#into the world
Quite often we feel as though we’re travelling through some faraway distant land when we come across scenes like this, and in many ways I suppose we are. But looking at a map of the world, seeing how small and insignificant the miles we’ve covered across Europe are, Albania feels like it’s on our doorstep compared to the journeys we will make one day.
Albania has a unique culture unlike that of any other Balkan country, born of the decades of isolation they faced during the years of communism inflicted on them. They had no contact with the outside world, religion was forbidden and freedom seemed unimaginable.
After the death of dictator Enver Hoxha and the fall of communism, the Albanian people started to recover; they were free to pursue their own lines of work, farm their own animals, and practice religion once more. Now a great majority of the country are Muslim, and the rolling mountain valleys are punctuated by beautifully ornate mosques such as this one in the tiny rural village of Qerret i Madhe.
We spent the afternoon in this village, after a morning of windy tree-planting with @vulnetkuci and @discover_puka, at @agroturizem_devin, sampling the various and delicious homemade products they produced or foraged. We ate pieces of dried persimmon, homemade flija (a traditional dish of layered pancakes and sour cream) and tiramisu made with Turkish coffee washed down with sweet berry juice.
It was fascinating to see how much food could be grown or foraged locally, how one woman and her daughters could live self-sufficiently and thrive.
We thanked them for their time and headed back into Pukë for one final night before we were to travel into the far North.
Isolated.
Few places offer such opportunity to seek the wild and the remote such as North Albania.
A swathe of black pine trees, a horizon dominated by the hostile white peaks of the Accursed Mountains, and a winding dirt track meandering toward a wide open plateau just big enough for one van to camp. This is where we spent our nights while our days were spent in nearby Pukë.
Of course, parking in such remote places is usually fraught with a danger we must weigh up and assess before deciding to stay. And with our van playing up in cold weather since driving the perilous SH75 road we knew this was a risk we would take.
Dusk arrived, staining the valleysides purple and tinting the dry grass a beautiful shade of umber. The starlit night was peaceful and undisturbed by another human presence, but by dawn the winds had began to pick up, descending from a mountain whose name we were later told translated to the .
Our sleep interrupted, we cracked our eyes open and lay in bed while the van rocked to and fro until one of us gave in and got up to move it to a sheltered spot. Unfortunately, with the wind blasting straight into the engine, the stubborn old beast refused to start and we were left stranded, watching the hammocks and the lights sway as though in an earthquake.
Thankfully we were rescued, for the first in a number of times that week, by @discover_puka in a Land Rover. With our van running at last we were able to drive into the town to wander round its beautiful square and little tiny shops, and sample some of the local Puka beer made from the surrounding area’s mountain spring water.
Then we returned to our secluded spot amongst the pines to rest for the following day’s adventure, safe in the knowledge that even the most troublesome days in the wild were bound to make a good story one day.
