Satellite
  • Day 13

    Entering Albania the hard way!

    August 5, 2018 in Albania ⋅ ☀️ 32 °C

    We knew we had a long day of mountain driving ahead of us, but we didn’t really have any idea what lay ahead.

    As we near the Albania/Kosovo border, we start to see several processions of cars with many of the cars prominently displaying Albanian flags and we couldn’t quite make out what they were, either funerals or weddings possibly, but either way, these people are proud Albanians - but we are still in Kosovo. Talking to a few people from the previous night, many people of Kosovo are ethnically Albanian and they like the idea of someday becoming part of Albania.

    As we enter into Albania, the nostalgia starts setting in for Steve. He came here 23 years ago with his father to work on a mineral exploration camp for a summer. As we make our way deeper into the country, the mountains become more imposing and we start to wonder if we need to go through and across them. Once we get past the northernmost town of Valbona and approach the Fierze Dam, the road becomes fairly devoid of traffic. We would find out later that there is a border crossing further to the south which had a more normal road and a more straight shot to our next destination, but where would the fun and adventure be in that?

    As we approach the Dam, we stop for a few pics and try to figure out where the road goes as all we see are towering mountains. Sure enough, there are a series of tight switchbacks that start to take us up. These switchbacks are intense, have us rising quickly at a 10 % incline, and have no guardrails. This takes the term white knuckle driving to new heights, knowing a wrong reaction to an oncoming car around a bend, could mean a 1000 foot free fall to certain death. The thought becomes more real as we continue the drive and start seeing memorial after memorial along the side of the road. In fact, there are no speed limit signs, but the full-tombstone memorials serve that purpose - for us anyways. Some of the tombstones are dedicated to multiple people, likely meaning they all sailed off the cliff in one car to meet a horrible end. As I write this, the term road might be a stretch, more like a glorified goat path, which goats still use today as if it’s meant exclusively for them. You may have seen roads like this on TV, they are carved into the side of the mountain, mostly one lane, except for slightly widened spaces to allow for oncoming traffic to pass, no guard rails, ever present signs of recent rockslides, and the occasional large stone or boulder which tumbled down to the road, and immediately alongside the edge is a steep drop of hundreds - thousands of feet, with no trees to slow down a falI. I maneuver the road carefully as I see Steve grabbing for the handle and holding his breath on occasion. I assure him that I got this, but he doesn’t seem too convinced at first. The dozens of memorials we see along the route serve as a constant reminder that this is some serious driving and we need to stay ever attentive. This would go on for 6 hours, before we finally came to the main road to Shkodër.

    We were losing light but needed a break, so we stopped in the old mining town of Fusche Arraez, this was the area Steve had worked when he was here in the 90s. The mountain in front of us and the land 20 miles to the south had once been part of a mineral exploration operation led by Steve’s father, Jim Kelly. These hills and mountains are filled with gold, copper and zinc, but unfortunately the Albanian Revolution of 1997 put an end to that operation. We wanted to stop by the area where the old camp was located, but the roads were terrible and daylight wasn’t on our side so we had to skip it.

    A couple more hours of maintain passes gets us to our destination city - Shkodër, a big shout out to the Travel Scientists for choosing such a great route and arranging a fairly high class hotel for us to recharge at.
    Read more