Travelers park their bus on the beach near Borsh in Albania.
Photo: IMAGO / Kickner
It was the end of the summer when my life partner and I spent one of our first vacations without children and planning in Albania. Booked a flight to Corfu, walked from the airport through the small Greek town past taverns and port warehouses to the ferry terminal. Border control there: three women in uniform kept a conveyor belt running, the electronic passageway beeped in sync with the sound of a radio, and the luggage of the two handfuls of people wanting to travel jerked through the luggage scanner without anyone wasting a glance at the monitor. During the funniest border passage of my life, weapons were waved and directed, and laughter was also practiced.
A small ship rocked across the Ionian Sea to Saranda in Albania, the skyscrapers getting prettier as we got closer. Bustle on the beach until late at night. Very early in the morning a full bus drove into the mountains, we behind blind windows. It smelled, it was hot, I couldn’t stand it. Next stop a café on a bend. We remained seated when the toilet-goers got back on.
A guest of the café presented his half-broken car as a taxi and wanted to drive us to his cousin’s by the sea. I perked up, we agreed and rocked down into a bay. A river had created the broad delta a hundred kilometers across from Apulia. Green crowded to the edge of the sea, which suddenly appeared, uncultivated and unbounded. A dusty track at the top of the slope, then sand, light and fine, almost white.
The cousin’s hotel consisted of the first floor, there were three rooms ready, one was still free. Throw off your backpacks, off to the sea. I ran in and was amazed – warm and calm sterile water sloshed onto the fairytale beach like I had never experienced before. No fish, no algae, no mussels, not even a sea cucumber could be seen through the swimming goggles. Swimming was great, I cruised back and forth along the shore and looked in vain for creatures.
Bathers began to gather on the beach, and it was only now that I saw the many palm-frond umbrellas, deckchairs and stairs that, starting from our hotel building, covered and divided up the rest of the beach. A large hotel was in the immediate vicinity, otherwise only booths, temporary bars, pubs and restaurants. On the beach’s only road, expensive limousines shared the lane with cows and donkeys foraging for food at the bay’s garbage bags and containers. Sometimes older men dressed all in white would drive a donkey laden with shipping crates, pausing here and there to chat with the café owners.
It was too hot to hike, so I swam back and forth ten times a day, desperately searching the seabed. Vain. Turquoise green to light blue, the sea scraped gently over the ground. Towards evening clouds began to gather and as the sun was setting towards Italy I suddenly heard the family in the other room next to us speaking Italian. Thanks to my Erasmus studies in Florence in the nineties, I was able to have a say, and she thanks to Italian television, which she watched secretly under the dictatorship.
We were welcomed into the family of the lamp seller from Tirana and sat together scraping a boiled sheep’s head under the fig tree in the courtyard of our hotel. Gazing silently at an orange-red sky slowly turning purple, across the whole empty sea.
