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Given that the highway, on which we were travelling from Lezhë was the
main road between the capital, Tiranë, and one of the country’s few border
crossings, there was remarkably little motorised traffic on it. There were
plenty of pedestrians and cyclists, very few buses and trucks, and no saloon
(or estate) cars. Every now and then we met or passed a type vehicle the likes
of which I have never seen anywhere else during my travels. It was a
horse-drawn lorry. Imagine a motorised truck with its engine compartment sliced
off neatly below the driver’s windscreen. What remains is a flat-fronted
vehicle. Two slots cut below the part of the windscreen in front of the
driver’s seat allow the driver to hold the reigns of the horses that provide
the truck’s motive power. We encountered many of these vehicles on the roads in
the country and towns during our visit to Albania .
We reached Tiranë, where we were assigned rooms in the then almost new Tirana
Hotel, which, located in the city’s centre, was one of the city’s tallest
buildings, more than 12 stories high. The view from our bedroom was wonderful.
We looked down on Skanderbeg
Square , which, despite being in the heart of the
country’s largest city, was almost devoid of motor traffic. In addition to the infrequent
appearances of often overcrowded public buses, the occasional Peugeot saloon
car and Volvo estate car (the hardy, brick-shaped 240 series) would zip around
the square. These foreign-built cars, and the even rarer Mercedes Benz, were used
for government business. None of them were privately owned. During one of our
stays in the city, some of group claimed to have glimpsed Enver Hoxha passing
by in a Mercedes, but if Lloyd Jones novel “Biografi” has any truth in
it, they may have only seen an Enver Hoxha lookalike!
This is an excerpt from a preliminary draft of my new book provisionally called "In Enver's Albania"
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