Albania - North — The road liss traveled

Well I feel kind of bad for not finishing up the blogging for the last 2.5 weeks of the trip, so here we go. I took a 5 hour bus from Kosovo to the town of Shkoder in Northern Albania. That was the easiest border crossing of the trip, which I guess makes sense since the vast majority of Kosovo is ethnic Albanian. Shkoder is a quaint little place, situated in between the mountains to the east and Lake Shkoder to the west.

There are lots of places to rent bicycles, as that seems to be the main way to get around town, as well as cycle around the lake, which is exactly what I did. Well the lake is large enough you can’t exactly cycle around it, you’d have to cross the border into Montenegro, but it is a really nice out and back ride. Probably the most interesting feature was a little island just barely off the coast, that has a large unfinished 3-story building, with a bridge crossing the water to get to it. It’s fenced off, but there’s a guy with a food stand there, and if you pay him $1 he let’s you go through the hole in the fence. It’s kinda creepy and cool at the same time, and probably the best views on the lake!

Shkoder is pleasant enough, but the real reason most people go there is to get up into the mountains and do the famous Theth-Valbona hike, which I think is the most popular touristy thing to do in the whole country. The famous hike is only about 5 hours long, but the whole trip is a loop that involves a few buses, the hike, and ferry. I opted to go to Valbona first, reverse of the usual order. To get there you take a bus to Lake Koman, then take a ferry though the long winding alpine lake, where a bus picks you up and drives you another hour to the small mountain town of Valbona.

Apparently most people buy these bus-ferry-bus tickets ahead of time in Shkoder as a combo ticket, but not I! I showed up at the minibus stop at 7am and was able to just buy a single ticket to the lake. At the lake there were two ferries, but everyone, and I mean everyone was getting on one ferry, and the other had just a small handful of people on it. I verified they were going to the same place, at the same time even, and then bought a ticket for the one with nobody on it of course. I guess all the people who bought their tickets in town were all packed like sardines onto this one ferry, not even enough room to sit down. Haha suckers.

I’m always jealous of the people with their big travel camper vans

My ferry was awesome, it was pretty freezing cold up top, so there was plenty of room to go down to the bottom cabin and warm up and then back up again, or to the viewing deck on the back of the boat, wherever. It was great, the scenery was fantastic, at some points you were surrounded on all sides by gray craggy cliff-faces, almost felt you were in the fjordlands or something. After 3 hours of cruising we finally stopped and they told me to hop in minivan waiting there with a group of Germans. I felt a little bad about this, as it was pretty clear the van was arranged for only them, and then they just threw me in there, oh well. I was the biggest person so I actually ended up getting the front seat, heh.

An hour later I was at my homestay in the village. If you can even call it a village. There really is not much in Valbona, there’s one convenience store in town, and that is being very generous, it’s a little wooden box that is very much under supplied and run by a teenager who gives you attitude if you ask him any questions. Seriously if anybody bothered to open a real convenience store here they’d make a killing off all the tourists.

There’s one stand alone restaurant and the other restaurants are part of a hotel or guesthouse. The rest is just mostly old houses and cabins, many/most designed to accommodate tourists. But it is sandwiched in between jagged mountains on both sides, so the setting is really quite wonderful, there’s just nothing to do. Now normally with homestays they make dinner for you and it’s one big communal thing, which I was looking forward to, but I guess my place wasn’t crowded enough to do a big dinner, so they arranged for all the people staying there to go down the road a bit to a restaurant.

See how pretty it is? This was the view a few minutes from my homestead

So that was kind of nice. At the homestay I didn’t really meet anyone because everyone was talking in German, but at least during dinner the German majority would switch over to English to accommodate me and a French guy who were the lone non-German speakers. Seriously Germans friggen love Albania, I don’t know if they’ve done a big tourism advertising campaign there or what, but it felt like 2/3 of the people I met in Albania were German.

Dinner was you’re typical fancy-ish European style affair, white tablecloths, slow service, have to order everything ala carte etc. My fish said it came with potatoes, which actually meant it had one small potato sliced in half, haha. It came with A potato. Most of the group had just finished their hike from Theth to Valbona, so I got some good intel on the hike and what to do in Theth, which is all pretty straightforward anyway. Originally I was originally planning on staying two nights in Valbona, as there was a specific hike I wanted to do, but the weather forecast was looking bad the following day, and even worse the day after (the day I had planned to do the Valbona-Theth hike) so I decided to skip town and do the hike to Theth the next morning. I had to eat the cost of the room for a night though.

The Valbona-Theth hike might be a challenge if you’re out of shape, it’s 8 miles in between the two towns, with a lot of elevation gain to get over the pass, but really it’s just 4-5 hours of hiking if you’re in decent shape. When I left the homestay it was a good 2 miles of walking on the road before getting to the trailhead, weather was overcast and foggy. And it would basically stay that way the whole hike! Plus a bit of drizzle here and there. So there were absolutely no views to be had, just a total whiteout. Bummer. On the plus side, it didn’t really rain. If I had waited one more day, I definitely would have gotten soaked.

Theth was a charming town though, it actually feels like a town, not just a single road like Valbona. I found another homestay there where I’d stay for two nights, as there was another hike I wanted to do in Theth, despite the bad weather forecast. The nice thing was the weather actually cleared up for like 30 minutes before sunset that evening, so at least I was able to get some nice photos walking around Theth, not just total bleak gray skies. And we had one of those big communal Albanian dinners that I had hoped for, and only half the group was German!

Really nice church built in the late 1800’s

The next day I did the hike out to the Blue Eye, which is a small waterfall and natural spring up in the mountains. It’s supposed to be a great spot for a swim, but not in this weather. Although at least the rain held off until I got to the Blue Eye, where there is small cafe that serves snacks and drinks, no seating inside, but some covered areas outdside where we could wait out the peak of the downpour. The rest of the way back was a mix of clouds and rain, so I was pretty thoroughly soaked by the time I made it back to the guesthouse. One more group dinner and I was off on a bus to Shkoder the next morning, and then onto the capital, Tirana.