CRF: The Best Of Liechtenstein

"CRF" is not a crime show you've never heard of, it stands for "Cutting Room Floor." It's been more than a year since we returned from Europe, and we've started to get seriously nostalgic.  To give us all an extra travel fix, we're posting some of our favorite photos that never made it onto the blog.  Here are our favorite unpublished memories and pictures of Liechtenstein - a tiny, odd, forgotten place.

These Swiss browns with Switzerland in the backdrop were photographed from a berggasthaus just like the ones we'd hiked to in the Appenzell Mountains.  We were carrying Swiss francs in our wallets at the time and trying to speak Swiss German.  Surprise! Du bist nicht in der Schweiz!
Liechtenstein might not look like much on a map, it doesn't have its own language or currency, but we left The Principality with a real sense that we'd visited a country all its own.  Sure, there are more registered businesses than there are citizens, but this tiny country's identity as an unlikely survivor rings truer than its status as a tax haven.

Not to say you're left to forget that Liechtenstein has the highest GDP per person in the world, the world's lowest external debt and Europe's wealthiest ruler.  It feels moneyed in the capital, Vaduz, even if it also feels like a farm town.
Their National Museum had one of the finest Natural History exhibits we've ever seen, anywhere.  Their Kunstmuseum is world-class and their ski museum and stamp collections are as cluttered and quirky as can be.  The public spaces are filled with art.  If there was a roundabout, it had a sculpture at its center.  The capital's center plaza was sleek and modern, though very tiny.

The food was... expensive and alpine.  There were some great local specialties at the Bauernmarkt, Weinfest Trieson, Sommernachtsfest and at "Oldie Night," but we otherwise had little success eating well.  We did cook some great forellen und rösti, and had plenty of camping picnics, but white asparagus toasts in aspic aren't our idea of inspiring, even if they did come with a squirt of mayonnaise and a bit of pickle.

The heat at the end of August, dusty with the last cuts of hay, drove us to the water.  The Rhine is too swift and sharp-bottomed to swim in, but there were plenty of pools.

Liechtenstein isn't tiny tiny, by microstate standards.  At 61.78 square miles, it's about three hundred and sixty three times larger than Vatican City - but that's like comparing grapes and poppy seeds.  In terms of micro-ness, it's closest to San Marino, though Liechtenstein's still over two and a half times larger.

Still, it's the third smallest place we visited on the trip, and every larger country felt a LOT larger.  You can walk across Liechtenstein in a day.  Luxembourg, which many people confuse with Liechtenstein, is sixteen times larger, and has a functioning train system.

This greenhouse was situated alongside our walking path from campsite to capital.  The walk took less than an hour and covered more than a quarter of the country's length.

But that's on the flats along the Rhine river valley.  Along the Austrian border on the other side of the country - locally referred to as the "Oberland" - Liechtenstein is mountainous and harder to get around.  We spent a sunny day hiking the ski resort of Malbun and watching a falconry show, and another few days on a long, trans-nation hike.  The peaks here are part of the Western Rhaetian Alps. Cowbells clanked on the summer breeze.

One of the trip's wierd animal experiences was at "BIRKA Bird Paradise," a zoo-like aviary that we never really figured out.  There were plenty of parrots and chickens, but who the heck knows why they were there?
In some ways, Liechtenstein feels a bit like a roadstop along the expanse of our trip.  We visited just after returning from a trip back home - we flew back into Ljubljana airport, where we'd left our car, and drove up into the Austrian Alps feeling excited and full of energy.  Two weeks later, we left Liechtenstein bemused and restless, driving on to France and broader horizons.  What had we seen?  What had we done?  Walked, looked at postage stamps, wandered around a garden, gotten confused, felt hemmed-in - and seen some strange birds.  It's not that it wasn't pleasant, it's just that we wanted to get back on the road.

There's a romantic myth about Europe: that it's filled with tiny kingdoms, where princes and kings and queens sit in their castles, ignored by the rest of the world.  Two and a half centuries ago, before Napoleon and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, there really were little duchies and comtés scattered amongst and beside the major countries - in Germany alone there were around 300 sovereign states.
Today, almost all of those little kingdoms are gone, and you'll find only three micro-states ruled by royal families: Luxembourg (which isn't really that micro), Monaco (which can hardly be called a forgotten kingdom) and Liechtenstein.  In a lot of ways, this little place is a unique throwback.

Approaching Vaduz, a traveler passes through farms and orderly vineyards.  The mountains rise to one side, very green and lush in the late summer, but topped by glaciers and distant rocks. There's a quaint little castle just above town, where a real prince lives.  A few Victorian-Gothic steeples rise above the beech treetops.  It looks, from afar, just like the capital of a fairytale, middle-european, lost-principality should look.
Of course, close up, it's full of Toyota dealerships, pizza places, bank buildings and shopping complexes.  Theres too much traffic and not enough places to park.  If modern concrete is your thing, maybe you'll like it. If you want to visit a peaceful principality town, though, avoid the capital.  You can stay anywhere else in the country and still drive to Vaduz in twenty minutes, if you feel like it.  Better yet, take the bus.
This picture was taken at dusk from a third story window of the one old Inn still left in town, Gasthof Löwen.  The timber-framed building has literally been walled in by roads and development.  On the last night in the country, we went to sleep under the eaves, listening to the grumbling roundabout outside in the night, dreaming of bigger places to explore.

To see all of our posts about Liechtenstein, just click here.

Castle Hunting: Kotor

Behind the last rise, the hot and arid medieval lands of the Serbs and Bosniacs stretched. Later, the Ottomans controlled this expanse of mountains and plains, running as far as old Hungary.  A caravan trail - a mule track in the dust - ran from the interior to the very edge of the sea, coming just to the point where land and water meet.  The black mountain that gives Montenegro its name rises there, at the edge, part of a long horseshoe of peaks that encloses Kotor bay.  Down its side, crossing in hundreds of switchbacks, the ancient trade route trickled down to a busy port.  Named in antiquity, this "ladder of Cattaro" is still visible in outline, there are still some paving stones in the yellow grass.  Before it, at the entrance to the Adriatic, the Venetians built one of their grandest and most ambitious castles - Cattaro (now called Kotor) was the ancient gateway that held shut the back way to Montenegro's heart.

The landscape isn't much changed - scrub and tinder-dry grass.  As we hiked in the peaks around Kotor we came across a man collecting dead wood for his fireplace.  The views are amazing, the heat was overwhelming.  The upper part of Kotor's fortifications are impressive, but not all that well preserved or interesting.  From below, they blend into the mountains, the towers having been leveled by earthquakes.  But sometimes, a castle can be evocative just because of where it is - and there are few castles we've been to with this kind of setting.
Until 1879, the "ladder" (note that it's not actually a ladder, just a very steep path) was the only way in or out of Cattaro by land - which the people of Montenegro liked.  Essentially, the shores of the Bay of Cattaro (now Kotor Bay) were like an island in the Mediterranean, cut off and sheltered from the turmoil of the mainland but readily accessible by boat.  The bay is the deepest-cut and steepest-sided of the Adriatic.  The water here is dead still, protected from the storms and winds of the wider sea - perfect for a port.  Everyone coveted it, from the Romans to the Ottomans, but it was the Venetians that ruled it for the longest in recent history, and who shaped the castle's fortifications the most.

Kotor's defenses are much more than just a keep and walls - there are two main parts, an upper castle and a lower sea fort, built mostly at the same time, during the 1430's-90's.
The real "castle" part of Kotor's fortifications is really called the Fortress of St. John, or San Giovanni, and is more than 900 feet higher than the old town (there is a myth that the castle is 1,200 meters above the sea, which would be spectacular if it were true).  It's situated perfectly on a high crag, between the bay and the slope where the ladder of Cattaro weaves its way down.  Behind it, out of sight from Kotor itself, is a steep cliff, forming a nice, natural wall between the landward side and the fortifications.  Reaching from the citadel, cascading down the rock, are two long walls that cut off any entry towards the town from behind, sealing in the slope between the fortress and the city.  The walls didn't need to be very tall, they topped nearly-sheer drops.
Originally built in the 15th century, the fortification was (somewhat humorously) re-fitted with snippets of modern defenses during communism, so there are bunkerlike chambers within the ramparts.  These parts are now crumbling more noticeably than the stone walls around them.

Venice expanded its empire hugely during the fifteenth century.  This was the early stages of gunboat warfare, and the little seafaring nation proved to be the naval superpower of its day.  The Venetians, with thousands of boats but not many men, staked out a scattered and narrow curtain of holdings around the northern shore of the Mediterranean, capturing everything from Peloponnesus to Cyprus (we already looked at a great fortress in Kyrenia, from roughly the same period, and a later example, in Nafplio, Greece).  It was a short-lived empire in the outer regions, as the Ottomans proved stronger and more determined in the East.
But closer to home, in what was called "Venetian Albania," the empire held on for longer.  Here, they had carved a catholic slice of coast from its Serbian neighbors and were able to provide the ships and guns to keep it.  The bay of Kotor was one of the last remnants of Venice's holdings because it was such a watery town.  The Ottomans had a hard time fighting at sea, despite massive fleets and overpowering forces - while land to the east became dominated by the Turks, Kotor bay remained part of the sea, and Venice held on from 1420 until 1797, when it ceded the land to the Habsburgs in a treaty.

The Ottomans did capture Kotor on two occasions, but never through direct force.  The problem with Cattaro's defenses were that they were almost too complete - it was easy to cut off supplies and lay seige.  In two instances - between 1538 – 1571 and 1657 – 1699 - the Ottomans were able to successfully take the city, during periods when their navy was in better control of that stretch of coastline.  Without supplies from the sea, Cattaro was unable to survive.  As Venice's fleet ebbed and strengthened, so did the fortunes of the fortifications.

The old Montenegrin lands, and Kotor in general, thrived because of shipping.  Venetian Albania was an important trading and shipbuilding center for the empire, but Cattaro had been a major port for centuries beforehand, despite not having much access inland.  But, if there wasn't a good overland route here, there has always been the sea - and the second main part of Kotor's defense has been primarily naval.
In an overwhelmingly Venetian way, the small triangle of land that constitutes Kotor's walled town was protected by a series of low bastions and thick walls.  Essentially, the Venetians were applying what their military did best - naval gunpowder units - to a solid framework.  This is familiar from places like Kyrenia, but on a smaller scale here.  The low walls were fronted by moats on two sides and faced outward - like a wedge - into the harbor.

Earthquakes have thrice damaged Kotor's defensed - most recently in 1979 - but the lower walls were solid and low enough to survive mostly intact.  There is little room at the end of Kotor bay for a ship to maneuver away from the fortifications which was important for one significant reason.  Because they needed to fire at very close quarters, attacking fleets were required to shoot very directly at the walls, and were unable to loft any missiles inside, to attack the town directly.  Therefore, the walls could be made in an almost ideal way for protection - blunt, thick and squat.
In essence, the idea goes like this: a more open wall, where fleets could square up at a distance, was vulnerable because it was a large and easy target - a ship some distance away was difficult to hit with old cannons, while walls weren't.  In addition, a cannon firing from distance could attack the entirety of the fortress, not just the blunt outer wall, by angling its missile to clear the wall but fall inside, which meant that a lot of seaside fortresses needed to have higher walls than they would have liked.
In an enclosed space, like the bay, the ships lost all of this advantage.  They needed to be close up, and so were just as easily bombarded as the walls.  And, because they needed to fire on a level in order to hit anything, a stout outer wall was more than enough protection.  After all, several meters of stonework holds up better than a few inches of woodwork when trading direct blows.  If Kotor's lower defenses don't look impressive, it's because they don't need to be - the bastions had only to be as high as a ship's gunnels.

Coming into Kotor from the sea or the newer, lower road, one could be forgiven for missing the upper castle in daylight.  There's a lot to see in town, the best views are out into the bay to the other mountains.  In the bright July light, the rock and scrub above town blend into hazy gray.  It's not until evening that the castle's true outline, traced in long strands of lights, stands out.
But standing on the old ladder way, the castle is tremendous.  It looks like something out of a general's fantasy, a melding of rock and cliff that seems even more massive than it is.  It's telling that Kotor's Venetian defenses were never directly overpowered, holding up against centuries of hostile neighbors and frothing sea warfare.
We got sunburned and dried out, wandering through the ruins.  Kotor is a castle of staircases, so be prepared to get out of breath.  It's also a castle of views, as though the real thing the Italian architects coveted wasn't the bay, but the vista out over it.

Castle Hunting: Zamokot Samuil

Zamokot Samuil is all about the view.  Walking the ramparts, it’s hard to force your gaze inward to the crumbling walls and tin shacks that populate the castle’s courtyards.  Instead, look out over the bristle of pines to the slate-grey waters and the snowy peaks beyond.  It’s one of the great ancient vistas in the world.

The castle is one of the oldest and most well known in the Balkans, built on the site of an earlier Byzantine castle that was likely pre-dated by another, 3rd century BC fortress.  It’s a massive-walled, very wide structure that’s mostly been ruined and partly been restored.  While the walls have been reconstructed to some degree, the inner keep and some old towers exist only as bare foundations.  The gate fortifications have held up, and are impressively sturdy.  This main entrance faces outward toward the water and the steepest stretch of hillside, where now there are a few souvenir sellers in the shade and a cooler or two of water and soda.

It seems funny that a castle in Macedonia would have more visitors than any we’ve been to recently, but that was the case.  Sunday daytrippers and tourgroup biddies clutched at the handrails and huffed up the steps.  Little crowds formed at the most picturesque points, as people waited their turn to take a photo.  Usually, I’m not all that keen on excessive safety precautions at castles like this – one of the delights of travel in Eastern Europe is that nobody impedes you from taking a bad spill – but there were so many people that the railings were necessary.
All of us - tourists from Slovenia, Holland, Macedonia and the two of us - were entranced by the water.    From on high, the rippling patterns on the surface made the lake seem vast and infinitely complex.

Tzar Samuil built the fortress during Ohrid's peak, when it was serving as the capital of the First Bulgarian Empire.  The old town – a hilly stretch of waterfront on a pretty curve in the lake – was originally ringed by lower town walls, with the castle serving as the last means of defense.  The town’s population was contained inside these walls until the Ottomans conquered the region in 1395 and began building around the outside.

Little is left of the lower walls, except a few gates and stretches of stonework.  Here, at the “upper gate,” the old doorway and small bastions remain, complete with rusting embellishments and weedy firing slits.  Traffic rumbles through the narrow opening at great speed, tires chattering on cobblestones, pedestrians ducking out of the way.

From below, the fortress isn’t very impressive - the huge flag almost makes more of an impression.  But it's atmospheric and the rebuilt ramparts are a pretty addition to the cities skyline.  The truth is that Macedonia, although littered with ruins, has very little in the way of surviving fortresses.  Because the country sits at a vulnerable spot in between tectonic plates, there's a long history of earthquakes; even the thickest walls eventually tumble if they're shaken too many times.  The restoration job was heavy handed, but Ohrid is Macedonia's prime tourist destination and tourists love a castle.

Diminished by distance into a simple, forested line, the far coasts seem untouched by time.  The walls too, and the mountains that ring the water.  With a light breeze drowning out the sounds of town and the sun clanging off the stones, it’s easy to lose touch with the senses of the present.  It’s easy, too, to imagine that nothing’s changed on these walls, that the year is somewhere around 1000, when Tzar Samuil reigned.  Even if it’s not the most fascinating fortress, Ohrid provides a backdrop that can’t be faulted.

Lunching Around Tirana

Parking lots full of cars, tables groaning with meat, mugs of beer (and highballs of raki!), lamb on the spit, trout darting in ponds, postprandial diners almost snoring in their seats... Tirana is a great place to eat, but you can't get any better than what's around the capital. On the weekends, if you want to lunch like the locals, you head out of town. Anyone with the money and the transport makes their way out into the countryside, into strange little worlds of pastoral fancy and gimmicky eateries.
Not far from the city limits, on a stretch of scenic road that leads up into the Kruja foothills, a string of "country" restaurants tempt Tirana's wheeled set. Signs for places like "Ura e Lizes" (Liza's Bridge) and "Iliria" point to wooded retreats where empty swimming pools and grubby plastic tables are arranged in the shade. The place we ate is called "Natyra e Qete," which, unsurprisingly, means "nature and quiet." With grandiose brick towers and a large playground, it might have been better named "theme-park castletown."
The promise these places make is carnivorous, the diners are there for meat - ribs, liver, lamb's head, paving stone steaks, stuffed tripe - with maybe a side of potatoes and a pitcher of red wine. Patrons arrive in their Sunday or Saturday finery, usually in family groups, sometimes as boisterous bunches of men. They smoke and eat and sit for hours, the dim, cavernous halls giving them some sense of nature, no doubt, that they simply can't find in town. Every weekend feels like a special occasion.
At Natyra e Qete, we ate more modestly than most. A table near us was served two enormous trays of beef ribs, which the diners set about dismantling with greasy hands and sharp teeth. Another table received something akin to a stack of steaks, like a small burial mound constructed of meat. Rebecca had frog legs (a pondful, approximately), which arrived battered and fried but still delicious. I had "baked goat," which was very tender and toothsome - as you can see, there was nothing but the kid on the plate.

After the last raki of lunch has been finished, the idea is to drive tipsily up the road towards Elbasani - a twisting and mountainous route with few guardrails and fatal drops. The views are spectacular. Here, it really is the countryside.
In another direction (upwards this time), one can find another slew of weekend eateries. The restaurants on Mount Dajti - which soars, rocky and immense, above Tirana's skyline - are of much the same type as the ones on the Elbasani road, but they have much better views and the added bonus of a cable car ride. Servicing a national park on a high plateau, the lift up really does feel like an escape from Tirana.
At the bottom station of the cable car we were sold tickets and handed a brochure for the gondola company's own restaurant, located in the unsightly cylinder called "Tower." At the top, (after a fifteen minute ascent), we were met by a man selling pony rides - a youngish woman sat unhappily (shrieking, actually) on the rental steed while her friends took pictures. Rows of drivers and vans waited to whisk customers to their woodland tables. These men work for individual establishments, so it's best to know which one you'd like to go to beforehand, as the competition among them can be overwhelming.

Our driver maneuvered carefully enough along the top of a long cliff, where the more scenic restaurants are arranged. The day was fine, but the peacefulness of the park was somewhat offset by the aggressive techno music our young chauffeur played for us.
We ate our Sunday lunch at Gurra e Përrisë, which has a trout farm on the premises but still seems to be geared towards redder flesh. Typically, Tirana diners eat on the late side - we arrived at one, but it wasn't until about three o'clock, when we left, that the restaurant began to fill up. A fire roared beside red draperies and plushly set tables. The waiters wore vests and ties. The tablecloths were heavily starched and cigarette burned.

(A note: I should mention that smoking is actually prohibited in Albanian restaurants, but the law is completely disregarded by everyone over the age of 16.)
We ordered trout, which came admirably cooked and were filleted at our table by two men who concentrated very hard but seemed unused to the work. My broccoli soup was mostly cream, but was actually quite good.

For two large trout, soups, a large salad, grilled vegetables, beer, wine, a free car ride, formal service and terrific views, the price was about thirty-five dollars, with a heftier tip than what's normal in Albania.
We walked back to the gondola, passing men in suits and women in heels, all of us moving slowly in the spring sunshine. In a mostly atheist country it's a kind of ritual, this weekend lunching, playing a part in the social calendar that otherwise might be filled at church or the mosque. The idea is to leave the city, perhaps, for a carefully curated "natural" experience - one that can be enjoyed mostly by sitting down. It's relaxation. It's reveling in the ownership of a car or the technology of a ski lift.

The ride down the mountain is precipitously steep and blissfully quiet. A few thin, high waterfalls cascade down the cliffs nearby, their watery crashing plays wonderfully through the open window. The city is colorful and blocky below.

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 Beautiful Lake Komani Ferry

On a grey, cold early morning in Tirana, we boarded a minibus headed north for Lake Komani. A man got on a few minutes later with three sacks of corn and a shotgun. Hours later, in the tiny cabin of the Dragoba, he took the gun out of its case and began passing it around. His friends and neighbors admired it and someone told a joke. Outside, high cliffs passed by in the mist. This was one of the strangest and most beautiful boat rides one can imagine.
There are two ferries that ply the long, sinuous waters of Lake Komani. The more commonly-run boat is a conventional, small car ferry. The Dragoba, which we took, is an old bus with a hull welded around it. The seats were threadbare, the doors clanged open unexpectedly. A deep, slow, diesel note grumbled from the engine. Two young men were in charge - they looked as though they might be brothers. The captain piloted the boat quietly, surrounded by a chatty group of friends. The first mate collected money and made people laugh – he wore red pants, a fuchsia shirt and pink sweater. Both were lithe and tall, with ready smiles and the friendly nature of Albanian mountain men.

Lake Komani is a dammed lake, running some forty kilometers through the heart of the Dinaric alps. It’s not the easiest way to get to the northern towns, but is definitely the most scenic and the best route that doesn’t lead through Kosovo.

Our “furgon” (minibus, marshrutka) took us up to the top of the dam, some hour away from the nearest town, and dropped us off at the south-western landing. Here - on a patch of cement at the end of a tunnel, surrounded on all sides by cliff and water – there was barely enough room for a few vehicles, a bar, some waiting people and two forlorn cows. The buses were unloaded (our furgon, aside from the corn and firearm, had carried bags of fertilizer, some hardware supplies and sacks that looked to contain cured meat) and men stood smoking. The lake was vividly green.

When the ferry came, it didn’t seem that it could possibly be big enough for us all, but it turns out it was only about two-thirds full. Bags, boxes and sacks were piled against the gunwales (and the cows were left on land) Everyone aboard knew everyone else, they were all neighbors. One old woman held court in the middle of the rows of seats. Wearing a white kerchief over her hair, she spent time talking and laughing with all the young people on board; they took turns visiting with her, receiving kisses on the cheek and pats on the head.
As desolate as the lake seems, its shores are actually inhabited by a few hardy families. Clinging to the cliff-like sides of the mountains are tiny farms, not much more than hovels with a few square feet of plowed earth and a handful of goats. These people, almost totally cut off from the world around them, rely on boats to get anywhere and on the ferry to bring them any supplies or mail. The passengers aboard the Dragoba were mostly going home – we made a lot of stops at tiny landings, not much more than a few rocks, so that people could jump ashore or collect packages. One woman was met at the bottom of a waterfall by her son (who was about five or six). Together they scampered up a trail that looked impossibly steep – the two of them moved like mountain goats, jumping from foothold to foothold. They must have lived quite high up, we couldn’t see where their house was.
The forty kilometers take about three hours to navigate. The ship goes slowly, the way is twisting and narrow. Mountains like these offer little. They’re not more than walls. A way through was made by the river, and all the dam has done is widen this path a little. We moved as though down a hallway, taking turns when they came. The vistas were ever-changing and tightly focused. Shore was never further than a few hundred yards on either side. The others on board had seen it before and barely looked out the window.

A few times, some fishing boat or other would pull up alongside. One young man motored alongside us for about half an hour, communicating with the pilot and his brother with hand signals. Before he turned his boat off into a cove, the first mate tossed him an energy drink from their cooler.

These two men raced to a small landing so that they could get on board. After tying their little aluminum craft to a bush, they lifted the outboard motor onto deck and swung up after it. Our pink-clad crewmember greeted them with hugs and questions. They shared a lunch together in the back row of bus-seats.

By the time we got to the end, the sky had lightened a little. It had rained for some time on the trip, but it had cleared again. The remaining passengers took their things from the deck and said their goodbyes. It was a perfect voyage, the kind of traveling that makes you forget about the destination, casting the time between place as the leading experience. We got off gladly but would have taken the trip again if given the chance – when we left the north the boat wasn’t running. It had rained too much, the water was too high.

A woman we met in Tirana, Zhujeta, had told us that there were once two boats, but that one of them had “sanked.” Luckily, it seems that both are operational and floating.