Style Points

Last Wednesday, I worked a half day in the morning and then left Pogradec to make the hour and a half journey to the village of Librazhd. There, I joined several other volunteers for a training in a Peace Corps program called Outdoor Ambassadors. Volunteers who participate in Outdoor Ambassadors organize groups of kids (usually high-school age) in their cities and villages who will take part in events and trips that promote environmental education and outdoor recreation such as hiking and camping. I wanted to learn more this program and therefore joined several other interested Group 13 volunteers in Librazhd, where the older volunteers already have an active program. We tagged along on one of their camping trips in order to learn more about what is involved with organizing and managing one of these groups.

Librazhd is located near the intersection of two of the rivers that flow down out of the mountains of eastern Albania. The river valleys provide a stunning landscape for both the town and for our campsite, which was located about an hour's walk north of the village. From here, I'll let pictures do the talking.

The next morning, as we were all preparing to make our ways back to our sites, one of the volunteers in Librazhd suggested that I take the train back to Pogradec. It was going to be passing through town at mid-morning, it charges less than half the price of a furgon, and the journey between Librazhd and Pogradec is regarded as one of the most scenic sections of the entire train system. I considered all to be excellent points and, a couple hours later, found myself standing on the deteriorating passenger platform of the Librazhd train station, watching my very first Albanian train slow down to a crawl as it pulled into the station.

Just in case you happened to miss my last post, I'm going to take a moment to recap the train description that is provided in the official Pogradec tourism guide in order to set the stage for my journey:

"The District of Pogradec has access to the railway network. This fact is known by few people. [...]The ride, however, is not comfortable. Trains are very old and it takes seven hours to go from Tirana to Pogradec[...] Only the people that are interested in industrial archeology should venture taking the train to Pogradec. [...] On the train you can enjoy looking at both the scenery and the variety of people that board and get off the strange train."

Somewhere between industrial archeology and strange train, I had become convinced that a train journey in Albania would be one of those adventures that you take only to be able to say that you've done it. Considering these low expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised when I found conditions that were actually quite comfortable. A brief summary:

Seating: Cushioned! I honestly thought that I had heard that some of the passenger cars have wooden bench seating. That's not to say that there isn't a wooden bench or two somewhere out on the system, but on this train there were none to be found.

Windows: Destroyed. Every window in the two passenger cars that were on my train (no really, every single one) had been shattered by what appeared to be rocks. When I'm old, grey, and showing my grandkids pictures from this trip in 40 years, though, I will doubtlessly recount tales of wild bandits on horseback riding down out of the hills to raid the trains for women and the tens of lek that I guarded dearly in my leather money purse... because really, they look like bullet holes. I'm pretty sure the culprits were rocks, though. If you read the artricle that one of my old high school friends linked in the comment section of my last post (by the way, thanks for that Andy), you will find out that it is speculated that furgon drivers payed children to throw those rocks in order to deter people from using the trains as a transportation option. This may sound surprising uncivilized if you've never met a furgon driver, but if you have... yeah, that sounds about right. An interesting breed, those fellows are.

Fellow passengers: Pleasant. I once had a seat on an Amtrak train next to a guy that told me all about how he spent all of his disability payments on booze and low rider pick up trucks and was on his way to live with his son in Indiana for a couple weeks while he waited for the next payment to come in. Mercifully, our conversation was cut short when he found out that the girl working on the cafe car was a cutey and went to go work his magic on her. (There are some moments when I am incredibly grateful to be a man. But I digress.) Fair or not, he is what I tend to picture in my mind when I think of Amtrak passengers. I understand that this is Europe and that trains serve a much, shall we say, broader base of the population over here, but Albania doesn't exactly have the silk cushioned luxury lines that you find racing across the countrysides elsewhere on the continent. As such, I was half expecting to be surrounded by the Balkans cast of Amtrak. Instread, everyone on board seemed surprisingly normal. Certainly no stranger than furgon passengers, at least.

Speed: Not so much. Partly because of the age of the engines and partly because of the conditions of the tracks, the trains maintain what surely must be no more than a 30mph clip throughout their journey. This has a way of making a trip from one side of the country to the other extremely long, but it added less than an hour to the trip between Librazhd and Pogradec.

Scenery: Lovely. It is the same countryside that you pass through on the road (the tracks and the highway run nearly parallel for the entire journey), but you get to enjoy it at a slower pace and without the impending feeling of doom that often hangs over the trips on the road. Speaking of which...

Impending feelings of doom: Depends on what you think of tunnels. Namely, tunnels built during communist-era Albania by young volunteers. There are many between Librazhd and Pogradec, including a 2-miler --gulp-- that passes under the mountain ridge on the western shore of Lake Ohrid. Mercifully you are not forced to observe the handicraft of these 15 year old mountain dwarves, though, seeing as how there are no lights on the train cars and no lights in the tunnels themselves. That is a very effective recipe for "dark," in case you were wondering.

Random English Tourists: One. A little over half-way through the trip, some Albanian boys who I had briefly spoken to earlier came running up to me and told me that I needed to follow them. They were quite excited because there was a girl from England on the train and, seeing as how I spoke English and she spoke English, we obviously needed to meet. I couldn't imagine that a tourist would actually be using the train, but I thought I would humor them and see what the story was.

As it turned out, they weren't lying at all. Sitting in the car behind me was a 20 year old English girl from London who was backpacking around the Balkans. By herself. She acknowledged that it was maybe a little bit crazy to do so, but up to that point everything had been going quite well. We talked for a while and, shortly before we arrived at the station in Pogradec, I asked her how long she was planning to stay in town. She told me that she intended to pass directly through Pogradec and make her way over the border to Ohrid that evening due to the fact that Pogradec doesn't offer any hostels.

If this was America, that probably would have meant that our meeting would have ended there. This is Europe, though-- the world of hostels and couch surfing. Inviting traveling strangers into your home isn't quite the oddity that it is in America. As such, I decided to ignore my instincts regarding what does and doesn't qualify as being an individual of questionable character and offered her a spot on my extra bed that night if she had any desire to stay around and see Pogradec.

Somewhat surprisingly, she actually accepted my offer. A wonderfully awkward story about me getting called away to a meeting with my apartment managers as soon as we got back into town follows, but I'll spare you the gory details here. In summary, what I expected to be a short coffee meeting turned into a long Raki meeting, meaning that I left the poor girl alone in my apartment for about an hour and a half (mercifully, she was tired and slept through the entire thing) just to return-- in the middle of the afternoon, mind you-- smelling of strong alcohol (the duet it played with "sweaty camping" must have been quite melodious) and feeling a wee bit tipsy. For bonus points, those same apartment managers informed me that they needed to take some measurements of the layout of my apartment that day, meaning that I returned drunk and with two new strange men in tow. How she restrained herself from dousing us all with pepper spray and running out of the building screaming is something that I may never understand. Let's just say that I'm glad that I didn't still have a mustache. After that, though, things settled back down and I had a very enjoyable evening of showing her around Pogradec.

All told, I am a very big fan of our train system and, if you're even in Albania, I would strongly recommend that you take at least one trip on it. Even if you're not into industrial archeaology.