The Road to Thethi

The road to Thethi is the price of admission. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor. If you want to experience Thethi you have to take it.

Thethi is a village high in the mountains and not much has changed there in the last few hundred years. There is internet, electricity and proper restrooms, but everything else here is done the old way. You can see it in how the buildings are constructed and you can taste it in everything you eat and drink. The place where we stayed was hotel-like in that we had rooms with beds and bathrooms, but was like a boarding house when it came to food. Other than beer and coffee you didn't really order food and there definitely wasn't a menu. You tell them the size of your party and you get what they have. Dinner was like a mini feast, with plates of lamb parts (every cut was different), bread, Greek salad, 2 kinds of goat cheese spread and cornbread. The cornbread was exactly like we have back home. The dinner table was outside, under a wooden canopy with a mountain stream nearby.

In the 2 hours between the drive and dinner a few of us went on a hike to a nearby waterfall. We passed a flock of sheep, tended to by a woman in traditional garb. It was a decent climb to get to the waterfall but it was worth the effort. We took a dip in the Rocky pool of water below the waterfall - it was absolutely freezing but good.

We took a different route down and followed a small stream someone had built a long time ago to send water to a nearby farm. We passed a small bar that was really just a tiny log shack with a rough hewn deck overlooking the river. The view was fantastic. A hike like that deserved a beer so we stopped in. Colton noticed my arm was bleeding. It was a teeny cut, but it had bled over the hike to make it look worse than it was. I hadn't even noticed it. As we got ready to leave, the owner of the place noticed it and un kinked a hose and insisted on pouring rakki (moonshine) on the my arm to clean it. I pretended to lick the liquor off my arm as a complement and he passed the bottle around.

The road: getting into Thethi is a challenge. It's paved up to the last 18km but after that it's very rough. Our car, an early 2000s Volvo wagon had been an absolute tank the whole way but this was pushing it. At the end of the pavement we were warned by a group of Italians in a land rover that our car was too wide and wouldn't make it on the narrow rock and dirt road. We knew others from our group had made it in wider cars so we ignored the advice. We had second thoughts one last time when a local guy in a old land rover drove up, took one look at our car and tried to offer us a ride. Knowing how they drive here, we preferred to be in control of the driving, even if that meant we had to go really slow, and we would average about 8-9 km/hr. Three kilometers in, we encountered a guy driving a car similar to ours who had turned back, but we were determined to make it.

If the road to Thethi were paved, there would be a lot more accidents. It was extremely narrow and made mostly of rocks and dirt, not gravel. The roughness ensured oncoming traffic on blind corners would be slow-ish. Like the day before there were sheer cliffs at some points, so we decided to take off the seatbelts in case a quick exit was needed. When we encountered an oncomimg car at one particularly tight and and cliffy spot the passenger jumped out and guided us past the car, us inches from a cliff and a centimeter from the other car... all the while wearing cool shades with a cigarette from his mouth. Those 18km took hours but eventually we made it in.

Later on we decided our car deserved a name since it had survived that road. It was a FWD Volvo wagon with 250K km on the clock and it hadn't signed on for this kind of treatment. Vlora seemed like a good fit since it's an Albanian name, starts with V and goes well with Vlora the Explorer.

There is only one road to Thethi so we had to take the same way out the next day and it took hours and was hairy, but it didn't seem as bad the second time.Read more