On a recent trip to Albania, I found the Albanian people among the friendliest, most helpful and kindest people on the planet: The former Albanian ambassador to the United Nations, dressed in a spiffy white fedora, white vest and black silk shirt, walked us to the hotel we couldn’t find in Tirana.

A kindly grandmother ushered me onto the correct bus in the capital of Tirana, and kissed me goodbye when I got off a few hours further south, in Berat. The bus driver on my trip along Albania’s Adriatic coast, from Vlora to Saranda, helped me find an immaculate hotel at half the price of the one I’d picked, and called the owner, who came to fetch me and my mass of luggage, no charge.

The author encountered helpful, friendly residents everywhere he went in Albania.

It had taken me more than 30 years of trying to get into Albania before I succeeded. This Balkan country sits on the coast where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet, just across from the boot heel of Italy.

I first applied for a visa in 1972, but Comrade Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist chief of state from 1944 to 1985, gave me a pass, stolidly ignoring my written requests for a visa. That year I had to take a detour and drove around Albania. On a trip to Greece in 1997 I considered a visit to Albania, but it had been plunged into anarchy after an epidemic of collapsed pyramid investment schemes that took the life savings of many Albanians.

Many cities were controlled by Kalashnikov-wielding militia, and thousands of Albanians had fled to neighboring countries while an international force made up of eight European nations helped to restore order. So I gave it a miss.

But perseverance brings reward, because on a 2006 visit I finally made it across Albania’s border.

Maybe the sincere friendliness I encountered has something to do with Albania’s turbulent history as the North Korea of the 20th century, isolated and alone, first spurning Yugoslavia, then Russia, and finally China, as too liberal. (Imagine Stalin and Mao as too liberal.)

Hoxha was paranoid of a capitalist invasion, and had more than a half-million ugly two-man bunkers built to protect his soldiers in a potential guerilla war. These mushroom-like defenses required several tons of concrete each, possibly enough for pavement to stretch from the earth to the moon.

The concrete-mushroom bunker caper was sufficient by itself to grind the country into poverty, diverting all money from roads whose potholes could have seemingly swallowed dump trucks. But except for a few minor stretches around Tirana, most potholes have now been fixed.

The country’s poverty is reflected in the many cars -- well over half of them Mercedes -- on blocks being parted out along the 50 miles (80.5 km) of highway from the northern city of Shkodra to the capital of Tirana. Only in Albania can you find more Mercedes Benz parked in front of a grocery store than at a dealership.

Many cars now in Albania were stolen from across Europe in the mid ’90s to compensate for the lack of cars here; there were only a few thousand cars in a country of roughly 3.5 million that had been stuck for more than 40 years under the thumb of brutal Stalinist ruler Enver Hoxha.

I encountered few tourists on my visit, yet I’m sure that when tourists finally realize Albania is a European country with unspoiled beaches remarkably similar to its neighbor, Greece, they’ll come.