The Pillars of Hercules

Adrian said nothing. The policeman abandoned his attempt at conversation. Clearly, Adrian hated him. We drove about twenty miles. When the policeman got out at a crossroads Adrian discovered that some of the olive oil had leaked onto the carpet of his trunk, and he cursed and swore. It was obvious that the Albanians had few personal possessions, but they were maniacally fastidious about keeping them in good order.

The villages on the southern Albania coast looked Greek—blocky stucco huts in hillsides. We passed a ruined church.

“What religion are you?”

“None,” Adrian said.

“What about God?” I asked, sensing that I sounded like a character in a Graham Greene novel.

“I really don’t know—the whole thing confuses me,” Adrian said.

We soon were back above the coast again—great bluey-green bays and steep sluices of whitish rock. There was no one in the coves. No boats, no people, no villages. There was no litter. These were the emptiest and most beautiful beaches I had seen so far. Most of them were only accessible by sea, the cliff walls were too steep for any path. I was never to see such a coastline again in the Mediterranean. Nothing had happened here. Farther on there was a submarine base, with a large man-made cave cut into the mountainside at the shoreline for the sub to slide into. That was guarded, but that was the only man-made thing on this whole superb shore that still had the look of Illyria.

The Greek island of Ithaca, home to Ulysses, was only a hundred miles due south of here. Sailing back to Penelope, Ulysses would have seen these same cliffs and bays of this unspoiled coast.

We reached Sarandë in midafternoon. Adrian was edgy. He wanted to start back to Tirana immediately. I gave him the hundred dollars that we had agreed on and he dropped me at the Hotel Butrinti at the edge of town, just above the harbor.

“Is there a boat to Corfu?” I asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, yes. It will be here tomorrow at noon,” he said. “It is only one hour to Corfu Town.”

This was delightful news. The hotel was empty. I got a room and walked around the town, which was a strangely empty place, having been deserted by Albanians who had fled to Italy or Greece in search of work. There were a shirt factory and a carpet-weaving operation in Sarandë. There was a hospital. There were schools. What Sarandë lacked were people.

I met Fatmir, a friendly local man, whose parents had remained devoutly Muslim, he said, throughout the atheistic Hoxha years. He was fluent in English.

“I hope you will come back in ten years,” Fatmir said. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better, and I am better.”

The strangest thing of all—stranger than the ruin of Albania, the bad roads, the skinny people, the rural poverty, the broken glass, the vandalism, the cruelty, the unexpected kindness—stranger than all of this was the sudden appearance the next day of a boatload of tourists sailing into Sarandë harbor on a day trip from Greece. I had not seen any tourists for such a long time—none in Albania, none in Croatia, none in Slovenia, not even Trieste had tourists. I felt I had been through a mild ordeal and that I had made a personal discovery. At that point I bumped into a busload of package tourists on their day out.

I waited for them to return from their little tour of the ruins at Roman Butrinti, and then I sneaked onto the bus which was taking them back to their boat. I would simply pretend that I had been on their day trip and, just like that, would find my way to Corfu with the tourists.

These were nicer than the sort that in Gibraltar I had had to distinguish from apes, but still the genuine sunburned beer-swigging article. They hated Albania. They were disgusted by Sarandë—after my experience of the rest of Albania, Sarandë seemed pleasant, if a bit spectral. The tourists were shocked by the Hotel Butrinti. They mocked the Roman ruins.

Most of them were hard-up Britons who had come to Corfu because it was, they said, cheaper than a holiday at home. Kathleen and Sally, two older Irish women who worked in the same clothing factory in Dublin, had paid a little over four hundred dollars (£267) for two weeks in Corfu. This included their round-trip airfare from Dublin, as well as bed and breakfast at the hotel in Corfu. (“We couldn’t go for even a few days in Cork for that money.”)

“I’m not impressed at all,” one woman said, glancing at the town as we lined up on the quay.

“The food were filthy,” a man said in a strong Lancashire accent.

“The tea, I couldn’t drink it,” his Lancastrian companion said. “They make it out of flour, you know.”

“The Russians had something to do with this, I understand.”

They were bored, scared, exhausted.

One man next to me looked very depressed.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Me wife died at Christmas,” he said. Four months ago. “It was quite a blow.”

“How long were you married?”