Travel off the beaten track has long attracted former Otago Daily Times editor Robin Charteris and his wife, Judi. This time, they spent a January holiday in the almost-forgotten eastern European country of Albania, as he reports.
The men, square and squat, are disturbingly similar, most in black trousers, grey shirts, black leather jackets. Their women, dumpy and dour, are just as dark and impassive.
They line the crumbling pavement in knots, staring silently, menacingly even, at the middle-aged foreign couple walking warily among them.
Behind, on the potholed four-lane main drag of the downtrodden Eastern European capital city, undisciplined pedestrians dodge convoys of black, late-model, darkened-windowed Mercedes-Benz cars and wheezing, dilapidated buses.
En masse, these people, former communists all, are dark and forbidding. Are they gangsters?
Are visitors safe here? Welcome even? Why are there no other tourists? How wise are we to come to this strange country for a fortnight with nothing planned and knowing so little about
it and its people? We had been warned it would be dangerous.
Then Judi stumbles over a loose paving stone. Two men rush forward to help her, anxiety written on their faces. "OK you?'' asks one, helping her to her feet and brushing her down.
When she smiles and murmurs assent, broad grins emerge.
"Please, you enjoy Tirana. Welcome, welcome,'' they urge in passable English. "Where you from? Where you stay? You like our country?''
Welcome, then, to Tirana, capital city of much-overlooked, much-maligned Albania on the Mediterranean's Adriatic Sea. Welcome, too, to that frequent traveller's mistake of - momentarily, in this case - judging by first impressions.
Our initial fears, now quickly eased, were soon to be swept away as we discovered during a two-week stay in their country that Albanians - still unspoilt by too much Western "development'' - are among the friendliest and most hospitable people in the world.
It was two days before New Year when we reached Tirana after 30 hours of flying and airport-waiting in Rome. The midwinter streets were cold, bracingly rather than unbearably so, crowded with locals and Mercedes-Benz cars and with trussed-up, live turkeys.
Big, black turkeys were on every street corner, hundreds of them. Most lay placidly on their fat fronts, legs tethered, in groups of three or four.
Others hung from poles; some were tied to parked cars; some clucked and gobbled away in open-backed vans; others dangled sugar-bag-style from sellers' shoulders.
Prospective customers, mostly men, fondled breasts and thighs, hefted birds to judge weight and haggled over prices. Strangely, compared with the numbers for sale, few turkeys appeared to be changing hands.
Roast turkey for New Year's Day is an Albanian family ritual, like Thanksgiving in the United States. Turkey dinner is followed by the ceremonial scoffing of huge, rich, icing-plastered cakes; they were selling well, at least, judging by the queues at local bakeries.
The turkey-sellers were persistent. On New Year's Eve they were still hard at it outside our hotel at 8pm, many having started before dawn.
While a home-cooked turkey dinner on January 1 was beyond the resources of these two visiting New Zealanders, we did dine in our boarding house room on delightful rotisseried chicken (300 leke, or $NZ5), a bottle of local riesling (200 leke) which, after the first plastic mugful, was quite acceptable, and a fresh-baked loaf of bread given to us free by a young man on a hot-dog stall of whom we had asked directions to a bakery.
"All closed today,'' he told us. "Here, have a loaf of mine.''
Such generosity followed us throughout Albania. On a local minibus at the historic village of Kruja, in the mountains near Tirana, a lovely young lass insisted on paying our fare, then taking us out of her way to the next bus stop.
Time after time, I was corrected in shops and buses for tendering too many coins; twice, the attendant at an Internet café declined my money because we were "honoured visitors''; at a hotel when I tried one of the three different types of local raki, the barman was adamant I sample the other two as well, free (I preferred the mulberry over the grape or plum, although I must concede three powerful belts of this firewater may have affected my judgement).
Many times, locals went out of their way to ensure we were on the right route or take us to a particular hotel, shop or facility.
Always, they smiled and laughed when we talked together (many, younger folk especially, had excellent English). And, always, they shook their head in assent and nodded when they meant "no'', a disconcerting local practice which caught us out every time.
Some of their insistence on showing hospitality may be due to the (nominal) Muslim background of 70% of Albanians (of the others, 20% are said to be Christian Orthodox and 10% Catholic).
For almost 400 years to 1912, Albania - ancient name Shqiperia, the land of the eagles - was part of the Ottoman Empire and Albanians, descended from the ancient Illyrians who had for two millennia been self-governing then subject to Greek and Roman rule, were forcibly converted
to Islam.
Independence from Turkey came with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1912, but part of the price of self-government was the ceding of Kosovo, almost half of Albania, to Serbia in 1913.
Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu became King Zogu in 1928, allying his country with Italy, but he was forced to flee in 1939 when Mussolini invaded.
Fierce, and ultimately successful, resistance was led by the newly-formed Communist Party under first secretary Enver Hoxha, who was then to head the Socialist People's Republic of Albania from 1946 until his death in 1985.
This was Albania's descent into oblivion, as Hoxha (pronounced Hoo-jay) effectively shut off his country to the world for 40 years.
Initially, Albania's communism was tied to that of the USSR and then China, but Hoxha fell out with both. From 1978, Albania had no friends and was left in total isolation.
Religion was banned: from 1967 (until 1990) Albania became the world's only officially atheist state. With the country's borders closed tight, the world passed Albania by.
Post-Hoxha, changes have come, but slowly. Since 1992, the country has been a parliamentary democracy, if one beset by numerous crises that continue to this day with developmental issues, high unemployment among its four million people and continuing strife over neighbouring Kosovo and Serbia.
It was the trouble over Kosovo that caused friends and relations to caution Judi and me against travelling to Albania. You'll not be safe there, they warned; it's a hotbed of political intrigue and unstable people.
There was, and is, political intrigue, but not on a level in December/January that had any effect on visitors (not that we saw a single other tourist in our two weeks in Albania).
It might be different later this year following the decision in February of the Albanian majority in Kosovo to break away from Serbia, a move that has already led to rioting and calls from Serbian nationalists for Russian intervention.
But unstable people? No, no, no. Poor people? Yes.
Under-privileged in some cases, and needy? Yes; but never anything less than warm, hospitable and kindly. And the young people we encountered, without exception, were clean-cut, keen for education and much better behaved than many of the young people we spoil in New Zealand.
We saw no instances at all of unruly behaviour, youthful drinking or drugs or street rowdyism in Tirana, and this throughout the New Year holiday period and beyond.
Tirana itself is not a pretty city, in the "not pretty'' vein of so many former communist capitals.
Ugly, monolithic concrete apartment blocks litter the suburbs; most roads are potholed and unkempt, and pavements, where they exist, are often rough and broken.
The city is in the midst of a building boom; its 800,000 inhabitants are expected to double in the next eight years as rural Albanians move to town and as many of the thousands who fled during and after the Hoxha regime return.
The centre contains several elegant older buildings and wider boulevards and the inevitable statue of 15th-century national resistance hero Skanderberg, who won 25 battles against the Turks and who is commemorated throughout Albania.
It also features the 200-year-old Ethem Bay Mosque, spared from destruction during the atheism campaign of the 1960s because of its status as a cultural monument, and two Soviet-style museums.
Many inner-city apartment blocks now stand out in incongruous bright colours - violets, yellows, greens - after the efforts of the present mayor, formerly a painter in Paris, to brighten the otherwise drab city.
Sadly, organised rubbish collection, or even a modicum of environmental awareness, are not among the relics of Tirana's or Albania's communist days and have not been acquired since.
Litter is endemic, spoiling even many of the remote and beautiful parts of the Albanian countryside.
This we discovered on a five-day jaunt through central and southern Albania in a tinny little 800cc Chevrolet car, badged as a "Noshi''. Fortunately, it was an economical little beast; with petrol at 140 leke ($NZ2.35) a litre it needed to be.
Pondering the expense of driving in this poor country, I sought the reason for the huge number of late-model, large Mercedes-Benz cars to be seen, many driven by young men who had no other obvious appearances of wealth. Fully four cars out of five on Tirana streets and throughout Albania were Mercedes.
On three separate occasions I was told most of the cars had been stolen in northern Europe, mainly Germany, and driven south to Albania. This has long been a thriving industry, apparently.
If it is true - and English-speaking contacts were matter-of-fact about it - then how it continues without authorities in western Europe or Albania itself doing something about it is quite baffling.
With private vehicle ownership only legal since 1990, drivers are not greatly experienced, so our 1500km jaunt, on the "other'' side of poorly-maintained roads in a left-hand-drive car, had its daunting moments.
Indeed, the road up the coast from Sarandra in the south to the awe-inspiring, 1000m-high Llogaraja Pass at Dhermi, though marked on the only "road'' map we could buy in Tirana as a major highway, was a dirt track winding up and down bare brown mountains that in New Zealand would be classed as a four-wheel-drive route only.
It truly became a goat track after 40km when we became stuck for 15 minutes behind a bow-legged crone of a goatherd and her 50 or so charges. She flashed us a toothless grin and a cheery wave of her stick when we eventually passed.
The standards of roads aside, touring Albania was delightful. The old towns we visited - Berat, Girokastra and Sarandra especially - still had town centres of medieval charm with cobbled streets, ancient houses and castles and thriving marketplaces.
And the stacks of beach chairs outside hotels lining the white-sand coastal beaches in the south testified to the emerging summer popularity of coastal Albania with northern and eastern Europeans.
As in Tirana, the marketplaces and shops offered a range of consumer goods that would satisfy most New Zealanders.
Large flat-screen television sets vied with modern bathroom and kitchen ware; grocery stores, though fewer in number, offered almost as much fresh, canned and frozen foods as ours do; and the quality and variety of fresh fruit and vegetables (much of it, this being midwinter, imported from Africa) was amazing. It seemed that few people went without the necessities and some of the luxuries of life.
There were exceptions, of course. Gypsy folk, readily identifiable, were sometimes on the streets begging, while second-hand clothes stalls did roaring trade and rubbish piles received regular scrutiny.
Small pizza parlours were popular with locals, reflecting links with nearby Italy, but Western fast-food outlets such as McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, thankfully, have yet to be established (although we did notice several young girls proudly struggling with
pull-along Barbie suitcases).
But the West is gradually finding Albania, nevertheless.
We stayed in Tirana in the comfortable quarters of an American evangelical base, whose members help emerging Christian churches; the United Nations and charity groups have teams aiding the country and its people; and Hertz and Avis and two worldwide hotel chains have just
established operations in Tirana.
International business conglomerates already take a share of major roading and construction projects as the country strives for more electricity, better communications and improved services.
We read, too, of plans by British developers for hotel complexes and privately-owned holiday homes along the 360km-long Albanian coast where the return of pre-communist-days' land tenure practices apparently allow the privatisation of beaches ... before long, southern Albania could become another Costa del Sol and, heaven forbid, Sarandra another Benidorm or worse.
Sarandra and the beautiful white beaches of southern Albania are, after all, but a 25-minute ferry ride from the popular Greek tourist island of Corfu and the hurly-burly of the Western world.
Yesterday, they were planets apart; not so tomorrow.
If you get the chance, and don't mind a certain level of discomfort, get in now and treat yourself to Albania and its wonderful people before the West takes over.
- Robin and Judi Charteris travelled to Rome on Cathay Pacific Airways.
