Up in the Albanian Highlands

We'd been warned there would be snow. When we arrived in Valbonë, we thought for sure that the ground was covered in it. White spread out before us. But as the furgon drove over to the door of our homestay, its tires created a sound more akin to a crescendoing bag of Jiffy Pop than the squeak and crunch of snow. These white stones cover a good deal of Valbonë valley, brought down from the mountains by the river after which it is all named.  In 48 hours, these river stones would find themselves in a familiar place, back beneath the rush of water.  Two days of heavy downpour carved a labyrinth of puddles and streams so large you'd think they were always there.
In fact, we woke up to find that our homestay had earned a protective moat overnight.  It had taken us 11 hours to reach Valbonë, via three furgons and one amazing ferry, and now a rain-river threatened to keep us from exploring it.  The only choice was to throw the biggest stones we could find into some shallow sections in an attempt to create a footbridge.  After too many kerplunked under the surface of the deepening water, we figured we were stuck.  But our host mother came to our rescue with a pair of galoshes. Embarrassingly, I wound up sending one of the boots down the river in a failed attempt to throw them back across to her, and she jumped in to catch it. Our feet were kept dry, but she was now drenched up to the calves. I reddened, she laughed. In Valbonë, leaving your house to find that a body of water now stands in the way of leaving your property is simply comedic.  
These are the mountains of Albania, where isolation is a part of life. Merlin and I joke that nearing two full years of travel, we aren't satisfied unless we've been to the most remote part of each country. In Georgia, that took us to Mestia. In Azerbaijan, extraordinary Xinaliq. Albania's north is full of villages that fit the bill and Valbonë, along with Theth, have become destinations for travelers who like going off(off-off) the beaten track. Summertime brings hikers from around the world and daytrippers from neighboring Kosovo. Teenagers who live in the nearby hub of Bajram Curri most of the year to attend high school - commuting every day isn't really an option - come home. They work as waiters and hiking guides for their family's business - half the houses become "hotel familiars" with restaurants and rooms for rent.
We weren't the first visitors of the year for our host family, but it is still well before their on season.  They are hoping to complete a new floor on their house, with wraparound balcony, before the tourist crowd begins to stream in.  Full all last summer, they are in need of new rooms.  Valbonë in the summer must be a far cry from the sleepy, rain-soaked place we found. Where, for two full hours of walking along the main road, we didn't see a single car.  This has been the poorest and most isolated region in Albania throughout most of its history and while tourism is beginning to help things a little, life remains mostly the same.  There weren't any cars parked alongside houses and for a month every winter, people are still completely confined to their houses because of the snow. Valbonë is a recognized National Park, which keeps it blissfully free from the litter that plagues most of Albania.  It really feels more like a protected stretch of nature than a cohesive village, with no discernible center, minimarket, post, etc.  The big, pink schoolhouse stands alone, aside from a trio of leftover bunkers half submerged into a hill. In a lot of ways, the Bajram Curri-Valbonë furgon acts as the nucleus of the town. Twice a day, the van makes its way across town. Down to Bajram Curri at 7am, back up at 3pm sharp. In the hours between, the driver runs the village's errands, armed with shopping lists and a handful of things that need to be returned or repaired. We were delivered to our host family along with a quarter chicken and tomatoes.
When we could rouse ourselves from the warm comfort of our room, we explored Valbonë under borrowed umbrellas. Unable to take full advantage of the hiking trails, we simply walked. The newly built museum and tourist center is currently empty and we weren't exactly sure what we would stumble across. As wet as it was, most people stayed in. It was just us and the constant sound of rushing water- from the heavy grey clouds above, from the waterfalls that ran down the mountains on all sides, from the impossibly blue Valbona river at our feet. Just when we thought the bell-wearing mare who leaped past and this salamander that sauntered by would be the only life we'd see, a siren call of chimney smoke brought us into a "hotel familiar/restaurant/bar." Inside, a pair of young men were waiting out the rain with a game of cards and a table of eight were enjoying a marathon lunch. Salads, yogurt with spicy pepper mixed in, fried potatoes, soup and a casserole of macaroni and lamb. When there was a lull in the delivery of courses, they passed around a traditional çifteli and each took a turn plucking at and strumming its strings.
Of course, we also had a family to come home to. And the warmth of the fires they built for us. The matriarch, whose galosh I'd sent a'floating, could light a fire with such ease that I swear she was telekinetic. The patriarch installed this wood stove right in our room, making it look downright tiny as he carried it in. He was a statuesque man with a low, smoker's voice that rattled and boomed. His broad, handsome face was sectioned off in three equal parts like an unfolded letter by one long, thick eyebrow and a long, thick mustache. He reminded me of the heroes' busts set up all around Tirana.

In front of the house sat these picturesque remains of the house he grew up in. With its doorway framing the gorgeous Dinaric Alps it seemed to smile over the ever-growing new home like the portrait of an ancestor hung above a mantle. In the barn next to it, we were shown the goats, who tumbled out of their holding pen, climbing on top of each other to exit like it was the L train at rush hour. Usually, they were up on the steep hill behind their house with the young son of the household. He and his mom screamed conversations we couldn't understand, in parent-child tones that sounded all too familiar. Some things are the same the world over.

The Living Skansen

There is a peculiar type of museum, which we call "skansen." It's a Swedish name, but we use it because it's easier than the bulky "ethnographic museum" and more elegant than "open-air history museum." We've been to skansens in Poland, in the Czech Republic and in Georgia. The effect is generally the same: in the collections of old, tiny buildings, one feels the simpleness and smallness of life in the peasant classes of the past.

But it's also the present. In Xinaliq, it's a way of life. We stayed with a family in their house and felt the closeness of a timeless home.

In this room, three generations - some nine people - cook, eat, sleep, pray and watch TV. There is a low table, we sat on the floor. There is a stove, covered in pots. A stack of mattresses gets put away in one corner, the dishes are kept on a small shelf. When the electricity is on, there's a light overhead and the television blares Turkish music videos. When the electricity doesn't work, the only light is from a small hole in the ceiling - once the chimney for an open fire. The family's sheep are kept underneath in a low, dark barrow.

It is, in so many ways, exactly like the skansens. But it isn't a museum, and the people whose lives are contained in this room weren't eager to play the part of living history.
All of us curious travelers are attracted to Xinaliq because of its "unspoiled" culture. It is a place not yet fully modern, somehow. The people speak their own language, full of clicks and hard vowels. They dress in traditional clothes, have their own customs, live almost completely off their sheep. There is a sense that one is making first contact with an undiscovered culture - a perverse anthropological excitement. Hasn't this sort of thing disappeared?

Before we went, in a guesthouse room in Quba, our Xinaliq contact - a man named Xeyrradin -apologetically explained the situation to us. "There's no water, no hot water. The family only heats one room and it's very cold there. They don't have wood, so they burn dung. They will only eat soup, maybe, or some kind of potato, it's very simple." He paused and spread his hands out to us. "Most people go in the summer," he said, shrugging.
There is one other "finished" room, mostly disused, as well as a small entryway, plus a storage space - but these aren't heated, and aren't used much. We slept in the guest room, which was only a degree or so above freezing. The winter closes in the life of this family. They spend as much time as possible inside, watching the television or using their cellphones. At night, the piles of mattresses are spread out over the carpets.

Falling asleep in our cold, separate space, the sound of sheep below the floor mixed with the sound of the television in the next room.
We spent hours sitting on cushions around the table. There was a lot of simple food, and many cups of tea in between.

Maybe the biggest cultural oddity about the home wasn't something we expected - this family seemed almost doggedly resistant to making a connection. There were no introductions. No-one said goodbye when we left. There were very few attempts at crossing the language divide. Food was served to us, one of the men would bark at his wife to refill our tea cups. Rebecca and I would have our own conversation and the family would have theirs, even as we all sat around the same table. We felt lucky that there were two toddlers - at least someone looked at us. We spent two nights with this family and have no name to attach to them.

There are no hotels in Xinaliq, and no restaurants, and that somehow explained our loneliness. The family was providing a service to us - a place to stay, with meals served. In other words, they were providing access to Xinaliq, the town. It probably never occurred to them that we were interested in them more than the buildings.

When we walked between the old stones, the people who approached us wanted to suggest hiking routes, or tell us to visit the caves. They were friendly people. But there are mountains everywhere, and shallow caves too. What makes Xinaliq stand out isn't its location - rocky, hilltop towns are special, but not extraordinary. They exist. Most of them, though, exist only as places - not as a theater for life.

There was a man named Misha in Tbilisi, Georgia, who we met at our hostel. He was Polish, but he'd lived in the Caucasus for years - he'd traveled all the back roads, been to all the remote spots. When we told him that we were heading down to Azerbaijan, he told us about Xinaliq. "It's my dream to go there," he said.

Xinaliq is the dream that there are still untouched places on earth. Perhaps with better Azeri (or Russian), or with more time, or with more persistence we could have found some spark of recognition between us and the family. Instead, we found ourselves more and more settling into the role of watcher, as though we really were visitors to a museum.

But what an amazing museum! Accept the divide, and the display is magical. We saw wolf tracks in the snow, a bloody sheep's stomach in the mud and herds of goats in the narrow lanes. We watched groups of kerchiefed women fetching water for their tea and washing clothes outside in the snow. There were boys playing dominos beside us and homemade cheese on the table - and fresh lamb, pickles, and bread rising wrapped in blankets. We sat in a tableau of the ancient present and saw things that could only be re-enacted elsewhere. Waking in the morning, the sun rose over a wall of rocky peaks around us, the hilltop was as silent and static as it has been for thousands of years.

Maybe not making a connection is the difference. Maybe that's why Xinaliq is still so untouched.

In a Land Far, Far Away...

Some places are hard to get to and, once there, even harder to really get at. Winter makes both attempts more difficult with snow obscuring roads as well as most signs of life. The world is full of places that remain set apart, that remain relatively unreachable even in this era of global connectivity. There are all sorts of words for these places: off-the-beaten-track, remote, exotic, fabled. Xinaliq has earned that final adjective - existing for at least 5,000 years on its unlikely mountain perch. Isolated, it's the stuff of legend.
Xinaliq an ancient village, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. Pressed into the mountains like a silk button in an overstuffed cushion, it has been able to retain its unique identity - even its own language. Who knows how many times in its long history the residents of Xinaliq have been aware of which empire or country they technically "belonged" to. It's the mountain equivalent of a distant island that has, for almost all of its existence, until very, very recently, been disconnected from the rest of the world.
This has changed, somewhat, with the new Quba-Xinaliq road. A difficult two hour ride in the summer, it was almost impassible on the wintry morning of our departure from Quba. Snow fell steadily and we were surprised, really, when our ride to Xinaliq showed up right on time in his Lada Niva. On the way out of town, he stopped to pick up another passenger. "I'm the man that plows the road," the man communicated proudly. "With my tractor." Well, great. The snow never let up and driving up into the village felt like entering a snow cloud. In the morning, at sunrise, the white curtain had been drawn and we could see where we'd wound up.
Winter makes it difficult to really get a good look or feel for things, physically and culturally. Xinaliq's landscape, which is lauded for its hiking options, though not without a guide, was covered in snow. The people were mostly hidden, smiling and waving to us when they emerged to use the outhouse or fetch more water. The sheep, the reason for the town's existence, weren't gallivanting around the fields being guarded by vicious dogs. They were led out once or twice a day to eat warm grains from troughs, ingeniously made from split tires.
Even with the bleats of sheep and occasional sledding child, there was a deep sense of hibernation. Fruit and vegetables were tucked away in jars, pickled and preserved. Wool socks and hot tea were applied in layers. Chickens were cooped up, along with families. Rubber clogs on doorsteps gave a sense of how many people lived in each house. This young girl stamped excess water out of her laundry. Her female relatives waited to hang the clothing up, adding to the banners of bright cloth with icicle fringe strung up all around town.
The town has retained a way of life that has become more and more rare and rarified. The smell of burning cow dung clings to everything. These pungent heating bricks are piled up outside of homes, an alternative fuel in a place that has no wood. Water is piped into wells spread throughout town from a single spring in the mountains. The stone houses are built one on top of another. Covers are placed over the chimney of one house so that the "upstairs" neighbor's child won't fall in stepping out their front door.
We managed a hike out into the surrounding mountains, a four hour loop guided by the oldest son of our homestay. He brought us first to this shepherd's refuge, a shallow cave filled with ice sculpture stalagmites and stalactites. Handkerchiefs and scarves were hung up and four or five tea saucers were placed upright against the wall. It was difficult to tell if there was a religious purpose for this or if it was simply a way to flag the spot and provide dishware for lunch. As we continued on, the rock faces kept changing, buzzards appeared and disappeared overhead, a gunshot rang out and the fox it was aimed at darted across a hill. Now and then, our guide would sit on his gloves and smoke a cigarette while we took pictures , cleaned our slip-prone boots and gathered our fraying nerves.
Many people mourn the Xinaliq-Quba road for the modernity it is bringing to such an ancient place. Cement walls, corrugated roofs, wood paneling are seen as defacement. Until recently, Xinaliq was frozen in time. Covered in snow, frozen in practically every other way, it still felt ancient to me. Winter gives everything a tinge of being colorless, lifeless, timeless. A sense of mystery.

Welcomes in the Svaneti Region

The Svaneti region of Georgia – in the most remote valleys of the Caucasus mountains – is a land of contrasting welcomes. We have been invited into the homes of strangers and nearly forced to drink and eat at their tables. In every house, we are sat at the best seats, directly in front of the stove. One man invited us home to meet his mother; the two of them wouldn’t hear of us leaving until we’d finished a bottle of her blueberry liquor.

Another man – his face brought threateningly close to mine – asked if I had ever been to Alaska. I told him that I hadn’t.

“Ah,” he sneered, “this is like Alaska.” He swept his hand behind him, gesturing at the white crags. “Very dangerous.” He gave his head a strange tilt and turned away, spitting on the ground.

Indeed, guidebooks warn against hiking alone in the mountains, as armed robbery is common.

Until about a year ago, getting into the Svaneti meant taking a series of “marshrutka” vans across the country, then a long Jeep ride one hundred miles up a bad road. The journey from Tbilisi typically took about fifteen to twenty hours.

Now, there’s a tiny airport and occasional flights. We took a little prop plane on New Year’s Day, the only passengers; the Tbilisi airport was absolutely devoid of travelers, the security guards were drinking champagne and singing. The flight took about an hour, and was spectacular. The pilot leaned back from the cockpit to shout the names of different peaks and to point out tiny villages below. We skimmed above the summits, then came in low over Mestia, the capital of the region and its largest town. A woman in high heels came out onto the snowy tarmac to greet the plane. “Your hosts are a little late,” she said. “But you can wait inside.”

The Caucasus mountains are the highest in Europe, soaring to over eighteen thousand feet. The people here have lived in isolation for centuries, and have never quite gotten used to the idea of a larger nation. In the mountains immediately to the west, the South Ossetians have effectively seceded from Georgia, and live a hemmed in, militia life. A few miles to the northeast, Chechnya is still fighting for independence from Russia. Here, the Svan people speak their own language, a fifth-century branch of Georgian that has evolved into a unique tongue. One of our hosts said that he speaks modern Georgian only a little, and that he prefers Russian. In the past year and a half, a better road has been built to the outside world, and the marshrutka service has gotten faster (about seven hours to Tbilisi, in good weather) – but this is still a region apart.

Mestia is an ancient town, bristling with stone towers built a millennium ago (these towers are so interesting that they deserve their own post, to be put up soon). As recently as the mid-19th century, explorers in Svaneti found villagers wearing chainmail and carrying broadswords. The locals are fond of saying that they have never been conquered by anyone.

The mountains have been the real defense, for they themselves are nearly unconquerable. This was one of the very few areas of central Eurasia that was able to repel the Mongolian raiders, and Svaneti became something of a safe house for Georgia - many treasures from Tbilisi and Mtskheta were stored here when the capital region was threatened by invasion.

Like much of Georgia, Mestia is being spiffed up and made “modern.” Like in other places - especially the towns that Tbilisi considers potential attractions – the first thing to be built was a large, gleaming police station. Though there is still some danger in remoter areas, Mestia is mostly safe. There are handpainted signs everywhere advertising rooms for rent and “hostels,” though tourists are still an oddity. We stayed with this family, known in the village simple as "Alexi," the first name of the patriarch.
The Svan children are uniformly open and friendly. Two little girls walked with us for a while yesterday, laughing at our cameras and pointing at different buildings for us to photograph. Before they ran off, they gave us each a few pieces of candy from their pockets. Packs of boys out sledding waved and say hello, some introduced themselves, practicing their English. Two young boys, perhaps having exhausted their store of foreign words, yelled “I love you!” once we had exchanged names and basic pleasantries.
The mountains are stunning in a pure, white-lined, unreachable way. The landscape of Mestia is one of roaming cows, deserted buildings and litter. Broken and rusting cars line the roadside. Roofless buildings crumble. Dogs sniff and dart in the ditches, hoping for a scrap of food hidden under the beer bottles and candy wrappers.

There are hairy pigs running wild, and men smoking cigarettes. When we first arrived, the mud and rubble in the streets portrayed only poverty. Snow came, and Mestia felt ancient and pastoral.
In many guidebooks, for many countries, it's suggested that the only "real" way to experience a culture is to be invited to dinner at someone's house. In most places, this is much more difficult than it sounds - we've only rarely been successful. In Georgia, and particularly in Svaneti, there are more invitations than can be accepted.

Grigol, above, and his mother wouldn't let us leave - we literally had to back our way out the door, zipping up our coats and waving as we went.
We ate at this little bar for three lunches in a row - there was really nothing else appealing or open in Mestia. On the first day, we were greeted with suspicious looks and given curt service. The locals moved aside to allow us access to the fireplace, but their faces were very hard. On the second day, the waitresses smiled when we came in, and there were some grumbled "hellos." One man asked where we were from. On the third day, a cheer went up when we opened the door, and the owner came to shake my hand and kiss Rebecca's cheek.

Halfway Up The Mountain

High up above the little town of Zreče, on a steep, mostly wooded slope, we stayed for three nights at Tourist Farm Arbajter. The valley below is filled with old watermills and log trucks; at the mountaintop, the Rogla ski resort was green and mostly empty. In between, the streams were rushing loudly and the meadows were almost sheer cliffs. The Arbajter family raises deer and sheep here, and let out some of their rooms to travelers. Konrad and Maritza, the farm's papa and mama figures, are among the most welcoming people we've met on the trip.
It's certainly a working farm, with scores of deer darting back and forth on the hillside and a few dozen sheep grazing slowly alongside them. We aren't entirely sure about the process, but it seems that the venison is harvested with a rifle. We talked at length with our hosts, but they didn't speak any English and our Slovene is limited to mispronunciations of numbers and the words for beer and wine. It's entirely possible that most of the information in this post is false or seriously misunderstood. We do know that Konrad is a hunting enthusiast and that he'd assembled an impressive collection of trophies. There were various stuffed cervidae (including four fawns), a badger, a few weasels and a smattering of squirrels.
Konrad also makes sausages, which were delicious. At breakfast, we were presented with venison and pork "salamis" and an herby deer paté. Also, eggs fried in cracklings and grease, cereal, farmer's cheese, local jam and a garlic-heavy lump of chopped lard. He had just built himself a new sausage-curing room, which he showed us and was very happy with. The salamis were earthy and mildly spiced, with a dark grain and tasty gaminess.
When we returned to the farm each evening, we were greeted with a small glass of "borovnica," the local blueberry schnapps. We aren't positive that Konrad and Maritza made it, but someone in the area certainly did. They had various solar-fermenting jars on their porch and tucked away in the pantry - pickled vegetables and cherry liquor, some fruit preserves and one container that looked like it contained capers.
It was a pleasure to sit down in the sunny dining room at breakfast and dinner. The kitchen was just through the door and we could always smell something cooking - the scent changed subtly as the day went on, from eggs and baking bread at breakfast to rosemary and garlic before dinner.
We were fed well, of course, and with proud flourishes. The dishes were typically hearty Slovene mountain food, with lots of meat and starch, mostly slow-cooked and tender. We shared with the Arbajters a love of "bučno olje," or pumpkin seed oil. They dressed their salads with it and mixed it with new cheese to make a green, salty paste for Maritza's bread. When we left, they gave us a bottle of the thick, nutty stuff that a friend had made.
The valley was clogged with mist when we arrived, and it wasn't until our second day that we could really grasp how beautiful the view was. Konrad stepped out onto the porch with me at dawn and pointed out the different towns that trickled down the cleft, and then where the hills of Croatia began, some twenty five miles away. They're proud of their place, and seemed to enjoy the wonder that visitors feel. It's the kind of place that one wants to bring other people to, to see and experience what's there. Taking our leave, we promised to bring our families someday.

To Grandmother's House We Went

Homestays in Lithuania are often referred to as sleeping "with the grandmother" (a sort of unfortunate translation). Arriving in Plateliai at around 3:30pm with winter early-evening darkness approaching, we stopped into the tourist office, where the very friendly and helpful woman made a quick phone call and then gave us two step driving directions to Granny Juliya's house.
She was waiting outside, hugging a long sweater around herself and returned my wave-and-smile with a bigger wave-and-smile. We pulled into her driveway and found that, like 99.99% of houses in Lithuania, she had a basketball hoop. Grandma Jules was really excited that we were from New York and, judging by the signatures in her guest book, we could possibly have been her first Americans. She apologized for not speaking English, explaining that she knew Lithuanian and Russian and had learned German in school. I made the mistake of trying to communicate that Merlin had studied French in school and I, Spanish, because she then excitedly began to speak to me in Espanol. I was too embarassed to admit that I hardly understood her - that her fourth language was better than my second.
We were given a tour of our guest space, on the second floor of her house, which could be accessed by a staircase straight from the parking lot. Our room, as you can see above, was lovely. I am a firm believer that matching is overrated, so I felt at home at once. In the hallway was a plug-in kettle, some tea and mugs. Naturally, I chose the one with the picture of her cowboy hat wearing granddaughter on it.
The bathroom had one of the most interesting plumbing mechanisms we've seen yet. There was one faucet for both the sink and the bathtub, it simply swiveled from one to the other according to your need. Up from its base was a shower hose that could be handheld or suspended on a hook overhead. We learned that the second option could result in some serious behind-the-tub leakage. Fortunately or unfortunately, all the water that spilled seemed to disappear. We really hope it didn't seep down and start dripping into Grandma's kitchen.
And this was our view. We could step right out onto our own private balcony overlooking a pond in the Zemaitija National Park. If you're wondering, it was the equivalent of $20 for the night.