Moonshine Tomar de Berat, al Albania

After misreading my flight details and finding the Istanbul tramway down for maintenance the journey to Istanbul airport was a little more stressful than I had planned but the journey was uneventful after some initial adjustments and I arrived in good time to catch the plane journey from hell.

Queuing isn't a strong point in these parts and the process of security checks and boarding the plane would have tested the most patient - business men and old ladies alike aggressively pushing the queue and with bags and umbrellas taking out the odd eye as they made their way up the isle of the plane. The actual flight was quite subdued but immediately on landing and as the plane was still taxiing off the runway half the passengers proceeded to jump out of their seats, open lockers, drop bags on peoples heads, argue and push their way to the front of the plane... only to be first on the bus to the terminal and get into the terminal last - genius! This didn't stop them pushing their way through the immigration line and then impatiently climbing onto the moving carousel to look through the luggage hatch one after the other - there was a common attribute I notice and it wasn't that they were all skinny.

As luck would have it, mine was the first bag out and I was the first through customs and onto Albanian soil proper, finding my airport pickup waiting for me; with a genuine friendly face which has defined my impression of Albanian's... The airport pickup was just as well as it meant I could avoid the mob of taxi drivers touting for business which hits you like the Moroccan sun immediately as you exit customs.

After meeting up with Ben at the hotel - it was very weird meeting up with a work colleague in Eastern Europe, especially as I am usually travelling alone given most of my friends and acquaintances aren't up for roughing it in dictatorships and ex-dictatorship states - and finding the owners had given us our own rooms at no extra charge - nice hotel too! - a walk around downtown Tirana to see the pyramid mausoleum for the late Stalinist dictator (only 25 years old and looking the worse for wear, daubed with graffiti, windows broken, tiles falling off) and checking out the local hot spots. After walking around in circles on a fruitless hunt real Albanian food (we we rent about to make our first meal in Albania pizza, burgers or pasta!) we headed back to the hotel for a feast of home cooked food and more Albanian wine than was sensible.

A few games of backgammon, more wine, a massive plate of olives and peppers, a liberal helping of duty free whiskey (and a Kinder country bar, weird with whiskey but still yumm!) and bed was the only remaining option. This morning, all good intentions to get up at 9am were lost to a hangover, with love from Albania.

After breakfast we caught a cab which we thought was to Berat (for 7 Euros) but which ended up at the bus station where we watched the world go by and let the reality of our hangovers sink in and waited to depart for Berat (Ben had a turn of the shakes and I felt more than a little ick)... a 2 hours bus journey (for about 2 Euros each) stopping and starting, hotter than a camels snatch in a heat wave and feeling a little more than queasy and we arrived in Berat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site - with its old houses, mosques and churches built on top of each other with half tubular ceramic roof tiles (not unlike Mexican or Spanish roof tiles) and scaling the valley walls in a moody mountain setting - the real Albania.

A very friendly older local, Tomar, approached us straight off the bus and offered us a room in his house with a home cooked breakfast, how could we refuse? ...and are we glad we didn't as we found ourselves in one of the very same old buildings right in the thick of the old district - to further delight we found grape vines growing over the inner yard from which Tomar turns the juice into wine and the skins into Raki, a local moonshine... Tomar even gave us a tour of his fermenting and distilling equipment and we ended up tasting and buying a bottle of the good stuff to ease our hang-overs; Ben's face lit up like a kid at Christmas - Ben, being able to consume inhuman amounts of alcohol and safely operate dangerous machinery at the same time (he must be a communist!) - and the very welcome hair of the dog cemented our approval of our new accommodation.

I should note here the various stuffed toys we saw hanging on the outside of homes from Tirana to Berat, some funny, some weird, some new and others looking a bit worse for wear. A little while after settling into our accommodation I noticed a smurf above the door to our room - Tomar doesn't speak English but he does speak Italian which is thankfully similar enough to Spanish to render my singular and most basic of foreign languages skill very useful - the conversation still isn't without its challenges but it did enable us to figure out the purpose of these little, or in some cases large, oddities - it turns out these are considered to bring good fortune as would a horse shoe in England; who knew a stuffed smurf or a bugs bunny could solve all my problems? I'm considering buying one and securing it to the back of my backpack, I'm sure it will meet the approval of the locals. The smurf you see above protected us from the darkness during our stay with Tomar the local moonshine cook.

After settling in we took a casual walk around the centre of town, past the old houses climbing the valley walls on one side and the socialist architecture on the other, mobs of birds making a racket in the trees, men playing domino's in the local coffee shops, kids football training on the town's central football pitch (the first we've seen without chickens and cows outnumbering the players) and after more difficulty finding a place to eat (no food and only water, beer, coffee and strangely herbal tea only on the cafe menus) we finally found a place to eat and play a few rounds of backgammon - my tried and tested method to finding local and edible food is to find the most basic cafe with fluorescent lighting and this time was just as fruitful, with a local meat dish we've forgotten the name of and we aren't even sure what meat it was, but it was top nosh for 3 Euros each.

Hangover creeping back so its time to sign-off now and hit the moonshine again, purely medicinal of course.