To Shkoder lake

I left Niksic happy for the experiences I had. Mostly for the people I had met. But certainly experiencing the city in all of its liveliness contributed to the feeling as well. Would I have made a quick stop and cycled onwards to Podgorica, then I would've never witnessed the way the people live in the city, day in and out. Every day, not just in the weekends, would the cafes and square be filled with people. You might think it is easy to sit all day in cafes, but my new friends assured me that it is hard work indeed!

I departed towards Podgorica, the initial road traveled together with my host. Along the way we saw two Serbian hikers, my companion guessing correctly that they were making a pilgrimage to the Ostrog monestary. He explained that it was a tradition to go there on foot. After departing I managed to encounter the Ostrog monestary as well. For a moment I questioned whether I should ascend the stairs or not, but I once more reminded myself that I wasn't making a big bicycle trip just to cover distances. There was a road leading most of the way up, but I opted for the walking path. Some of the people who were heading there left their shoes at the base of the climb, others cheated and took their car most of the way up. The monestary was an impressive sight, moreso since it was built in a place that was difficult to reach and in simpler times. Equally impressive was the line of people waiting to go inside the building. I had no patience to wait, so I took the stairs back to my bike after taking in the sights.

I made the rest of the way to Podgorica and stayed in an appartment in order to call some family and friends. The family that owned the apartments told me that they saw me cycling, and gave me a warm welcome by handing me a cold beer for the efforts. The next day started with a wild goosechase for earphones, some food and some new fuel for my alcohol stove around Podgorica. As always the latter required four attempts. For cyclist's reference: methylated spirits (or denatured alcohol) can be found in Italy in supermarkets, in Croatia it may be found in DIY shops, and in Montenegro one must go to the pharmacy and explicitly ask for the mixture with the higher alcohol comtent. It will set you back by approximately 3.30 euro for a liter.

After finding everything (even scoring some superglue for repairing my sandals and phonecase) I made the rest of the journey towards Albania. This would be my first official border crossing. I'm not sure but I think my mountain routes got me into Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro illegaly. Shortly after crossing the border of Albania I took a break in a small village. While preparing to pack up I noticed a water fountain. After unscrewing the caps from my bottles I learned that the water supply was cut off. I wasn't the only one who noticed, since when I turned around and walked back to my bicycle someone whistled for me. It was a farmer passing by in his tractor with a water tank on a trailer, who promptly filled up my bottles and gestured I could wash my face. The latter was very welcome: in the last blog entry I wrote the temperature had been above 30 degrees for the past days, more accurate would have been to write that it has been like that for the past month. Remember that I also asked for rain?

Onwards I went to Shkoder. I traveled along the busy road SH1 (but it had a reasonably sized shoulder for me to be safe from the traffic), enjoying the view was harder for me than usual as the roadside was lined with a shocking amount of trash, many of the villages were as well. I had planned a refuge from these sights by taking a small detour over dirt roads in order to end up at Shkoder lake. Upon my arrival my mood worsened as I saw the shores covered with trash as well. Cycling onwards in order to find some unlittered grass proved fruitless. At some point I found a fowl and a mare drinking from the lake, initially providing a bit of emotional relief, until I saw that the mare had her two front legs chained together by a chain of about one meter. She could only walked in a strained fashion and running was out of the question. At that point I gave up on my quest to find a nice place to sit down, opting for the shade of a tree between the bushes instead.

Thoughts and decisions always being influenced by emotions, I decided to make a beeline for Shkoder city. The city was rather large, and like Niksic it was alive and full of people late in the afternoon. Every park, cafe, restaurant and sidewalk was full of people enjoying their day. People who wanted to make a quick visit to a shop would leave their car running on the side of the road, not trying to park at all, and came back a couple of minutes later. However, there was a particular order to the chaos that made for relaxed cycling. The language had finally changed as well, no longer could I rely on the little bit of Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegran that I had learned. Particularly unexpected for me was the deep throaty "hrr" sound that would be scattered around the uttered phrases.

That same day I left the city, looking for a place to sleep outside of the city. On my way towards Mjede I saw a man with a wheelbarrow cleaning the roadsides of trash, providing me with the relief I needed from the earlier sights. Having found a place to sleep my wish for rain was granted by a fair, but somewhat humorous higher power. As the next morning wasn't just hot, it was now rather humid as well. In that air that would simply not accept the sweat from my body. I traveled over roads that was initially a reddish brown dirt road, but the reader can guess by now that it did indeed once more turn into a rock garden. Once again I had a heated one-sided argument with geological formations.

I realised it is not so much the fact that the road is difficult to traverse that annoyed me, it is that I was expecting something else. Likewise the trash near Shkoder lake itself wasn't the problem, it is that I was expecting pristine natural beauty to enjoy during my break. But I think there is a silver lining in all of these, and other experiences I had that I did not write about. Within reason, one cannot expect the unexpected, but it is the unexpected that is a new experience most of the time. Encountering the unexpected provides one with a broader range to compare new experiences to. This allows me to enjoy other practical parts of traveling with a new perspective. Later in Albania I found a german man pushing his bike up a hill, one of the many ones you'd have to take alongside the Drini river, and cursing all the way. At that particular point in time I was experiencing the same hills as relatively easy cycling, considering the rock gardens I had traversed these past weeks, but I suppose I would've been as happy as my German fellow cyclist would it have been the first thing to encounter since leaving the Netherlands.

The sights along that difficult rocky road were well worth it as well. Different from other parts of Albania it was a rather dry place. Vegetation was sparse and the place where once a river flowed was now just its riverbedding filled with eroded pebbles and rock formations. Later I encountered a hodryelectric plant, its generators eagerly awaiting the moment water would flow through them. The villages I saw were half-abandoned, the derelict houses used as stables for cattle or to store hay, much like in parts of Bosnia and Montenegro. A big contrast between the lush valleys I saw to my west once I traded my unpaved route for the SH5 (very little traffic on that road between Puke and Fushe-Arrez), although I had no time to visit that valley as I was heading in the other direction. I took a short break in Puke, and decided to have dinner at just the right time in Fushe-Arrez (once more the weathergods were favouring my journey as the heavens opened up just as I sat down). After that I headed north on the SH22, equally devoid of traffic. Those days were finally a little bit cooler. Each night rain would fall accompanied by a thunderstorm, and the next day the clouds would shield me from direct sunlight. Luckily the mountain air retained less moisture than down below near Shkoder. I think I'm repeating myself as I say that it was incredibly beautiful there: mountains all around and the giant river Drini below me as I oscillated between 500 and 700 meters in elevation. Wildcamping appeared to be a problem until I saw a nice little road stomped flat by cattle leading up to a flat section to pitch my tent for the night.

Strangely enough for a citydweller I realised I had been traving for two full moons. When the moon is new I eagerly sit outside in these regions with little light polution to look at their stars and the milky way running across the sky, trying to learn the constellation using the Stellarium application (thanks brother!), while during a full moon that same lack of light pollution allows one to see reasonably well in the night. Such full moons make me spend a bit more time outside reading during the evening. I'm sometimes still surprised at seeing my shadow cast on the ground by the dim moonlight.

Albania's heart

The next morning I was faffing about camp, writing and reading a bit, and just as I finished packing up an Albanian farmer yelled: "good morning, kafe?". I learned later that it was the little English he knew as I stood at his doorstep waiting for him to calm his dogs down. We mostly talked with our hands, the first thing he asked was why the hell I didn't camp on the flat section of grass on his farm that was much easier to reach. I heard from other bicycle travelers this was a common question. Back home you try to hide yourself when you're on somebody's property (I try to ask, but not always is there someone around) because the owners are never too happy about it. Here they seem confused why you didn't pick a nicer spot on their land.

I was quickly invited in and met his wife as well. The electricity didn't work for an hour or two, so the conversation couldn't have been made easier with google translate yet (I didn't download the Albanian language), but I was offered pancakes (petla) with honey, cheese, peppers and tomatoes by way of talking with our hands. After a while the electricity, thereby the internet, worked again, and we continued our conversation through typing in the translation application. Intermittently though, as sometimes the internet router would decide to give up for a short moment of time. The remainder of the day for me was incredible, but here I'll be concise: I was offered a place to sleep, my clothing was washed, I got a tour around the farm and we both told eachother of our families. In this region of the world I noticed that family is a subject that comes up rather quickly and is discussed in great detail. In an unforced manner I wasn't allowed to say no to anything that was offered to me. We drank raki (saying, phonetically, "zhu-arr" as way of saying "cheers"), and I was asked to call everybody in the family that could speak English. That night I was given a very bad B-movie to watch through youtube on TV, and had a comfortable place to sleep on a couch.

After awaking I had a last turkish coffee, raki and a glass of milk. We took some pictures, and I handed the couple a note I prepared the night before with my gratitude translated into Albanian. I left after making a couple of said photographs together. That morning, in the cool mountain air, the moisture escaping as clouds from the soil back into the air, my heart full of the experiences I had, I felt the luckiest man on earth.

I went along the Drini until I hit its hydroelectric plant. From there I made a slight detour into Bajram Curri to spend my remaining Albanian lek, and headed into Kosovo. Near the border I met a pair of german long-term cyclists, Leo and Julian (with a similarly named polarsteps account, if you're interested), and I asked to join them for a minute. After some conversations about our plans and some glances thrown at eachother's bicycle setup we took off together to cross the border. Quickly we would say our farewells too, as I was planning on making a slightly larger distance then they were.

Night fell quickly thereafter, and the next day I made my way to Prizren, planning to see a city for a change. I had no particular timeframe in which to get there, but I supposed the 40 kilometers I had to travel over relatively flat ground would be covered in no time at all. The small southern section of Kosovo I've seen consists of a couple of small cities that I've avoided because of traffic, and several small villages. The latter consisting mostly of completely new buildings, most already pretty large but some of them veritable mansions. Their newness, and the many monuments adorned with Albanian flags, all due to the recent war. This I learned a bit later when I was stopped for a conversation (in German again) by a man in the village of Rogove. My short distance would take an enjoyably long time after all as I was offered coffee, beer and food at the nearest cafe, again not being allowed to pay, and was made even lengthier by a trip to his enormous house where we watched TV, drank water and ate some of his homegrown watermelon. Again I was offered a place to shower and sleep. Conflicted I turned down his offer, as I had made plans to call people in Prizren and wanted to make some more distance. Once more I learned about the peoples scattered across the Balkan peninsula. With a smile on my face, and slightly inebriated, I continued towards Prizren, the Shar mountains to the south and Mavrovo national park behind them as my subsequent destination.