Kosovo, Round Two

Of course, not willing to let Kosovo bring me to my knees, I rose bright and early the next morning prepared to give Kosovo another shot at winning my love and affection.  I mean, who am I to let Kosovo bring me down like this?  While the UN isn’t giving me 8 or so million dollars per day to rebuild my shattered life, I still feel like I have one up on Kosovo.  Looking at the map, I shuddered at the notion of repeating my journey from the day before, so I opted to cut fresh tracks through a much less-frequented border crossing to the north at Letaj.

The “road” as suggested by the map really challenged my perceptions of what I had previously referred to as a “cowpath.”  What had been carved out of the hillside in terms of a level space to manoeuvre the furgon was rapidly depleting in the torrential downpour outside.  I was more than convinced this hadn’t been a good idea.  Also, as I was the only passenger, I was even more convinced something shady could happen which could cheat me out of tens of hundreds of pennies.  We arrived in a small town over the hill called Krume.  I had been advised by a young Albanian in Kukes who had ushered me into the furgon that it would cost me only 150 leke for the trip.  He spoke English with an east London accent, so there was no reason not to trust him.  When we reached the centre, the driver dropped me off in the middle of a traffic jam.  I gave him 160 leke, to which he screamed, angrily, “No!” He threw the coins to the ground and started cursing.  Seeing the bottleneck his furgon had created, I took my window and hopped out of the car, shouted “You have no recourse!” and fled the scene to a nearby café, where I drank a coffee to calm my nerves and listen to a man tell me about how much he loved Toronto.  I told him he’d never be a true Canadian with that attitude.

Still very much alarmed by the possibility of encountering my first foe of the day, in a territory renowned for ancient blood feuds and honour-killings, I erred on the side of caution and took a side street out of the city and hoped to meet up with the main road towards another border to Kosovo.  I met a group of schoolkids who followed me part of the way, and then was joined by two teenagers as well who wanted to talk with me.  The one chool kid who had remained at this point got into a fight with the teenagers, which I had to break up, and then as we were walking one of the teenagers decided to show me his set of brass knuckles.  And he asked how much my camera was.  And then he showed me his gun.  Assuming things could have got very rough, I decided not to show him my two iPods and wallet stuffed with 50 euro notes as well.  We continued walking—I starting to feel more like a hostage at this point—to the main road, but no aggression ensued.  Two theories: 1) fiery political rhetoric in the school system has raised all Albanian youth to believe that Americans and other members of NATO are not to be harmed; and 2) he had blond hair and knew that I knew how hard it was to be a blond* in Albania and felt an immediate connection with me.  

I managed to bid adieu peacefully to my armed escorts by citing my need for a coffee break at the first café that I happened upon (this was Albania, and luckily the ration of 3 cafes to every citizen worked in my favour).  I quickly downed a coffee and then left, assuming the youths had dispersed.  They hadn’t, but at this point they were disinterested in me and were off in a different direction.  The road lay open to me, and I flagged down what I assumed to be a furgon heading in my direction.  It wasn’t. It was a work truck but they were more than happy to take me right to the border.  As it turned out they worked in the mines.  Naturally, I thought this was the coolest thing ever.  Mining!  I immediately envisioned romantic images of 19^th century prospectors, peppered with excerpts from Zola’s Germinal.  I assumed they had struck a coal vein somewhere in the hills and sold their pickin’s to a small scale steel manufacturer.  However, after we crossed a crucial language barrier, I realised they were talking about mines, and that they worked to clear them from the Kosovo-Albania border.  Essentially, they were heroes, and I was simply a spoiled youth who wanted a free ride—which I got.  I also got a free shot of raki because when we stopped at a café along the way the power went out, rendering the espresso machine powerless.  Naturally, the backup choice at 10am is a bracer shot of raki.  They deposited me at the border and I walked across to a sweeping view of Kosovo and the city of Djakova below me.

The border crossing was a triumph of Socialist Realism that had been destroyed by nationalist ambitions just a few years ago.  The border guards, suitably surprised to find me walking across lethargically searched my bag (or rather sat and watched while I pulled out piles of dirty underwear looking for my gloves) and then send me on my way.  They warned to stay on the road only, which was happily mine-free.  The road signs confirmed this.  After slipping on some mud and tearing an enormous hole in my jeans, I was picked up by a dumptruck driver from Albania who had lived in the UK and worked on the Heathrow Terminal expansion.  Evidently, Heathrow users have the population of Albania to thank for the expansion because the majority of Albanians I have met had something to do with it.    He told me that he came back to Albania to be with his family and achieve his life dream of opening a café.  I seized on this opportunity to demand that his café serve pastries along with coffee.  In my biased opinion, this is the one thing standing between Albania and the EU.  He was hesitant, but he had noticed that in the UK people liked pastries with their coffee, but he wasn’t sure it would work in Albania.  Anyways, I planted the seed.  I did what I could do to ease the burden of future travelers to Albania, so we’ll see in a few years if all my efforts had been in vain.

Djakova was a charming little city with a Turkish bazaar for everyday use and a brilliant bus depot of the finest Yugoslavian style.  I paid the international rate to Peja, another little nugget wedged between the mountains leading into Montenegro where I met up with my Finnish couchsurfing hostess (not before being passed by a young Kosovar gentlemen in a car blasting Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” with windows rolled down however).  It was the perfect evening: we ate pizza, and she lent me some thread to fix my jeans.  The next morning, fully rested and fed, I was ready to brave the mountain pass and get myself on the right road to Sarajevo, if there even was one.  The thought of going to Bosnia suddenly dawned on me.  Bosnia.   I had no idea what to expect.  I wished then more than ever that I had access to Wikipedia.

*You’ll remember (or you won’t) that an Albanian supermodel told me that tall, blond, broad-shouldered, fair-skinned men are not considered attractive by Albanian standards.