two donkeys a moped 2

There are many advantages to traveling with young kids—one of which is that ship captains will be friendly and will often invite you into the cockpit. We stepped into the small room with three US flags tacked on the walls. “I am a fan of the US,” he said. He had his fingers on a small toggle switch instead of the steering wheel, but he wasn’t making any course corrections. The captain explained how the boat is guided electronically. I imagine that there are sensors that bounce signals off the sides of the mountains that automatically adjust the rudder so we stay exactly in the middle of the channel.

Along with the naked beauty of the mountains, sometimes not more than 10 meters away, at times we could see calm scenes of agricultural peace. We learned that these houses, with their grapes, terraced corn,

and boats tied up on the beach, belonged to men on the wrong side of a blood feud that may have lasted hundreds of years. In sparsely populated northern Albania, the core rules are set by Kanun code—traditional system of laws practiced since medieval times. Apparently, these people ended up here after being exiled from every other town in the area. There are no roads to their abode, no electricity. The isolation is alluring.

At the northern end, we drove off to another dirt road that made us glad again that it was not raining. At the first village, we stopped to ask if there was a hotel in town. We investigated four rooms for 10 Euros per person. Merita, the school's office manager, asked why they would give the price in Euros when we are in Albania. No answer. Albania uses the Lek, with is worth about 110% of a cent. 90 Lek = 1 USD = 70 Euro cents. I was ready to reserve the place and then we would be free to explore for the rest of the day. After all, I have stayed in much worse 'hotels' in Moscow, Kiev, and Azerbaijan. Merita, however, wisely said that the price was not cheap, so we should look at the next town, Bajram Curri, 30 minutes away, where a hotel was described in our guidebook. We easily found the hotel and negotiated a price of 6000 lek for two nice rooms plus a couple dormitory cots. We had five adults, three teenagers, and Oskar and Maxim.

Now we were ready to commence the final leg of the excursion to a former vacation spot near the border with Montenegro. The gravel road followed a turquoise steam that was so clear, one could peer into 10-foot deep pools and see the future. Words really can’t describe the luscious beauty of the roadside stream. I wanted to go down to wash my troubles away. One valley was a model for The Shire, home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins with huge haystacks, goats, cows, stick fences, water springs, and a bearded elderly farmer riding a donkey pulling vegetables in a rickety wooden-wheeled wagon. Sprinkled lightly across this bucolic scene were hints of modernity like a satellite dish on top of the outhouse, or a dirty moped straining under the weight of a shepherd and a young pig tied to the rear rack.

You might think that in a country where the main religion is Muslim, there would be few, if any, pigs—not so. When you buy a hamburger here, that’s what you get—a hamburger. As with the FSU (Former Soviet Union), religion was not in favor for several decades. An article in Slate.com has these words:

Enver Hoxha, the country's Muslim-born Marxist-Leninist dictator, outlawed all religious practices, books, and icons in 1967, declaring Albania the world's "first atheist state." Perhaps not coincidentally, the Muslim world's most tolerant nation is also its most secular. A recent Gallup poll found that of every Balkan and Muslim-majority nation, Albania had the smallest proportion of people who said religion was an important part of their daily lives.

http://www.slate.com/id/2226840/entry/2226843/