DAY 63 - NORTH OF KAVAJE TO DURRES: 9.2 MILES (18,059 STEPS)

June 25, 2011

North of Kavaje to Durres 9.2 miles (Total: 691.9) 18,059 (Total: 1,317,115)

I want a brand new house
on an episode of Cribs
And a bathroom I can play baseball in…..

I’m gonna trade this life for fortune and fame
I’d even cut my hair and change my name….
‘Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We’ll all stay skinny ’cause we just won’t eat

‘Rockstar’ by Nickelback

After my late night hanging out with ‘the stars” at ‘Zone-e’  and resisting the temptation to ask them to turn the volume of the music down as it might disturb the neighbours, I allow myself a few extra hours to lie in bed and eventually get going at 9.30am. There is a major road construction underway on the section of road up to Durres and the dust and heat made me think of those scenes from David Lean’s classic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.  Although dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, black socks and white legs whilst being passed by lorries, is not nearly as ‘cool’ as being sat on a camel and dressed in flowing white robes.

Someone asked a really interesting question of me the other day; they asked, “When you are walking all of these miles what on earth do you think about?” At first it seemed an odd question—practical things; am I on the right road; has that lorry driver smoking a cigarette and chatting on the phone seen me?; where am I going to eat?; where am I going to sleep? The more I thought about it, I realised that actually I think a great deal—daydream—happily so. I chew thoughts over and over in my mind again and again till they lose all their flavour, and then insert some new ones. It reminded me of my parents favourite story about my school reports and parents evening as they would go along and wait in line to hear the same thing: “Ah yes, Michael, a nice little boy. Just sits and looks out the window in a world of his own all day. Doesn’t do anything, but he’s no trouble at all.”

Who was it who said, ‘show me the boy and I will show you the man’—could have been the Jesuits? I don’t think they are fully right, as areas of the brain and personality develop at different speeds and it isn’t until later years that the fully rounded person becomes visible—as Rob Parsons says when talking about raising teenagers—“don’t announce the score at half-time”.

Anyway, my primary school teachers wouldn’t have been totally wrong if they saw me walking ‘in a world of my own’ along the highways and by-ways of Albania, but in that world, I am dreaming about the truce—a world in which state ‘killing’ in war becomes as unacceptable and widely rejected in civilised international society, as racism, capital punishment, abusing human rights, discrimination against women, money laundering or slavery.

T.E. Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia”, grew up in Oxford, “the city of dreaming spires.” Lawrence had a dream of an Arabia for the Arabs free from the imperialism.  In the introduction to his classic work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes:  “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible” and then he concludes with this telling phrase “This I did.”