Travel Mercies

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There Is Always Room For One More

Albania

     As we approach the day that we commemorate as Christ’s birth, I know that many people will be traveling. Some people will travel relatively close to home, while others will “traverse a far.” For those of you who will be traveling I thought a few stories about travel from my mission journeys will maybe help you push through the temptation to dread and complain about your circumstances, and realize that just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse you are then smacked with that sinking feeling that it really can.

     Over the years I have been in Albania sixteen times. Traveling in Albania gave me a whole new perspective on what is acceptable when trying to get from point A to point B. I have flown in by helicopter to remote villages, walked over mountains with small Albanian horses or donkeys carrying the equipment, chauffeured by horse cart, open bed trucks, buses, taxis, Land Rovers, ferry barges, and vans.

     The most striking feature of Albanian travel is that you can always get one more person in the vehicle no matter how many people you already have. One morning our team of six needed to travel to a town that was about two hours away by bad road. We were told that a furgon or van was going to be in the village at six in the morning and that we could hitch a ride. When the furgon arrived we discovered that it had already made a stop or two in other villages and by American standards was already full. Actually it was more than full. You might even describe it as unsafely stuffed. But true to Albanian hospitality and the mentality that there is always room for one more, the driver and the other passengers wouldn’t hear of us missing this scheduled stop and quickly loaded and lashed our equipment to the top of the van and made way for us to sit inside. The twenty-two of us squeezed into this eleven passenger van, and bumped and jarred our way down the mountain road.

     I know many of you are probably trying to figure out how twenty-two people could fit into an eleven passenger van. I really can’t describe it and give any kind of justice to it, but just to give it a meager try—one passenger squished into the seat on the left of the driver and held the door as best he could against flying open which it frequently did with every jolt of the potholed road. I should also add that that passenger had to operate the brake pedal because the driver was nearly straddling the stick shift and could only reach the accelerator pedal. I, at this point must make one thing perfectly clear—it is best to never look.

     On another occasion in Albania, another team of six had to travel in similar fashion from one village to another village about two hours away. This time, however, our team was one of the first stops early in the morning, so when we pulled into another village just down the road the boarding passengers squeezed into our already full furgon. In this case I had a little old shepherd man sit on my lap for the next two hours. I couldn’t really complain because everyone who had boarded previously got to have someone sitting on their lap. At one point I looked over at one of my mission partners named Mosa who was squished up against me and had a little old lady of her own sitting on her lap. I said to her, “Don’t touch me! I’m tired of being touched.” Mosa looked at me puzzled for a moment and then caught the humor in what I said and translated it into Albanian for the other passengers. We all had a good laugh and my little old man showed particular fondness by patting my leg and smiling at me.

     Personal space issues that most Americans have I have found just really don’t exist in many parts of the other world. There is no bubble. And it just doesn’t matter that you are all hot and sweaty because everybody else is maybe even more hot and sweaty. A definition that I remember from my physiology days is, “The olfactory is highly exhaustitory.” Meaning that your sense of smell can get used to an order fairly quickly. Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. There has never been a time that I have had enough water in a village to take a bath, so I would, along with everyone else, go days or even a week or two or three with a waft of foul, odious, putrescence in my wake. In other words, I blended in.

     I was hitch hiking in central Albania one day with an Albanian friend. We had been in a village that was just off the main highway from Durrës to Tirana. A furgon stopped to pick us up and I could immediately see that they already had way too many people riding in that van, but that of course didn’t mean that we were not to hop right on in. I sat on the small arm rest of a middle seat and tried to balance myself against the jarring of the road. That was before major construction made the road the very nice highway that it is today. On that day it was full of potholes.

     At one point we came up on a police checkpoint. The driver slowed and turned and said we had too many people and that he could lose his taxi license. I was amazed that he even had a license, but to help him get through the checkpoint without being stopped, I and the other four surplus people above the fifteen passenger limit laid on the floor and, unfortunately, for the legal passengers to look normal they had to rest their feet on us. The ploy worked and the driver was waved on through the checkpoint. I and the others crawled back into place with much thanks from the driver and pats on the back from the other passengers. I went the rest of the day with little, dusty shoe prints from the lady that was sitting next to me stamped proudly on my back.

     On another occasion in Albania we traveled in an old beat up school bus from the airport in Tirana to the northeastern city of Kukës. Again that was before they had a nice highway built. That trip was about seventy miles as the crow flies, but it took us ten hours to travel it. Winding switchback roads through the steep Balkan Alps. This was shortly after the fall of the communist government and many Albanians who were now driving had very little experience with driving or automobiles in general. We noticed that the driver was driving with the buses headlights off. It had become very dark and the roads were treacherous, and he was driving with no headlights. When asked about it, he said he didn’t want to run down the battery. It was explained to him that there is an alternator and a generator that recharges the battery when the engine is running. He stopped the bus, popped the hood and we showed him the alternator and the generator by the light of one of our flashlights. He was very pleased to learn this, having never heard of this before. As we continued our journey he turned and exclaimed, “I can see!”

     As I have written these stories about modes of transportation I realize that I have many, many more from other travels. So for the sake of the season and your attention span I will post a continuation later. For now, however, I hope you have a more light-hearted perspective as you make your own holiday travel plans, and are thankful for the opportunity to visit loved ones.

Merry Christmas, and may God Bless you until next time!

71 thoughts on “Travel Mercies”

  1. I have smiled through the whole story Rob….a can of sardines had more room than those “Ultra Mini Vans” did that a lot of us rode in over the years….22 people in a van sounded just right for travel….Merry Christmas to those that think every seat in a plane taken is over crowded.

  2. Hahaha. This actually reminded me of my trip to Albania this summer. My mother and I were traveling from Tirana to Fier by bus. The trip was supposed to take about 2 hours, but since the bus driver kept stopping every few minutes to pick people up and drop them off, it took over four hours. The bus windows were closed. It was humid and there was no AC. Surprisingly, everyone was complaining to the driver that he was taking too long (not what would have happened in the past, when everybody would put up with anything no matter how unjust it was). I raised my voice from the back of the bus and told the driver that he needed to buy us lunch as we were all starving. Everyone started laughing and no one complained anymore. The bus driver didn’t stop much anymore either.

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