How Long the Lonely Road

Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Broad wholesomeness and charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one tiny corner of the globe. —Mark Twain Crossing from Albania into Greece is a lot like crossing into the United States from Mexico. If you are Albanian, you are scrutinized and searched by the intrusive and tyrannical Defenders of the Border; if you are white, the same guards wave you through with hardly a glance. From Corcyra I took a bus across the narrow island of Corfu to the famous Pink Palace hostel, which lives up to its desultory reputation as a Pepto Bismo-colored monument to white western debauchery. I checked in and received a pink-dyed shot of Greek ouzo along with the constrictive ground rules and the programme of extreme sports, sunbathing, and drinking. I was also greeted by a shirtless douche in a sailor's hat, shorts, and flip flops, who grabbed me and demanded that I punch him in the face. "I need the adrenaline bro,...

Why I wanted the adventure of it, and I'd a waded neck deep in blood. —Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn In Vlore last week, with an English bloke from Birmingham named Stuart, I made it my goal to hitchhike. Vlore is a crowded line of sunburned concrete buildings on a flat plain between mountain and sea, whose welcome sign states earnestly: "Vlore, because you'd forget anything else." Anxious to leave, to find a real beach, and to attempt the humble art of hitchhiking, we marched an hour out of town along the coast on the only highway south, and we held out our thumbs, which to the hospitable and generous Albanians, coming from two obvious Westerners, is a beacon of need. The third car to see this, a red Jeep, stopped and drove us under a ridge and around a cove to Orikum, from whence we trekked away from the coast and across an empty plain towards a line of mountains. A car stopped and offered the last two spots on the back seat to Stuart, me, and our backpacks, for an...

I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go of small cities no less than of great. For most of those which were great once are small today, and those which used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike. —Herodotus There are two kinds of roads: Those where you have to wait for goat herds, and those where you don't. Albanian roads are among the former. No buses or trains go there from the Montenegrin capital, and if you do take a bus that goes through Albania to Greece or some further destination, it will not stop anywhere along the road, but remains sealed as if quarantined. I took a cab from Podgorica up over the hills around Lake Skadar, and walked from the exit station into Albania. A red Mercedes drove up while the guard was checking my passport. A guy got out and handed over his wallet. He talked to the guard, who pointed at me and said, "Shkodra?...

We just don't give a shit. —Lemon of Macedonia on Balkan social values The bus for Podgorica left Sarajevo in a deep gorge carved by a white water river that cut out tunnels in the cliffs and left standing rocky spires with green wigs of shrubbery. One of the window panes was filled with glass that vibrated with the bus like an oscilloscope hooked up to a death metal song. Mountainous ridges, green and brown with pine and cedar and oak, fell away into meadows and pastures shattered by the abandoned ruins of houses and by piles of tires and rubble, the ground patched with cumulus shadows. On the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, scrawny green tees climb up from the turquoise water of a reservoir into the folds of slate cliffs, which open to rolling green highlands, then sheep-speckled pasture rimmed with scree and firs and snow-capped hills. That is where I lost my camera. The Bosnian border guards took our passports and spent an anxious 10 minutes checking them. It always takes...

There was once a land called Bosnia A fasting a frosty a Footsore a drossy a Land forgive me That wakes from sleep With a Defiant Sneer —Mak Dizdar The parks in Sarajevo double as graveyards, though the clean white obelisks that mark Christian burials are kept separate from the slanting mushroom-headed plinths of Islam, which look unfathomably old, stained by dirt and weather. There was nowhere else to bury the dead during the four years under Serbian siege (1992-5). I went to the Holiday Inn where all the journalists stayed, it being the only hotel still open at the time. It's on the Zmaja od Bosne road, a wide highway that goes from the city to the airport, and that was affectionately renamed Sniper's Alley during the siege. Serbian marksmen in the hills targeted civilians, who had to run through the marked sniper zones on their way to work, school, church, or the sparsely supplied grocer. It's vertiginous and unreal to see a city so recently affected by war, where many b...

I uploaded a bunch of pictures. Here are some of them. Vienna, Austria Budapest, Hungary Zagreb, Croatia Split, Croatia (plus Trogir and Solin ) Dubrovnik, Croatia (plus Herceg Novi, Montenegro ) Sarajevo, Bosnia

One knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. —Paul Fussell I was at the Budapest train station last Friday when I decided to come to Croatia, which is strange because I woke up with the vague determination to go to Transylvania, Dracula's Carpathian home. "How much for a ticket to Braşov?" I asked the stocky ticketress. "Boorrla?" she asked, rolling R's and crushing vowels in a way impossible to transcribe. Everyone I asked pronounced Braşov, Transylvania's biggest city, with a different enunciation. I still don't know how to say it. "Yeah," I said. She tabulated the price of my trip, including variables for age, class, and further destinations on a solar powered calculator. "15,209 Forints." That's about $70 dollars. "How much for Zagreb?" Calculating. "880." "Then I guess I'm going to Zagreb." She...