See Albania . . . and thank God you're British

A DAY trip to Albania. It sounds a bit improbable, like a gala evening at Strangeways or a magical mystery tour of Tunbridge Wells. But you step on to a boat at Corfu Town, buy a visa on board and, 90 minutes later, you are sailing into the port of Saranda, with small boys swarming round the boat demanding 'give us your money, master'. Suddenly, from the luxury villas and plush yachts of a Greek holiday island, you have landed in the Third World.

Albania's fascination for the European bourgeoisie predated Enver Hoxha. More than 200 years ago, Edward Gibbon observed that, though it was in sight of Italy, it was less known than the interior of America. The comment became outdated only because the American interior ceased to be a mystery. I last holidayed in Corfu more than 10 years ago. Across the strait - less than two miles at its narrowest - Albania looked dark, unfathomable, faintly threatening. If you hired a boat, the owners warned against straying towards a coast patrolled, we were told, by gunships. An Albania of unmentionable horrors and perils was part of our mental geography: here be tavernas, swimming pools and olive groves, there be dragons. Nowhere else in Europe, except possibly in Berlin, could you be reminded so satisfactorily of the excellence of us and the awfulness of them. My wife, for the first time, was inclined to follow the advice of her primary school teacher, who enjoined her pupils to fall to their knees nightly and thank God for being English.

That, probably, is still Albania's main attraction. The day trip, including visa, costs a good pounds 50 a head. Yet the boat from Corfu Town carries more than 100 people, twice a week, about three-quarters of them English. What do they go for? Not for the water sports. Saranda is a seaside town, with decent beaches and a fine promenade. Yet the first thing that strikes you, on a hot day, is the lack of activity on the water: no motorboats, no pedaloes, no sunbeds.

Nor do people go for the food, which is execrable. We were taken to the huge Roman archaeological site at Butrinti, one of the most spectacular in the eastern Mediterranean. But for most of us, I suspect, the lure was a voyeuristic one. We could gape at the potholed roads, the ubiquitous shattered windows, the pitifully understocked shops. Albania has the highest infant mortality rate in Europe (excepting wartime Yugoslavia). At least 40 per cent of the urban population is unemployed. Water and electricity are frequently cut off, sometimes for weeks. Those who have homes (and many do not) live in unadorned tenement blocks.

Deprivation, as sociologists and economists often tell us, is relative. The poor in Britain can afford riches beyond the dreams of the masses of the Third World. But that is no comfort to the inhabitants of Toxteth or Southwark whose deprivation consists in their being unable to participate in the life visibly enjoyed by the majority of their fellow citizens. Nowhere illustrates the point better than Albania, once the most purist of the East European regimes. Until recently, standard living accommodation was allocated according to family size and food strictly rationed. The private car, that most treasured emblem of Western affluence, was banned. (Now the roads are becoming clogged with second-hand Mercedes, bought for families and friends by Albanians working abroad.) In that sense, Albania abolished deprivation. Even now, it is not a place where anyone need feel they have the wrong cut of bathing costume.

But prosperity, too, is relative. This is where a visit to Albania is more comforting to the Western bourgeois soul than one to the poorer countries of, say, Africa. The latter's plight may be the result of the white man's exploitation - our fault, not theirs. The Albanians share the same continent and the same opportunities. They chose to reject our values, to revile us, to remain in isolation. And look what happened to them] Some of our fellow day-trippers seemed angry. Gazing at the beaches, the lakes and the mountains, picking disapprovingly at the cold spaghetti, they said, 'look, they have all the resources here, but they just waste them', as though it were the unquestionable duty of any Mediterranean nation to provide vacation comforts for northern Europeans. (The truth is that it was our fault. Albania's fate was sealed in 1943, when Churchill gave Britain's full backing to Tito's partisans, benefiting the Communists' allies in its neighbour. But that is a detail of history, and I suspect it seems so to the Albanians.)

There was something missing from Albania - besides the obvious trappings of Western affluence - and it took me a time to work out what it was. It was cynicism. Or perhaps, if that is too strong a word, detachment. I mean that shoulder- shrugging frame of mind, common to Europeans of west and east, that things will never get much better, that nothing is really worth believing in, that all forms of politics are just ways of ripping you off. In Saranda, even a 15-year-old boy would tell us with pride, 'now we are a democracy'.

Later, in London, Pavli Qesku, the Albanian ambassador, showed me a survey by Eurobarometer, the European Community's opinion polling arm. If the Albanians once had a pure faith in Marxism-Leninism, they now have at least an equal faith in its opposite. Eurobarometer put a series of questions earlier this year to the people of 18 former Communist countries. On belief that their country is moving in the right direction, that the economy will get better, that their new political system is an improvement, the Albanians invariably came top or near the top. Above all, they believe in the market economy and privatisation. Qesku told me how much had already been privatised - buses, houses, farms, shops. Look at us, the Albanians seem to say. We are poor, desperately poor. Now, we are adopting your way of life and it must all come right.

'One day,' our guide in Saranda said, 'you may want to spend a holiday in Albania. We shall have better food, better beaches, better hotels, better shops and a better guide. Perhaps in 10 or 15 years.' We day-trippers broke into spontaneous applause, presumably for his realism and self-deprecating honesty, as well as his country's desire to please. I hope we do not let the Albanians down. Or do I mean that I hope they do not let us down?

Neal Ascherson is on holiday.