The Fateful Autumn Trip

Typical scene on the Albanian highway looking out the back window of the car!

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The Fateful Autumn Trip

Before the upcoming weekend trip begins -  it is changing. Originally there were 3 couples traveling to Montenegro but for various reasons the others bailed out. I started taking an intestinal medicine and couldn’t drink for 5 days. However, around mid-day on Friday, Peter and I left Tirana, headed north, anticipating a relaxing weekend away from the city. As we approached the border and were chatting away, we noticed that the road was deteriorating rapidly and climbing steadily. Pulling out the Ipad, and using Google Maps, (you gotta love the internet), we found ourselves heading up a very rocky secondary road to Vermosh, Albanian’s most northern village. The road was one lane, a very large grade of gravel but stunning in its rugged rocky vistas. The 68 kilometers take 3 hours in the best of conditions, crossing two passes and driving through the Kelmend Valley. There are fantastic panoramas, opening up with fold after fold of rock to the north and the gravel road zigzagging steeply down in dozens of hairpin turns. Climbing up again, through huge rock fields, the dusty road allows for plenty of vistas and a bumpy ride. 

See the road below us

Pedestrians on the road!

We accepted our fate, ready to experience this much talked about village where winter snow, up to 3 meters, keeps the 58 inhabitants insolated from the outside world for 3 months of the year.

With an hour to go, Peter stops the car (there is no place to pull over, really) and gets out. A curse or two later, he tells me we have a flat tire! Not good. He opens the back of the car and begins to unscrew the bolts that hold in the car jack. After prying it off the hinges, he looks under the car and wonders where is the safest place to put the jack. He did not major in mechanics! I, meanwhile, can see that there is about one hour of daylight left. Two small farms  dot the hillside below. While he figures out the jack, I start down a path from the “main road”. I venture forth to see if anyone has a room for us. Passing the first farm, I spy a woman crossing the pig yard, carrying a burlap bag with freshly picked grapes. Trying my best Albanian that she absolutely doesn’t understand, we each repeat our phrases over and over with neither of us understanding the other. Finally she offers me a bunch of grapes and motions for me to follow her through the poop from four kinds of barnyard animals. Just then, fatefully, I hear a horn and see Peter driving down the road toward me. As fate would have it, the one minivan that makes the daily 8 hour trip from Vermosh to the big city of Shkodra each day is thankfully making its way back to the mountain village. When they see the problem, 8 people jump out, take over the tire changing operation and in minutes, are on their way. 

One man, residing in Vermosh, agrees to escort us there. I thank the pig woman, who stills doesn’t have a clue why I am standing there in her yard, and get in our car. By now the full moon is rising over the mountain peaks illuminating the rocks high above us.

An hour later we arrive in Vermosh. The full moonlight shows off the stone structures that are boxy and have deep slanted roofs to keep off the winter snowfalls. Our escort has us stop briefly at his house to unload his bags of produce from the big city and then directs us into “town”. We leave the gravel road, go down a steep incline and rumble along a river bed (good thing it isn’t spring!) to a rather dark guest house set in the hillside. Here  we are warmly greeted by a young couple with their 3 year old daughter, offered a warm bottle of beer and conversations begin between the escort and the woman of the house. She gives me a big hug and in her somewhat good English has us enter.  Throughout the night the hanging light bulbs, in the living room, dimmed occasionally but never went out. This main room had plain white walls, an overstuffed couch with 2 matching overstuffed chairs and a table. 

Our host

The night before add four more people to this chair to skype

Dinner was served as two middle age Italian men entered the room. They were guests as well and had been hiking the surrounding trails for three days. We each received a plate of food consisting of a 3” medallion of bologna, a well fried pork chop, fresh sliced tomatoes, fried potatoes, a big hunk of feta cheese and big soft homemade rolls. No wine, (thankfully I couldn’t drink alcohol) but Peter availed himself of another warm beer. While it wasn’t gourmet, in the context the chatter, the environment and our good fate to be indoors, it was a meal to savor. While we ate, the family of now five all sat on top of one another in one overstuffed chair and skyped with an Albanian family living in Greece. In walked 4 men, newly arrived house guests. The talker of the group immigrated to Detroit, Michigan years ago and comes back to visit Albania each year. He owns a construction company and we had some rousing debates about Obama. He admitted that Obama had saved the auto industry and that Detroit was booming but he would vote for Romney because he thought Obama showed a terrible weakness by apologizing for the recent anti-Muslim film. I think this is a male Balkan thing. Add that to Obama’s stand on abortion and Mr. Detroit was going to quickly cancel out my vote this November!

The Raki making apparatus

Homemade Raki was then produced and shot glasses filled multiple times. The host makes his own Raki from plums in his yard, fermented and bottled in reused 1.5 plastic liter bottles. At 10:30 we excused ourselves, climbed up to our room, opened the windows to let in the cold fresh mountain air and looked out at the valley, now illuminated by the full moon.  We hugged each other and did agree that we had a remarkably fateful day.

The following morning we awoke to the early morning light, showing off the village houses, dotted between fields of vegetables and livestock pens. Being “shut in” for three months each winter requires the putting up of much food. 

 

That particular Saturday a group of townspeople were coming over to our guest house to pick potatoes from the field. 

 

We were served a hearty breakfast with cheese being the main attraction. After paying for our meals and lodging ($31/pp) we exchanged hugs and more hugs and left over the river bed to the main road out of town, east, toward Montenegro.

Saturday provided clear sunny weather. Aren’t all days around here sunny? I wish I had a video to show the sights we saw on our 8 hour ride that seemed like 2 hrs. The vistas of forests, small village towns with tidy houses, the mountain top roads above the tree line, and the deep rock gorges with rushing rivers. My fearless driver, Peter, thinks nothing now of taking our 4 wheel drive car on “secondary” roads. As bad as the road was leading into Vermosh from the west, when we left in the daylight on Saturday morning, we were astonished to find a well paved two lane country road to Montenegro (16 kilometers away) heading east. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, we saw people cutting, hauling or stacking wood for the long winter ahead. Additionally we passed repeated fields of potato pickers, hauling in the winter supply.

Our car climbed up and down mountains, down steep gorges and on the dirt paths clinging to the mountainsides. We passed a small ski area. Basically there were no cars or people for long stretches of time. Fall colors covered the exposed sides of the mountains where something can grow. This was certainly our fall foliage tour. 

Who says only Vermont has fall colors???

 The final hour of our day, as daylight was fading, we descended down the Stygian Platije Canyon, in and out of tunnels, some lit and some not. The river, where the sun never reaches, lies several hundred meters below, while across the gorge and high above, the railway races between the city of Bar on the coast and Belgrade in Serbia. This could be another trip by rail for us. We arrive in the small capital of Montenegro, Podgrodica, tired but full of photographs. We found a hotel, ate dinner on the hotel terrace by the river and crawled into bed from sensory overload.

Sunday was basically the journey home, stopping for a dip in the Albanian sea and a late lunch at a castle near Tirana. Luckily no more flat tires!! Fate was, once again, very good to us.

Oops, a monastery on its side. I can't find rotate!

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