The color of the wildflowers in the hedgerows and the music of the birdsong went a long way to ease the ache of my muscles and cool the sweat on my brow. Each hill climbed would reveal a vista of pine forests, upland moor or cultivated fields interspersed by small villages and connected by narrow lanes. The villages were a riot of color, every house with hanging flower pots or climbing vines. The villagers were always formally correct in manners and greetings, probably amused by visitors foolish enough to carry large loads on their backs at the height of the summer, but too polite to show it.
The French not only love flowers but are great vegetable gardeners. The nation as a whole is close to the land. Almost every country residence has a vegetable garden where the salad stuff and other vegetables stand in well-hoed rows. Anticipating an evening meal in a local restaurant, I passed through a village towards the end of an afternoon and caught sight of a chef picking last-minute salad items from the garden next to his restaurant.
A New Yorker, staying for a year in a French village a few years ago, found a way into the villagers' confidence by starting a garden. He found just the right way of getting accepted into their conservative lives. He wrote about it in a charming and perceptive book called "French Dirt". (French Dirt, The Story of a Garden in the South of France by John Goodman, 2002).
Stevenson's own book immediately became a small hit, earning him money and affording him time to go on to write the books for which he is primarily known: "Kidnapped", "Treasure
Island" and "Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". In a continuing search for a home in a climate which would be easier on his chronic ill health (he was consumptive), Stevenson bought with the proceeds from his book sales, a large property in Samoa. It was there, nursed by his American wife, that he died in l894, aged 44. The natives carried him to the top of a mountain, where he is buried. His famous requiem is inscribed on the tomb:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea;
And the hunter home from the hill".
My journey along the Stevenson Trail took nine days through a wonderful corner of rural, upland France. I met few other hikers on the route. I did share a couple of meals with a young fellow from Mulhouse, a mortician by trade, and his Swiss girl friend. I also met an English dentist who was walking clear through France, top to bottom. He was organized and fit, and seemed likely to complete the 700-plus miles.
The abiding memory of the rich French countryside, and of village life: the shutters and curtains on the windows, the climbing roses and vines on the walls, the sound of church bells, the noises and odors of the farmyard. To enjoy this requires an effort. Stevenson made clear his attitude to travel: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move". I share this sentiment entirely.
2005
ALBANIA: EUROPE'S
LAST MYSTERY
"Bloody hell, mate. You don't want to eat that!"
I was in a sandwich shop in downtown Tirana, the capital of Albania, trying to work out what to buy. The language of the speaker was English and the accent from the North of England. The young Albanian man who had just spoken was obviously amused at my surprised reaction. "Who are you?" I asked. "I am Gimi Tezekiu", he said, "I am cook in England". I had scarcely been in Tirana 4 hours and this was my first pleasant surprise -one of several which would occur in the next few days.
Albania, a small, undeveloped, mountainous country of 111,100 square miles (the size of Arizona) on the Adriatic Sea just north of Greece, is Europe's odd man out. For years it had a king named Zog, and later a communist dictator named Hoxha (pronounced Hoedja) who ruled for 40 years until 1985. The lasting memorial to this madman is 700,000 mushroom concrete bunkers embedded in the earth all over the country, designed to accommodate the country's population in the event of a nuclear war.
I arrived in Tirana (population 700,000) on an overnight bus from Skopje, Macedonia. The bus dropped me outside of Tirana's rundown railway station. Using my Lonely Planet guide to orient myself, I walked half a mile to the city center, a large square dotted with monuments and surrounded by huge Communist-era government buildings. In 1990, five years after Hoedja's death, there were no more than 500 cars in the while country - all belonging to the ruling elite. Now, in 2006, there were cars everywhere, and crossing the main square was a challenge. With the opening up of the economy also came the worst of uncontrolled free enterprise. Over 70% of the population lost their savings in a country-wide Ponzi scheme. Those who could left for Italy.
Now things had settled down, but the country remained desperately poor. They see themselves as Europe's poor cousins, and are hoping that entry into the European Community will bring them prosperity. They are a proud people with a unique language, like Basque, which they feel distinguishes them from other Balkan ethnic groups.
Walking around Tirana I admired a few old handsome buildings from the days of Italian influence under King Zog. Most of the apartment and public building were in. the huge, drab Communist style. An energetic recent Mayor of Tirana had started to paint some of the apartment blocks with bright primary colors adding some cheerfulness to the scene. There were lots of people wearing cheap clothes hanging around at street corners. I never felt at all threatened by them just depressed by the appearance of so many jobless. I ate fast food, sometimes seafood dishes at better restaurants, and bought fruit to snack on. I found a room with air conditioning for twenty dollars a night at a center run by US missionaries.
In a short time I had seen most of what Tirana had to offer. I started walking to the bus station to catch a bus to the coast. Realizing this was going to take more time than I expect, I asked a young man on the sidewalk, "Avtobus Berati?", the name of the town I was heading for. He nodded and pointed at his van parked nearby. I jumped in, and he took me to the bus station and I paid him like a taxi. This was so typical of the young people in Tirana: desperate to make some money and eager to please foreign visitors.
A minibus, called a furgeron, departed from the bus station after half an hour. This shared taxi concept is common throughout the Balkans and Middle East. They depart when they are full. We drove past stone-filled fields with scrawny animals grazing, and through nondescript villages; at regular intervals by the roadside, more mushroom-shaped bomb shelters would appear.
I got down from the minibus in the town of Sarande, and was immediately accosted by an older man saying "Room"? He had a young girl with him (his daughter) and, when I paused, she added something which I didn't understand. "Do you speak some English?" I asked. "I speak a lot of English," she replied indignantly. She went on to tell me that her family rented out a room in their home, and would be happy to show it to me. I am quite comfortable with being accosted by people with rooms to rent. I had a young woman anxious to practice her English so I was able to ask questions which I probably would not have been able to do in a hotel.
At a place called Butrint, right in the south of Albania, with the Greek resort island of Corfu visible no more than ten miles away, was a seventeen-acre national park. This UNESCO designated site was a microcosm of Mediterranean history, revealing Greek, Roman and Byzantine monuments, structures and baths. In the very early stages of being excavated, it was unusual in that there were no guards and no signs. So one could wander round almost at will, with a pamphlet in English, trying to work out what one was seeing. In the late afternoon of a warm summer day in the Balkans I had the place almost to myself.
Crossing the Adriatic on an overnight, uncomfortable ferry I arrived in the sophisticated Italian port city of Bari. The smartly dressed Italian official waved me through at once, but from this attitude I could see that the crowd of ill shaven, poorly dressed Albanians were not going to get through so easily. "Mirupafshim Shiqipperia: (Goodbye Albania), you deserve better I thought.
2002
CUBA: STUCK IN A TIME WARP
I went to Cuba mainly because travel there by U.S. citizens was forb
idden.
People told me: "Go now, and see it like it is, stuck in the past. As soon as U.S. tourists and American investors are allowed to go there, it will change." To legally prevent its citizens from visiting the defiant, bankrupt regime of Fidel Castro, the U.S. government had to turn to an obscure law which prohibits trading with the enemy.
Two million Europeans visit Cuba each year. Canada invests in Cuba, and has just finished building Havana's new airport. Plenty of Americans have visited and, so long as they don't advertise the fact too much, the U.S. Government has not taken action. There are no direct commercial flights between the USA and Cuba so you have to fly via Canada or Mexico. I went via Cancun, Mexico. I arranged the visa application and ticket purchase online. I was told to turn up at Cancun airport sufficiently early before the flight to take care of the visa which would be issued at the check-in desk.
From Ojinaga on the Texas border I took a bus to Chihuahua City (150 miles) and then a fourteen hour, 924-mile leg with Omnibus de Mexico to Mexico City. The Mercedes bus was about Greyhound standard of comfort and made several stops, but it was a trying experience. After a night in a cheap central hotel, I took another bus for 1,024 miles to Cancun. This bus was brand new but the toilet did not work and the smell was sickening. Not a promising start to my Cuban adventure.
In Cancun I stayed at a modest clean place in the old town, and soon recovered from the two long bus rides. Now the trip was about to begin. The next morning with some difficulty I found a public bus to the airport. There's always going to be a public bus to a city airport, how else do the airport workers get there? At the airport, I checked in at Cubana Airlines desk, and was then directed to a young man standing to one side. He filled out my passport details on a loose sheet, stamped it and handed it to me. This was my visa. It was that easy.
The one-hour flight to Havana was in an old Soviet Yak plane with worn fittings. The on-board snack was a sandwich with fatty meat inside. Still, there was a good camaraderie among the passengers, some excitement among the first timers and a sense of togetherness from several musicians who were clearly not on their first visit. The passengers were a mix of Cuban and Mexican businessmen and gringos carrying guitars or with backpacks. The music scene in Cuba is strong, and U.S. musicians are welcome.
At Havana airport I gave one dollar to the attendant in the men's room and was effusively thanked. Immigration and customs were speedy. I knew from reading a guidebook that I would have to shell out for an expensive taxi ride to the city center so when I came out of the terminal building I was not surprised to see a line of modern cars which served as taxis. Since there was no alternative, I agreed to twenty-five dollars for the eight mile ride with good grace and took a photo of the happy driver before we set off.
There was little traffic on the bumpy road into town. Some work trucks, with people standing in the back, passed by as well as a few 1950s-era U.S. automobiles and small Soviet Ladas. Occasional billboards of Che Guevara with socialist slogans shared space with palm trees along the route. Knots of people hung around street corners waiting for rides. The outskirts of Havana seemed run-down and shabby; I hoped the downtown area was not so depressing.
The driver dropped me off at a tourist-approved hotel near the city center which I had booked on the web. Nondescript, vaguely Soviet in style, it suited me since it was central and cheap. As soon as I had settled in, I made a phone call at the front desk to a contact, a local teacher whose name I had been given by a writer friend from Kansas City who had met her when he visited Havana a few years earlier.
This was Lucy Peralta, self-styled Professor of English, a personable and attractive young woman in her late twenties, with adequate English. She was at home, and I suggested she come to the hotel. Not possible, she said, Cubans were not allowed in tourist hotels. So we agreed to meet in a nearby coffee shop.
With Lucy and her friend I visited Morro Castle, guarding the entrance to Havana Bay.
She told me about her life which was difficult because of the dire economic situation. But, she acknowledged that it was better than that of many Cubans since she had had an education and could speak English. I soon felt comfortable enough with her to touch on political matters. She reflected a point of view shared by many Cubans who desperately wished for a better lifestyle in a free market economy, like that of the U.S.A. yet still felt some feelings of loyalty to Castro whose political credo was the cause of the economic mess because he had defied the big bully to the north.
Most of the tourists to Cuba stay at Varadero, a coastal strip of resort hotels 40 miles away. Here they enjoy clean beaches and western-style hotels. A few come to Old Havana, a World Heritage site, where many of the fine old pre-Revolutionary buildings have been beautifully restored. Very few tourists indeed travel elsewhere in Cuba, partly because the tourist infrastructure is not in place and the difficulty in getting around.
With only four days available, I stuck to Havana except for one guided tour into the nearby countryside to Vinales National Park which features jungle vegetation at lower elevations and unusual geologic formations in the limestone uplands. In Havana I walked along the famous Malecon, the seafront drive, visited the cathedral and Plaza de Armas, and ambled around the old city.
Fifties-era American automobiles were quite common. More bizarre were the city buses called camelos (camels), long truck-pulled passenger cars that provided urban transportation. Otherwise I walked, dropped into one or two old hotels famous for their previous mafia connections, observed a new medical building where Cuban doctors provided cut price operations to foreigners and visited the Museum of the Revolution which sorely needed a professional hand to display Cuba's powerful story.
With Lucy's help I moved out of my hotel into an apartment for not much more money. Renting to foreigners was now legal, part of a gradual move towards a free market economy. I also ate lobster in a private home, turned restaurant. This liberalization of the tourism development was introduced to boost tourism after the departure of the Soviets in the early nineties resulted in a freefall of the Cuban economy.
There were plenty of foreign tourists in the Old City where sex tourism was on full display. It was a common sight to see older European tourists escorting young Cuban women in bars and restaurants. "We don't think of this as payment for sex", Lucy said, "You should think of the payment as a gift". The whole prostitution scene made me uncomfortable and I pursued my own agenda: riding a bici-taxi, smoking some cigars. and talking with my apartment neighbors.
Lucy invited me to dinner at her house to meet her family. This meant I would buy chicken and other food which they would cook and we would all eat. Her parents lived in a spacious apartment in a downtown house. The previous owners had fled after Castro came to power, and the state had confiscated the house and given it to Lucy's family. It is going to be a tricky situation when Cuba joins the rest of the world, and former residents come back to claim their property. We didn't mention this matter over supper, which was a good natured and loud event.
The people on the streets seemed to keep busy just getting by. In the decaying section of central Havana dogs scavenged in the streets, families sat outside their homes enjoying the breeze and music poured from bars - the only uninhibited aspect of today's Cuba. Cubans are naturally sociable and talkative with a great love for music and sense of rhythm. There is no resentment against individual Americans. The older generation takes pride in Cuba's independence; the younger people wish there was the opportunity to earn a decent wage and to be able to travel abroad.
It was thought that the accession to the presidency of Raul Castro, Fidel's younger brother, might lead to more freeing up of the economy and even more individual rights. This does not seem to be happening. Cuba continues to suffer.
2003
SLOVENIA JOINS WESTERN EUROPE
KOBARID, SLOVENIA
"It was a little white town with a campanile in a valley" Hemingway wrote, "A clean little town with a fine fountain in a square." The na
me of the town in those days (1916) was Caporetto, which the literary giant described in "A Farewell to Arms", published in 1929.
Hemingway's experience was autobiographical; he was an ambulance driver for the Italian forces during the First World War who were fighting the Austro/German armies in the Julian Alps which form the frontier here. The little remembered campaign was a sideshow to the fighting on the Western Front. Yet, in the space of two years, the campaign resulted in a casualty list of close to three quarters of a million dead and wounded, blasted by cannon fire, frozen on the mountain tops, or gassed to death beyond recognition. I came to Caporetto, renamed Kobarid when the border was redrawn after nineteen forty-five, to visit a new museum which commemorates the campaign.
I had visited this corner of Europe before. In 1958, trying to hitchhike to Greece, I had stood at the top of one of the passes between Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. Now Yugoslavia no longer existed, and Slovenia was an independent nation. I had just read "After Yugoslavia" by the Welsh writer Zoe Bran, an account of a recent trip to Slovenia that won a book award in England.
I flew to Vienna, and rented a car. A four-hour drive brought me to Klagenfurt near the Slovenian border. Entering Slovenia over a mountain pass was a cursory matter; Slovenia will be the first country from the former Yugoslavia to join the European Union and they are anxious to show that they are efficient and ready to be a new member.
In the northeastern part of Slovenia, close to Italy and Austria, the terrain is alpine. Mountains are covered by forested slopes, rise to 12,000 feet and are drained by rushing streams of turquoise water. In the villages, flower pots adorn every windowsill. The towns and villages are well maintained and connected by good roads.
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