Rebirth of a Nation

Beginning an eight-day road trip down the Albanian Riviera in Tirana, the capital city at the heart of a post-Communist awakening, prepares New York-based Aalika Mahindra to traverse the country’s particular sociopolitical arc and her own progression as a traveller

- Aalika Mahindra

Before I touched down at Tirana International Airport, my knowledge of the Balkan enclave of Albania had, embarrassingly, been restricted to its history of isolationist Communism and the fact that it is where Mother Teresa traced her roots. As the plane’s wing swept over the Adriatic Sea’s prismatic cerulean blues, I experienced a quicksilver wave of nervous-yet-excited energy. It’s unusual for me to visit a place sight unseen; I’m usually neck-deep in research, restaurant lists and random facts. For lack of time, I had to hand over control to my travel partner, leaving my imagination to give form to this vague territory. But the images and narratives it managed to summon hardly came close to the layered story of a European anachronism: the continent’s poorest country once disfigured by authoritarianism and closed to outsiders, reshaping itself as a cosmopolitan democracy and preparing for the inevitable tourism boom.

In the small and efficiently run airport, we’re flagged down at the baggage claim by made-up women in miniskirts offering SIM cards and other forms of connectivity, their red-lipped smiles meant to reassure us that civilisation need not be abandoned on arrival. And I can attest to free Wi-Fi being everywhere. Whether for surveillance or convenience, we didn’t complain…. After a 45-minute ride with a jolly, English-challenged cab-driver (he proudly ambushed his son, who coincidentally lives in Lyon, with a phone call to get translated directions from my French companion), we pull up to the misnomered Hotel Antigone. It’s unassuming and minimally accoutered but far from tragic. The five-member staff’s eager-to-help friendliness is almost suspicious in its constancy, although I appreciate this sincere national trait as the antidote to foreign cynicism. We hurriedly perfect the pronunciation of