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The town of Dhermi, now a rebel stronghold, sits at the foot of the Cikes mountains.

The Albanian plunge into anarchy means little to Americans. Most of us never quite learned where the country is located, let alone anything about its history and people. The towns reported in the news -- Fier, Durres, Sarande, Gjirokaster -- have strange and unpronounceable names. It's tempting to see the news reports as a blur and, just like Bosnia before it, say, "Who cares?"

My family and I might feel the same way -- if we hadn't vacationed there for four days last June. My wife had a conference in Tirana, the capital, and my two sons (then ages 8 and 10) and I joined her there for a weekend, then spent another two days driving south the length of the country before departing by ferry for more opulent civilization in Corfu.

What a great place it was -- primitive, as Europe goes, and not exactly ready, even before its latest turmoil, to receive Western hordes. But if it weren't for the current chaos (brought on by the collapse of pyramid schemes, in which many of the people we met were investing their life savings), we would be urging friends to take vacations there, too, and to do so before word gets around about this undiscovered find. Though somewhat challenging without the usual tourist infrastructure, we would have said it was a chance to see unique ancient ruins, spectacular scenery, warm and hospitable people, and a living classroom of political democratization.

An Albanian woman.

Alas, despoliation by tourists isn't likely to be Albania's problem anytime soon. But now that makes us sad. For the dividend of any vacation is to identify a little more with the place you visited. Amazingly, that includes our kids. With every fresh TV dispatch on Albania, instead of quickly switching to "SportsCenter," they relive our trip in vivid human terms -- remembering and despairing and caring about a people and country whose fate we would otherwise have disregarded.

For those who tell themselves that taking children to places not designed for tourism is a valuable education and worth the schlep, here's proof it actually can be. Not only did they learn something about a country and the temporal fragility of governments and political structures, but they also gleaned a lesson about their own fate. Of all ironies, our kids, who otherwise are hopelessly spoiled by American amenities, appreciate far more what their own country affords them.

When we read about roaming gangs in Tirana, we know something about the latent economic frustrations that have exploded. From the moment a sleek Crossair jet from Zurich deposited us in the dusty rural environs of this supposedly cosmopolitan capital, it was obvious that Albania was Europe's poorest country. A barely serviceable old Mercedes chugged alongside horse carts and donkeys to take us downtown. Street stalls, sidewalk cooking and underemployed throngs milling about brought to mind a small third world city. The International Hotel in Tirana, where we stayed, was spare and boxy with one slight restaurant and few services, and seemed furnished by Ikea. Yet it was considered the country's best address, evidently because it had 10 floors of gleaming windows, courtesy of foreign aid development loans, and seemed to possess the country's only air conditioning.

We had arrived in this new democracy right after parliamentary elections, which many were claiming had been rigged. As a result, rumors of impending demonstrations abounded, and scores of police preemptively circulated in the large Skanderbeg Square outside our hotel in the center of town. Our children, of course, had never heard of anything like this, and apart from the adrenaline rush of seeing so many uniforms and crowd control batons, they learned a civics lesson that my third-grader is now applying in studying the Bill of Rights: When the teachers discuss freedom of assembly, it actually means something to him.

Fortunately, no violence ensued, and the streets returned to normal. So while my wife conferred, we found a driver to take us through the idyllic countryside only a few miles away, where we could climb castle grounds commanding breathtaking views, observe children the age of my own diligently working the fields, then stop for serviceable ice cream at a pleasant roadside cafe, where our driver told us in halting English how his dream was to move his family from a one-room to a two-room apartment. My children, whose conversation usually turns to the lament of which electronic game their peers have that they don't, began to feel privileged.

We returned via a proud new attraction, Magic City, touted as the local Disneyland. We turned out to be its only visitors, not, I think, because it was barely the type of amusement park Americans might see set up temporarily in a supermarket parking lot -- mainly variations on bumper cars -- but because most Albanians could not readily afford the 50 cents a ride. Yet the operators, feeling sympathy that my kids had no one to bump into, jumped in the cars themselves to simulate action.

In the evenings we discovered the real delight of Tirana -- charming indoor and outdoor restaurants that showcased Albanian cuisine, which, to our pleasant surprise, reflected not the heavy character of other Eastern European countries but the olive oil and pasta influence of the Mediterranean.

From Tirana, it is easy to see the rest of the compact country (at 11,000 square miles, about the size of Maryland) in two days. On the other hand, you need a driver, which given the labor situation was easy and inexpensive to find. We consider ourselves adventurous drivers, but this is a country with (for American visitors, of which we generally had the impression we were the only ones) no maps, no English road signs and potholes that made us grateful for Washington, D.C., maintenance crews. Our driver, Ulie, was the friend of one of my wife's fellow conferees, not normally in the chauffeur business but happy to show off his country.

What makes a driving tour easy is that you can head straight south from Tirana, with no need to loop back, and indeed every incentive not to. By the time you get to Sarande, on the southern coast, you don't want to drive all the way back over all those potholes and lovely but mountainous roads with no embankments that crop up south of Vlore. And although Tirana has the country's only international airport, luckily once you make it to Sarande, you're just a few miles away, by ferry, from jet-set respite on the Greek island of Corfu, from which there are plentiful air connections throughout Europe.

An Albanian beach.

Today one reads of thousands of Albanians congregating at the port of Durres, due west of Tirana, desperately looking for any half-seaworthy conveyance to escape across the Adriatic to Italy -- so much so that incoming boats laden with food and humanitarian supplies are afraid to land, lest they be commandeered. The day we visited, people were also rushing into the city, and traffic was backed up for miles as we approached. But it was for a different reason: The day was blue and breezy, and we had never seen a beach so packed with bodies. It was a little dirty, and of course lacked the snack bars and toilets one might expect in the States, but at that moment, it was a worker's paradise.

And so it goes with the other towns that we visited. When we hear of the ransacking in Vlore, we think of Ulie, who was so proud of his home town that he asked to drive us around it. Every apartment seemed to have a satellite dish and hanging laundry competing for space on a ramshackle little balcony, but all Ulie saw, and pointed to, were the trees and flowers -- only a few, to our untrained eyes, but more than in Tirana. Perhaps it should not surprise us now to read that frustrations are greater in this area than in the north, because it considers itself more prosperous, and with more to lose.

After Vlore, the country suddenly became green and beautiful, and we stopped at one of the many undeveloped inlets along the sea, next to which a family had set up an appealing outdoor cafe with three tables. We thought we knew what we were ordering, but the Americanized fish we had expected appeared with head and tail intact, and our request for french fries obviously lost something in translation, since they came to us raw. But mistakes like this seem all the more exotic in the right vacation spirit, and we did our best.

Concrete bunkers that dot the Albanian countryside, reminders of former dictator Enver Hoxha, who believed them to be the only way to fend off invasions.

A few yards from our table was one of the approximately 700,000 little steel and concrete bunkers that -- not to be believed unless seen -- dot the countryside. Crazy dictator Enver Hoxha bankrupted the country building them on the theory that the Albanian paradise was secretly so coveted by the world that these would be the only thing standing in the way of invasions from Russia or the United States. In fact, for centuries Albania had been invaded, but unfortunately Hoxha chose to build the bunkers long after any real threat had subsided. Each one reportedly cost as much as a nice Albanian home, which of course no one has. So the real legacy is the obstruction of the otherwise unblemished countryside. Now it is too expensive to remove the bunkers and their only use is for growing weeds, although they did come in handy recently as fortifications used by rebels against advancing government tanks.

We continued on to a fine orthodox monastery in Ardenica, with graceful arches and red tiles, and corridors of well preserved statuary.

A bit farther south are the ruins of Apollonia, a city founded by the Greeks in the sixth century B.C. and worthy of a movie set. Back then, it was a thriving center of Greek art and philosophy, a few centuries later used by Caesar as a base for war with Pompeii. Its centerpiece is a striking row of columns from an original Hall of Agonothetes, beautifully restored by the French in the 1920s. Typically for Albania, we were the only visitors. Not even a guard was around to prevent our children from scampering up and down the lovely and neatly intact concentric rings of seating at the small Odeon, the site 2000 years ago of what must have been idyllic outdoor theater.

The main road between Tirana and Sarande, on Albania's southern coast.

The natural place to stop for the evening is the city of Fier, about a 70-mile drive from Tirana and a little more than halfway to Sarande. When we hear today about 9-year-olds roaming the streets toting rifles looted from the local armory, we think of our own child, who turned 9 the day we visited. We stayed in the best hotel -- third-class by American standards -- which even gave us a two-room suite. But as a vestige of the communist mentality of even budding entrepreneurs, the hotel keepers could not bring themselves to move even a cot from one of the many unoccupied rooms to what had been set up in our suite as a sitting area. Ulie simply lugged a mattress from an empty room and rolled his eyes.

We ordered a surprise birthday cake for my son and while it was being baked, went out to join the evening promenade downtown. We actually had a mission -- finding the mineral water without "gas" that had so far eluded us -- but although we didn't locate it, we found nothing but cheerful shopkeepers who wanted to help. We returned for dinner to find out that somehow the cake order had been forgotten, but Ulie ran back to a bakery so our son would not be disappointed.

The highlight of our trip came fittingly at the end, when we reached Sarande. Today this is a rebel stronghold, but we think of it as the quiet and charming gateway to Butrint, about 10 miles beyond, the most astonishing city of the ancient land of Illyria, which is how Albania was once known. We had heard that the site closed at 2 p.m. every day, but Ulie told us not to worry, even though the gates were indeed closed when we drove up. He wandered around until he found a policeman who was fishing. Obligingly, the policeman came back and opened the gates, and then enthusiastically escorted us around for the next hour, volunteering to lift the kids onto various pedestals for pictures.

Virgil wrote that the Trojans founded Butrint in the sixth century B.C.; later it fell to Rome in the second century B.C. Even though much of it has not yet been excavated, it is full of temples, dwellings and shops, as well as a gymnasium, baptistry, basilica and castle. Yet unlike Athens or Rome, there are no barricades preventing you from getting right up to the monuments, no other tourists to jostle you -- or get in the way of your pictures.

At the end of our visit, since we'd been told the guard probably made all of $20 a month, we handed him $20 in deep gratitude, but he would only accept the posted charge of $5.

That evening, back in Sarande, we dined in a rooftop garden restaurant on the harbor, overlooking the shimmering reflection of the moon on still water. Everything seemed so gentle and tranquil. Today Sarande is the center of Albanian revolution.

Travel Advisory Because of the violence in Albania, the U.S. State Department is recommending that Americans defer travel to the country. The Albanian government has declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew, and Americans now in Albania have been urged to depart. Before the current strife, visas were not required for U.S. visitors, and the country could be reached from several European capitals on Alitalia, Swissair and Olympic airlines. For more information, contact the Embassy of the Republic of Albania, 1150 18th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20005, 202-223-4942.

The next morning, it was time to catch the daily ferry to Corfu. Among the dozen people congregating for the ride, the chief of the port immediately spotted the Americans and invited us to sit with him at an outdoor table for coffee, then personally put us on board and seemed to mean it when he urged us to return.

I admit to having been a little nervous surrendering our passports to a teenage ferry assistant who seemed to spend the hour and a half crossing manually entering every number of every document from every passenger onto triplicate lists for no apparent reason. I suppose I was afraid an American passport would be too valuable for a poor Albanian to return. But we got them back, with exotic stamps proving where we'd been.

In what seemed like no time, we were swimming laps, playing ping pong and drinking Greek wine at the five-star Corfu Palace Hotel, our memories of an impoverished Albania receding.

We told ourselves we needed to recover from the hardships of our Albanian vacation. But the truth is, everyone needs an Albanian vacation to recover from the excesses of Western life.

The last few weeks our memories have come flooding back in haunting fashion.