, we took the bus back to Serande, where I got the best pizza I’ve ever had from a Halall restaurant.

This same day I felt a restless greed which is unique to this trip, but which has fettered my cognition before, in Paris and Germany and Budapest. It is a pathological need to move, to ramble on, to venture somewhere unknown; a traveler’s addiction that defies apprehension and the comfort of familiarity, which brought Bob to Albania and carried me across the water on a streamlined ferry to Corfu and an ancient and indomitable nation called Hellas.

I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go of small cities no less than of great. For most of those which were great once are small today, and those which used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.
—Herodotus

There are two kinds of roads: Those where you have to wait for goat herds, and those where you don’t. Albanian roads are among the former.

No buses or trains go there from the Montenegrin capital, and if you do take a bus that goes through Albania to Greece or some further destination, it will not stop anywhere along the road, but remains sealed as if quarantined. I took a cab from Podgorica up over the hills around Lake Skadar, and walked from the exit station into Albania. A red Mercedes drove up while the guard was checking my passport. A guy got out and handed over his wallet. He talked to the guard, who pointed at me and said, “Shkodra?” I said yes that was where I was headed. The guard pointed me toward the Mercedes.

The driver looked like Robert Forster. His plaid shirt had the sleeves rolled up and half the buttons undone, and he lit a Marlborough and put my bag in the trunk of his car next to some plants while the guard entered the rest of my passport information into an old computer. The man’s name was something like Niem, and the only English words he knew were “New York” and “Michigan,” so our conversation was pretty short. Not many Albanians speak English, although many speak Italian, which they learn from watching soap operas from across the Adriatic. I relied on the few Spanish phrases I remember from High School and on the universal language of Charades.

Niem chain-smoked and gunned his Mercedes past the horse-drawn carts, skeletal scooters, and 2-cylinder Volkswagon trucks on the rotted, perforated highway around the lake to Shkodra. I also noticed a lot of other decade old Mercedes like Niem’s, which seemed strange until I learned that Albanians were notorious for stealing cars from Northern Europe, and that they preferred Mercedes since only a tough steel-framed car could endure Albania’s rickety pavement. One time a top ambassador was caught at the Montenegrin border driving a car reported as stolen.

Shkodra looks like a experiment in Soviet reconstructive architecture gone wrong, where everyone takes fashion tips from Saturday Night Fever. Monday I visited the Marubi photo exhibition of two dozen century-ripened pictures of Albanians in ethnic garb and mustachioed Turks with long rifles in their laps, and I walked south through the slums to the Rozafa fortress. On the way back down I gave some lek to a kid who held out one hand and pointed at his stomach with the other, and who then followed me halfway down the hill grabbing at me and whimpering in mosquito-like desperation even though I didn’t have anything more to give him. Most locals dismiss such beggars with a vicious blast of shouting, so my polite evasion might as well have been weeping empathy.

In the lobby of my hotel I met a Canadian from Vancouver named Tyrone, who was there with his two brothers, Michael and Chad, who were twins that didn’t look anything alike. We went to a café for Kosovan beers and watched Newcastle and Portsmouth fail to score while the sportscasters shouted at them. (The Albanian language is neither Slavic nor Latinate nor Germanic, but a remnant evolution of Illyrian that survived the centuries in a Basque-like case of isolated perseverance. Also, they nod for yes, shake their heads for no.) All the cafés in Skhodra get Sky Sports and show football games constantly.

Pretty soon (at 11:30) we were the only ones left, and the bartender pulled the metal screens down over the windows. He didn’t speak any English and only a little Italian, but he came with us when we left and introduced himself as Betsmir. Music and song led us through the empty streets and past the central round-about to a hole in the wall called Von Café.

Every table but one, which we soon occupied, was crowded with balding and toothless Albanians who with boisterous enthusiasm watched the matronly songstress, accompanied by a musician on two electric keyboards, perform old Albanian ballads in the narrow aisle between the tables. She was about five feet tall. The red-gold color of her frazzled hair did not distract from her old age, nor could her short red skirt, black stockings, and black blouse, or even the ruby red slippers diffuse the weariness of her form. Yet the gathered crowd of elders showered her with applause and attentive eyes, and one balding man in a plaid shirt sprinkled 200 lek ($2) bills over her mane. The rude cabaret glow of manly attention smoothed her wrinkled features and greased her joints for carnal gyrations, so if you saw her dancing out of the corner of your eye she almost looked young again.

I was shaken by the profundity of her defiant appearance — this icon of faded beauty, clinging with misapprehension to the bygone days of her preeminent luster — and ruminated carefully until interrupted by the arrival of some Albanian sausages. The ingredients in sausages here are of questionable provenance. I don’t even know if they are sausages, since one time in Montenegro when I asked if they were sausages a girl said, “Kind of,” and looked coyly and uncomfortably away. They look like a Jimmy Dean breakfast, though, and were really good.

In addition to ordering food, Betsmir the off-work bartender showed us which beers to drink by pointing, and he passed out Rothman cigarettes. He introduced us to his friends, because everyone in Albania knows each other. When you see someone you know here you honk your horn (also if you see someone you have seen before or do not like, if you see a girl in a skirt or in shorts, if you think someone might move in front of your car, if you might move in front of someone else’s car, if there is a pedestrian in the road, or if someone in front of you considers stopping for a red light, although these are only present at the busiest intersections in the capital, and are usually not working anyway), and as a result the streets are as crowded with honks as they are with trash.

Police showed up because of the deafening noise of the music, but the bartender yelled at them and physically pushed them out of the café. The singing stopped, though, and the musician packed up his keyboards. Some of the 18-year-olds started a fight and had to be kicked out. Finally we left and went across the empty round-about to the hotel, where we had to wake up the night manager to get in.

In the morning we checked out with the help of a loud white-haired American gentleman who drove a yellow Hummer with Michigan plates.

“Can we leave our stuff here?” asked Chad.

The Michigan man then translated into Albanian with a method I thought only existed in movies: “THEY… WANT… TO… LEAVE… THEIR… BAGS,” he said, pointing briskly at the backpack pile, “HERE.” The maid, bowing under the weight of his diction, nodded, and the American told us, “She said yes.”

We had arranged to meet an Albanian man from the Von Cafe at 10 that morning who happened to run a restaraunt in Vancouver 9 months of the year. He had balding grey hair, and gold jewelry peaked out from his sagging leather jacket. He ordered us tea with fruit-punch liqueur, which you mix together, and then some espressos. His name as he said it might have been Petrovic and probably was not Patrick, but he told us to call him Peter.

Patrick told us about living in Albania, and then started talking with the Canadians about where his restaurant and house are located in Vancouver. Since the cartographical debates that always ensue when two people from the same city try to pinpoint the exact street where something is located, as well as nearby monuments and eateries, are only interesting to people who live there, I tuned the rest out, but could not help but hear when Patrick suddenly said of Albania: “No money… No money… No money, no honey. Ha!”

Tirana is a charicature of capitalist society. In the 90s, this city was thrown recklessly from fifty years of isolation into Western excess, even though it has no money. The largest building before the collapse of the Soviet Union was Comrade Enver Hoxha’s pyramid, which looks like the Battlestar Galactica. Since then hundreds of towering condos and office buildings have gone up with ironically Soviet features. The Albanians painted these concrete complexes with a pinstripe rainbow of colors that make them look comic rather than cultural.

Plastic bags are a ubiquitous novelty, used in grocery stores, markets, and at street stands to wrap every item the individually and then double wrap the hole package, and then to be discarded at the nearest park. There is trash everywhere, and the cars all smoke pollutants like Humphrey Bogart. An American embassy worker saw his doctor after three years in Tirana and was told to stop smoking cigarettes, which the worker had never touched.

The streets are madness, torn up roads ruled by a wild storm of lawless traffic, the chaos helped in no small part by the consumption of homemade wine and grappa-style brandy called raki. I saw only three traffic lights in the capital, a round-a-bout where traffic goes both ways, and plenty of policia who breathed through their whistles and wave white-gloved hands around while cars circle them heedlessly, following only their own personal road rules.

They serve real Temple of Doom fare here. I’ve tried stomach, intestines, and liver, as well as more sedate food like stuffed peppers and something like quiche, all of which was delicious. I skipped the lambs’ heads — eyes, brains, and all. These unsettling delicacies roast on spits next to the ones holding chickens and sell out twice as fast. On Saturday I went to Lizard, which is a regular sort of bar with kitschy decorations and overpriced drinks (that is nevertheless unique in Albania, where bare-walled and high-windowed cafés are the only places to drink), and to Charles, where we saw an Albanian cover band play Nirvana and CCR and some Albanian hits and jam Stevie Ray Vaughan style, but on weekday nights the city dies after 11 p.m. and becomes the domain of the stray dogs and the street sweepers.

One such night I played dominoes and drank tea and raki with one of the owners of the hostel, his cousin, and Trine-Lise, a photographer and ex-prison guard from Norway, and I learned about Albanian hardship: her borders shaved away by the Great Powers to placate Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece at the beginning of the century, and in the 1930s even more lost to Greece, which remains technically at war with Albania. The people of Kosovo and the northwest corner of Greece, as well as half the population of Montenegro, still fly the black on red two-headed eagle flag of Albania over their houses. The Albanians are proud of their trodden-on country and its few moments of glory.

I took a bus from the northern city station, just next to the Gypsy town and the combination garbage dump and sheep pasture, up into the mountains to Kruja, where the Albanian hero Skanderberg held off the Ottoman attempts to reconquer the rebellious province. From the castle, which is full of oversized statues of mountainous Skanderberg and murals of his noble acts that are framed with the same reverance as the Stations of the Cross, you can see the half-built apartments that tower over old tile-roofed Turkic homes, and the highlands that slope off toward the sea.

I got into Berat late on Sunday. It had been sunny all day, but I saw stormclouds up the Osumi River valley. Some kid asked me where I was from, and I told him “America,” and asked if he knew where the hostel was. Pretty soon there were a dozen boys in a circle, all conferring about this “hostel” and asking me questions in Albanian, until some adults came by and yelled at them to scatter — “Eke!” They pointed me towards a hotel, but I went into an Internet café instead and found out where the hostel was. By then the stormclouds were much bigger and almost solid black, and the grey sheet of rain under them flashed with lightning. The tempest at my back, the hostel somewhere across the river, I ducked into a hotel, just before the downpour started.

I got a room for €20 and then went down to the hotel bar, where I met a Canadian named Frederick, a financial consultant traveling around Albania and Macedonia on his way to meet his nephew in Istanbul. He told me that he had come from Seranda in the south, and that he had met a drunk Irishman there. “What was his name?” I asked. I’d heard about the Drunk Irishman of Seranda from two other people.

His name is Bob, and he is 60 years old, with a white handlebar moustache, and 8 kids scattered around the world. In the morning he is surly and grumbling until he starts drinking, which by noon makes him tolerable, or at least coherent, and by afternoon renders him good company as only the Irish can be. By evening, he is grumbling again, and also beligerant and insulting. Bob has been living in the little coastal dump of Seranda for 8 years on an expired visa. The Albanian government finally caught up with him when he helped some Englishmen buy local beachfront property, and he was supposed to be deported a week ago. He has to leave the country for 90 days, but then he plans to come right back.

Frederick got caught by him in the early evening, when Bob shouted, “Where’reyafrom,” across the bar. “I half expected him to have an eye-patch and a peg leg,” the Canadian told me. A few hours of drinking ensued, which ended when Bob, after berating the Canadian, the haggard waitress, and everyone at the bar, picked up a table and smashed it into the ground in a drunken exertion of primordial strength that cracked the marble tabletop in half. Frederick bailed, and Bob probably spent the rest of the night drinking with the bouncers.

The gutted clouds had cleared by 10 that night — although I was too absorbed watching CSI: New York and Ransom on the TV in my room to notice — and returned the following night for a similarly brief storm. In between I moved into the hostel, and saw the fortress on the hill above the town. On Tuesday, I traveled by bus, furgon van, taxi, and foot to the ruins of Apollonia. It was a Greek colony in Illyrian tribal land, and later the schooling spot of Octavian Augustus, the first Roman emperor. From up on the defensible acropolis you can see across miles of flat agricultural land and a web of small modern cities. The curving stone seats of the Odeon theater still rest against the hillside, but most of the ancient city is nothing but an overgrown marble outline, like a human silhouette at a crime scene.

Great in Herodotus’ time, today Apollonia dances for small change from gentlemen. It is a playground for ants and an obstacle for shephards.