SH74: A Very Albanian Road Trip

A shepherd with his mule - Arrëza e Vogël, Albania

Camped up by the side of a rough dirt track, signposted between The Literal Middle of Nowhere  and Absolutely No Place, we rose to the weak early morning sun.⁣

What started off as an unassuming drive through the mountains on a road that couldn’t be that bad  turned into one of our favourite travel stories of all time.⁣

As yesterday’s sun fell and the traces it left behind licked the mountain’s outlines like flames of orange fire we threw the handbrake up and cut the van’s engine, exhausted. It had been a tough drive, a drive that could’ve easily ended our van or us for that matter. This treacherous piece of road clinging to the mountainside, suspending you over a deep deep valley visible below crumbling precipice edges, throwing in rocks and mud and landslides just for kicks had presented the ultimate challenge. We’d barely made it this far in one piece to find we’d only travelled 10km of this impossibly brutal road that hadn’t seen a lick of tarmac since Albania was under communism.⁣

We ended up parked beside an abstract monument reminiscent of a spomenik, its stark concrete sides tinted rose by the dying sun, the only landmark for miles and indeed the only piece of road wide enough for two vehicles to pass, not that we could imagine anyone with a lick of common sense driving up here. As darkness washed over the land we were calmed by the total lack of streetlights or sound of any kind, and the serene nightfall reminded us of why we sought out such impossible places. We counted approximately eight faint lights from the windows of houses across the entire valley before us.

We’d been hoping to make it at least to Liqeni i Golemajt lake by nightfall and then press on toward Berat over the next few days, but our van was being beaten and battered by this road. We’d found little information about the route online, apart from one blog post and a couple of photos taken by 4x4 explorers, so we’d taken on the challenge blind, knowing full well there was a chance we wouldn’t make it.

When morning came we knew we had to turn back, a fact we were reluctant to accept.⁣

We were just brewing up a coffee for the journey ahead when we were greeted by the tinkling of bells and a very bemused man leading a white mule. He shook our hands and greeted us in Albanian, then gestured, confused, at our van. We didn’t speak the same language but we knew he was asking “How the hell did you get that up here?”⁣

With a combination of gestures and figures drawn in the mud with a stick we gleaned that he was one of the last remaining residents in an area of small villages that had seen steady depopulation over the years. He lived alone with his wife, his children having all moved abroad, and he was visibly excited to have foreign people visiting this most difficult-to-access land.⁣

He conveyed to us that the monument we had camped by was in fact a war monument, commemorating a battle that had taken place on this very ridge involving Albanian and Italian soldiers. We gathered this information through a few broken pieces of Italian and a date scratched into the mud, but we could only imagine the conversations and insights we could’ve gained had we had a translator.

We felt right then and there that we could’ve stayed in that place forever, maybe stayed with this man we’d just met and his wife for a while, talk to them about their lives and help them with their farm chores. But we spoke not a word of Albanian, nor her English, and so that was the end of our brief yet poignant encounter.

⁣The man paused our conversation for long enough to herd his cows past and into a nearby pasture, then returned to shake our hands and snap a photo of us on his phone in a surprisingly modern gesture.⁣

We reciprocated by taking a photo of our own, said goodbye, finished our coffees and set off back down the mountain as our new friend waved from the field with his cows.

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