New glaciers discovered in European mountains

by Kraig Becker on

British geographers from the University of Manchester have discovered four previously unknown glaciers while on a recent expedition to the “cursed” Prokletije mountains of Albania. The discovery was published in the December issue of Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, ahead of a full scholarly paper to be released later this year.

The newly found glaciers are located unusually low on the mountains,, beginning at roughly 6500 feet. But despite that, their existence has gone unnoticed for so long because the region has been embroiled in war and chaos for decades. Over the past decade some semblance of order has been achieved in the region, and it has allowed expeditions to explore the mountains more fully. The peaks are considered cursed by the locals, so few have ever ventured up their slopes.

The researchers from the university were completely surprised by their discovery. They suspect that other than a few local shepherds, no one else was even aware of the existence of the glaicers. They were also surprised to find them at such low altitudes and so far south. Glaciers at the same latitude are generally found much higher on mountains, but ample snow fall and cool temperatures all year long, help to feed these patches of snow.

By all accounts, the Prokletije mountains are said to be quite beautiful, offering good opportunities for trekking and backpacking throughout the area. The discovery of the glaciers is likely to make the region even more appealing to adventurous travelers looking to visit an area that has been mostly off limits for years.

“Taken” (the movie) and travel safety

by Brenda Yun on

Upon the suggestion of a family friend, my parents treated me to a $1 movie to see “Taken,” the new movie with Liam Neeson. My dad had told me his friend thought it would be relevant to my travels abroad, but after reading the synopsis, I kind of scoffed at the idea that the movie could have anything to do with me! After watching the movie, however, I can now see how it could in fact have to do with me, any solo female traveler, and travel safety in general.

The film’s plot is based on a real existing crime in Europe. In this case, an Albanian mafia group in Paris solicits information from female tourists, kidnaps them, gets them hooked on drugs, and then uses them in shady sex trade deals. Although this would appear to be a ridiculously convoluted storyline, the ease with which the mafia identifies and eventually captures these innocent girls is pretty easy to imagine. In the film, a man simply asks to share a cab into the city and then invites the girls to a party later that night. Suddenly, they’re taken.
Luckily, in the film, the father happens to be on the phone when his daughter is captured and also just happens to be a former spy. He single-handedly rescues his daughter from these dangerous and scary mafiosos. (Making matters worse, when he seeks the help from a former French spy, he discovers the mafia group is actually paying the government to keep its despicable operation running).

Unfortunately, not every girl can be so lucky. It was both funny and scary when, after the movie, my parents said to me, “Well, at least you know there’s no way we’ll be able to save you.” And it’s true. If I did find myself in that situation I would pretty much be at the mercy of the cruelty of my captors, which is not a very pleasant thought.

Females absolutely have to keep their wits about them more than men do — both at home and abroad. The first time I traveled to Colombia I was honestly scared of getting kidnapped. I was particularly wary of taking night buses. Fortunately, Colombia is a far safer place than people believe it to be, but it doesn’t mean that you can travel everywhere and anywhere to your heart’s content.

It’s a shady, shady world out there, so if you’re female and traveling alone, use really clear judgment:

  • NEVER get drunk or go to a party where you don’t know anyone (even if you’re going with another female travel companion).
  • Never hitchhike alone.
  • Always take a certified cab if you don’t feel safe walking back to your hotel at night.
  • Always do whatever is within your power/control to be safe even if it means staying in at night, taking a day bus, or not going somewhere altogether.

Gadling TAKE FIVE– June 28 – July 4

by Jamie Rhein on

In the traveler’s world it’s been a bit of drama this week. Plus, there have been lessons in traveling with a wider perspective and an open heart.

On the drama end:

  • Iva reported on passengers in China refusing to get off a plane because the flight was canceled.
  • In his Letter from Albania series, Jeff presented an intimate look at blood feuds through the experiences of people he has talked with in his travels there.
  • From Anna we heard about the drunken Swede who tried to row back home from Denmark
  • Grant told us about British Airways passengers who thought the smell of curry meant there were terrorists

On the wider perspective and open heart end:

  • Read Part 3 of Jerry’s “Talking Travel with Patricia Schultz,” the author of 1000 Places to See Before You Die. As she says at the end of the interview, “Life is short–get off the couch.”
  • And, after you’re off the couch, pick up a copy of Sacred Places of Goddess,108 Destinations by Karen Tate who specializes in openness.

Letter from Albania: Tirana’s impressive recovery

by Jeffrey White on


The first time I met Besnik Lame, he sat down at my table where I was having a drink and made a few rather awkward confessions.

“You see, I have some overweight,” he said. “And so, I sweat a lot. It is a problem.”

At that moment, two ribbons of water trundled down the side of his baby face.

“Also, see this?” He ran a hand over some stubble. “I shaved today, so it makes it worse. I hate shaving!”

None of this was an impertinence, or necessarily strange, since I had commented that Lame looked to be working hard, tending to the handful of tables that crowded the first floor of his small restaurant on a Tirana side street. Lame worked hard every day, often keeping his restaurant, not very creatively named the Grill House, open till 2 a.m. and then showing back up at 7 a.m. to start another day.

Lame liked to sit down and talk to his customers. A few more times this evening he approached. “Please, may I sit with you?” He was proud of his place, the meat dishes (which were wonderful), the homemade wine, the homemade raki that went down like hot acid.

“In my restaurant, we have a saying. You drink all you can. If you cannot pay for it all tonight, you come tomorrow.”

I could get behind such a policy.

Whenever a bottle or a glass sat on the table empty, he’d come over and say, “So, what do we do about this, my friends?”

I liked the Grill House, and Lame’s company, so much that I made it my home base during my time in Tirana, and the convivial nature of the place put me in a good mood and no doubt affected how I responded to Albania’s busy capital.

I arrived in Tirana expecting to hate it — the city’s nightmarish traffic makes a harsh first impression — and while I did not leave loving it, I found myself liking the place for its energy and for its people.

At a chic nightclub one night, a student named Fatma said, “Tirana is all young people now. That’s why it’s fun.”

Fatma might have been overstating things a little — I saw plenty of older Albanians who braved honking Mercedes as they took their xhiro, or evening stroll — but she was right to allude to Tirana’s apparent vibrancy, something that rendered the capital of today almost unrecognizable from the Tirana of even 10 years ago.

Most of that had to do with Edi Rama, the city’s populist (and popular) mayor.

A national basketball star and an avid painter, Rama was credited with transforming Tirana after he entered office in 2000. It helped that he had a youthful, masculine air to him — pictures abound of him riding motorcycles and walking on beaches nude — which seemed to help connect with a younger generation eager to see its city become more European rather than the backwater with a traffic problem it had been.

Rama cleaned up the city’s streets, closing down the numerous ad hoc kiosks and vendors that had sprouted up on pretty much any available patch of public space in the city, illegally selling, well, whatever they could.

Free of these squatters, the city’s parks and squares opened up.

Rama launched initiatives to rid streets of trash, installing bins and larger containers. He attacked broken sidewalks and pitted boulevards (though why he hadn’t been able to do anything about the chaotic mess that was Skanderbeg Square, I don’t know) and implemented so many road-widening projects that the city today still hadn’t finished all them.

But it was perhaps what Rama did with the city’s drab communist-era buildings that put him on the map as one of the world’s most successful mayors. He had many of them painted in Caribbean colors: violets, crimson, aquamarine, spearmint, so that a stroll down a Tirana street could make one feel, for a minute, like he was in Turks and Caicos.

What the guidebooks didn’t mention as they pointed out Tirana’s colorfulness was that residents had no say in what color their building was painted. One day they simply woke up to see that they were now proud tenants of a pink apartment block. Imagine somebody just coming and painting your home whatever color they wanted.

“They won’t be painted again,” Attin Fortuzi, a TV journalist and teacher, told me when I pointed out that the color was fading on many buildings. “There is not a big push to paint more. Most people were not in favor of it in the first place.”

The painting program was meant to be a one time fix, essentially a cover up.

But that was what I liked most about Rama. In his brazen style of politicking, he talked straight to the people and he understood that the best way to win back people’s trust in their government officials — and trust in the government had never been a strong suit among Albanians — was not to make Washington promises, but to actually do something people could see. Roadwork, clean-ups, painting. Rama made no bones about his populism, and he proved to be right. Albanians appeared happy to live in a city where things were happening.

“Albania is like a station where everybody is waiting for a train or a boat … or a beautiful man or lady to take them away because they’ve lost confidence in the government and any possibility of a better life,” Rama told the Christian Science Monitor a few years ago. “We don’t have the resources to solve all our problems, but at least we can change the colors of the buildings, to show them that something is happening,” he says.

That gave Tirana an optimism that seemed to be missing elsewhere in Albania. Not that life was easy in Tirana. It’s just that the locals believed that the city was working hard for them, and that conceit imbued them with a determination to work equally hard, not to solve all the country’s problems but to just make better lives for themselves.

“Life is good in Tirana,” Besnik Lame told me one night.

Lame embodied this Tirana attitude, I thought. He had had a peripatetic life. He’d started a few businesses, then became a flight attendant working in Malaysia and then, improbably, as a human resource executive for Halliburton in Kosovo during the late 1990s.

Today he had the Grill House, and another family shop somewhere else in the city, and I got the feeling that he had a few more enterprises going, though I felt equally sure they were all on the level.

Yes, the days were long. But he had a second house at the sea.

One night he sat down and told me that business was hurting a bit. The value of Albania’s currency, the lek, was going down. People were spending less. It used to be he could count on government workers from a few nearby ministries to come in every day for lunch, plowing through plates of meat and carafes of wine.

Now they only come an afternoon or two.

But he just shrugged it off and, seeing I had finished the last of my carafe, smiled, picked it up and sai
d, “Now, what are we going to do about this?”

Letters from Albania

Letter from Albania: What’s being done to improve the environment

by Jeffrey White on


Heading south, I passed the town of Orikum and the road soon climbed steeply into the Llogara Pass, one of those places that makes you feel very small and alone.

The road clung to a mountainside so steep that when I craned my neck up I couldn’t see it top out. On my left there was a verdant valley far below and another huge wall of gray rock. The valley seemed to pinch farther up ahead, for the views were long enough that I could mark the road’s progress as it snaked in and out of sharp bends.

Then, rounding one, I confronted the most dramatic and lovely stretch of road I’d seen on the Adriatic/Ionian coast: In the windshield, a ridge line the color of ash loomed over the road and it descended in a tumbling pitch perhaps 2,000 feet into iris blue water. The narrow road worked its way down the green hillside not in gentle curves but in hairpin switchbacks, like an extended mark of Zoro.

Far below, the town of Dhermi perched in resistance, some how, to the Llogara Pass’ plunge to the sea.

A few days later, taking a road out of the southern city of Saranda that soon turned into one of the best in Albania — despite having been marked in yellow on my map, signifying a track slightly better than cracked concrete — I was again to pull neck muscles trying to take in the immensity of a light-speckled valley that stretched almost to the hill town of Gjirokaster.

In one frame, a single house sat sentry over groves and green terraces, with the patchwork valley floor running away from it in the distance.

These were scenes that revealed how much Albania, despite all its problems, had that was worth protecting.
It was not an exaggeration to say that Albania’s environment and natural landscape had suffered mightily, both during the country’s communist isolation and in the years after it emerged from it. Like in the communist countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, there was little tradition of conservation and certainly no complex talk of carbon footprints, emissions and the crisis of global warming. Factories and production ruled the day, always at the expense of the land.

Albania, however, had a far messier recovery period after communism than places like the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Elsewhere, countries were beginning to address the environmental legacy of their pasts. When the dust settled in Albania, people seemed to put a higher priority on simply getting theirs.

The rush to build personal property during the past decade, for example, had lead to the disappearance of 30 percent of the country’s forests, while substantial mining had altered or dried up water flows in many of the country’s rivers.

The problem of air pollution grew as Albanians rushed to buy cars, most of them old and running on diesel. As of three years ago, the country still did not have a single waste water treatment plant.

Albania’s environmental woes seemed to gel with a damning United Nations critique of Porto Romano, a exotic-sounding suburb near Albania’s main port, Durres. In 2001, environmental experts found nearly 6,000 people living pretty much on top of an abandoned chemical plant where soil and groundwater contamination had been found to be 4,000 times the European acceptance level.

Some had even built homes out bricks taken from the derelict plant.

In a stern letter to the Albanian government, the UN team urged relocating the residents of Porto Romano and cordoning off the site with a fence.

Porto Romano might have been a wake up call for the Albanian government to finally begin taking measures to tackle the country’s environmental problems head on — that and the European Union’s recent courting of Albania to one day join its growing club.

Joining the EU would mean bringing the country’s environmental standards in line with, currently, 27 other countries.

“This is not only a problem of flowers or birds or plants,” Dzemal Mato, a Green trailblazer, told the BBC last year. “The environment can be a big cost economically.”

Whatever the reason, Albania lately had scored some significant environmental progress and was currently awash in projects countrywide that while complex in scope and lengthily in timeframe gave hope that the country had turned a corner.

Projects ranged in price. Larger ones included spending $13 million to improve ecosystem management in the Prespa Lake basin; $3.6 million to built and sustain an ecotourism industry; and $2.8 million to develop an environmental management system.

Smaller projects included spending $1.3 million to cleanup a handful of polluted “hot spots,” like Porto Romano, countrywide; $600,000 for green house gas emissions projects; and $36,900 to rehabilitate the Drini-Mati river delta.

The United Nations, with its development program, the EU and individual European countries like the Netherlands were helping Albania pay for all this.

It seemed that the world was taking notice of Albania’s new environmental commitment. This year Yale University ranked Albania 27th out of 149 countries in its annual environmental performance index, 12 places ahead of the United States.

Tome Thercaj, a spokesman for Albania’s environment minister, was particularly proud of this ranking as we sat and talked in his office in Tirana. He said the government overall had doubled spending on the environment.

I asked him what was the biggest environmental problem Albania continued to face, expecting him to address those dry river beds, or the air quality in many urban centers. His answer was more fundamental.

“Urban garbage,” he said. “It is not only an environmental problem. It is not good to see.”

Any traveler in Albania noticed the garbage that lined many streets and roads, piles of food and diapers and other trash that cooked in the hot sun and gave off a terrific stink. But this was not something unique to Albania; in Montenegro the situation, especially around the capital of Podgorica, was the same: litter everywhere, and in a country that last year called itself an “ecological state” in its new constitution.

Not far outside Tirana, a massive landfill lay smoldering, set ablaze by nearby residents so that its smoke would often waft over the city.

Thercaj told me that the government was currently negotiating with the northern city of Shkodra to build a $5 million landfill there. Another big new landfill had been built in the middle of the country.

So, Albania’s was tackling its garbage. But, Thercaj told me, there was more. Yes, there were many projects underway and financing coming from outsiders to fund them. But there were also more subtle efforts to change the environmental consciousness of the Albanian people.

One of the government’s biggest initiatives, he said, was to develop a recycling program for the country and foster a recycling culture among the people.

“Look,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

After a few clicks on his computer, Thercaj pulled up
a photo taken on a recent trip to Italy. It was of four large recycling bins taken in Milan, colored red, blue, yellow and white. Soon, he said, these would begin popping up in more locations in Albania.

He started at the picture on the screen, the way you would at a postcard.

Yesterday: The brutal custom of Albanian blood feuds (Part 2)
Tomorrow: Tirana’s impressive recovery