Birvidik

So - if the Albanians are so wonderful, why isn't the entire country over-run with yotties?

Well, for a start, the perceptions of the country and its people mentioned in the last post tend to put people off. When we were in Bar we came across a couple on a Maltese registered yacht who expressed amazement that we had stopped off in Albania, citing the perceptions of criminality and the belief that Albanians were the prime movers in human trafficking and virtually ran the UK prostitution rackets single handed. Ironic, then, isn't it that in the immediate pre and post war years this dubious honour was held by the Maltese.

These perceptions will, no doubt, change with time and land based tourism will expand. What won't change so easily though is the coastline, which is shallow, exposed and inhospitable, in contrast to the people. You can still be in a few metres of water several miles offshore. In an onshore wind you can get some nasty seas.

To make things worse, safe harbours are few and far between. Sailing at five knots it can take over thirteen hours to get from one to the next. On top of that, recreational sailing is a novel concept to the Albanians, occupied as they usually are with more important stuff such as scratching a living. As a result, most of the time yotties are accommodated in commercial harbours, designed for sodding great freighters.

We were moored up against huge concrete quays that towered above Birvidik, the mooring lines having to be fed downwards at an acute angle over rough concrete edges which, in any swell or wash, sawed away at them. Getting on and off required the acrobatic skill of a cat burglar and getting to a local restaurant at night involved a desolate trek through a semi-industrial wasteland before passing through security and into the lights of the big city.

Which leads us, somewhat circuitously, to the title of this entry.

We were against one such quay in Durres. By day it was benign enough, and the commercial and trade activity around us provided an entertainment. We made Birvidik secure and went off into town for a meal. Excellent (and cheap) it was too.

When we returned all activity had ceased and it was dark and quiet. Things come out to play when it's dark and quiet.

Things like cockroaches.

Thousands of the bastards.

The quay was alive with the things. They swarmed over every surface, horizontal and vertical. No surface, gap, hole or crevice escaped their inquisitive feelers. It was impossible to approach the boat without them crunching underfoot. They had scuttled across the fenders and down the mooring lines on to the boat. It was like a scene from some post-nuclear holocaust horror movie.

Liz hates cockroaches. I'm not over-enamoured of them myself. Those of you who have yet to succumb to the ravages of intellectual decline will remember that we had a bit of a cockroach problem a few years ago in Turkey. Left over from that we had a bigger arsenal of chemical weapons than can be found in a Middle Eastern despot's wet dream.

We had kept these in readiness for a repeat for nearly four years, just in case. Six weeks ago we had come across this stash while clearing out some of the storage. Lulled into complacency by the four, roach-free years we had decided that it had probably gone off by now and threw it out.

So now we're on the search for more boric acid so Liz can make up more of her tasty little toxin and condensed milk sweeties, which are about the only things that seem to do the trick.

The joys of cruising.