Well, it’s summer in Valbona.  A few days ago Alfred and I took a group of Austrian Hikers and botanical enthusiasts up to the Qafa (pass) just west of Maja e Rosit (Rosi Mountain).  After climbing up through the beech woods, you hit these Alpine meadows which are a riot of flowers. A bit further (and windier, rockier, colder and more like the top of the world than ever) we passed fields of the rare Albanian Lily and wild Fritillaria (Fritillaria messanensis?).  Then a wee skip across some snow (is this officially a glacier?) and we got a brief rest before heading back down.

Dear  Catherine & Alfred

Thanks for your hospitality, we have arrived home by now.

Albania has become the home of priceless natural treasures, of which we have seen only a little, while we arrived from Pogradec – Sarande to Koplik in 3-4 days.

My full track:

1. Szeged(H) – Makó(H) – Timisoara(Ro) – Kovin(Srb) – Nis(Srb) – Skopje(Mk) – Mavrovo(Mk) (730km)

2. Mavrovo(Mk) – Struga(Mk) – Pogradec(Al) – Leskovik(Al) – Kalpaki(Gr) (330km)

3. Kalpaki(Gr) – Sarande(Al) – Vlore(Al) (189km)

4. Vlore(Al)– Dures(Al) – Vore(Al) – Milot(Al) – Kukes(Al) – Laidhize(Al) – Fierze(Al) – Valbone(Al) (512km)

5. Valbone(Al) – Fierze(Al) – Koman(Al) – Shkoder(Al) – Mes(Al) – Shkoder(Al) – Hani I Noti(Al) – Podgorica(Al) – Mojkovac(Mont) – Zabljak(Mont) – Sasvnik(Mon) – Niksic(Mon) (450km)

6. Niksic(Mon) – Vilusi(Mon) – Treblinje( Bih) – Stolac(Bih) – Tasovcici(Bih) – Mostar(Bih) – Jablanica(Bih) – Vakuf(Bih) – Lisac(Bih) – Novi Travnik(Bih) – Zenica(Bih) – Doboj(Bih) (500km)

7.  Doboj(Bih) – Bosanski Samac(Hr) – Dakovo(Hr) – Eszék(Hr) – Udvar – Alsónyék(H) – Baja(H)- Öttömös(H) – Szeged(H) (339)

Sum 3050 km.

We have been to many places, but no place is like Albania. You live in a beautiful country.

We liked the neighbourhood where your motel was so much, that I decided to return in 2011 with my friends to spend there a little more time.

My plan is to travel from Valbone to Thet by motorbike through the mountain roads. Or if its not possible by bike do you think we can take the trip on foot?

Where does that road lead which is running up the valley next to the motel and the river?

Best wishes:

Lajos from Hungary

My ftp server films:

1. Romania 2009.  (280 Mb))

http://danyila.selfip.org/Film.wmv

2. Austria 2009.  (522 Mb)

http://danyila.selfip.org/alpok/alpok_0004.wmv

This Albanian Squirrel seems to have taken up residence in our kitchen at Rilindja.  Klod and I think he lives between the two cabinets that make the island in the middle of the kitchen.  He’s remarkably unobtrusive, and apparently impervious to insult.  In an ill-thought-out attempt to make friends, I accidentally chased him up up the chimney of the fireplace while there was a roaring fire going (it’s a big fireplace) — but he was back again the very next morning.  Squirrel is “Ketri” in Shqip.  Oh, and his body is just a little bit longer than my hand.

I am sitting in the restaurant, which means the main room, at Rilindja. I am in the Valbona Valley of Northern Albania. I am, somehow, home. After a lot of noise (arriving bands of local teenagers, out for a school-sponsored day’s exploration) it’s quiet, I’m alone, and all I can hear is the sound of the wind in the leaves of the beech trees outside. A cardboard box with two baby bunnies I’ve been feeding with a syringe is by my feet. It is very peaceful.

I’ve just returned home, as I’ll call it for lack of a better word, from a day spent in the local town, Bajram Curri, frantically emailing the world. I came back on the furgon, the local minibus, which travels down the valley this way once a day, around 3 o’clock. It is a Friday. This means that more than 30 people were crammed in a minivan meant to seat eight, with all their shopping, which in a place like Valbona which doesn’t have any shops at all – not one, not a post office, or police station, or a telephone box, certainly not a doctor, nothing like that, just 27 kilometers of people living as they have for hundreds of years – can be quite a lot. I myself accounted for a box of 150 eggs, as well as 5 kilos of tomatoes, 5 of onions, a sack of sausages, a bag of cherries, one of green peppers, two kinds of apples, some eggplants, a bag of bananas, three tins of coffee, three sacks of salt . . . oh and three cabbages that the man in the veterinary supply store went out and bought for me (no payment accepted) to feed to the teeny tiny baby bunnies which are nestled in my hat, wrapped in a scarf (three cabbages could crush them). I’m thinking that maybe this furgon ride illuminates the difference between here and, oh certainly New York, but maybe everywhere else I’ve ever been. A massively pregnant friend phoned me recently in New York, fighting back tears about how awful people were to her on the subway. No seat given, vicious glares for “taking up space.” Here in Valbona, the furgon is cheerfully packed. No woman is ever allowed to stand, even if we have to pile on each other’s laps, and seats are given by a combined precedence of age and gender. Everyone is cheerful. I think that, after 10 months, I am being accepted, as I was given the ancient wooden stool that is crammed in behind the front passenger seat. A chair certainly, but not one of the best ones. One appropriate to both my femaleness and level of strength. Artan, Alfred’s cousin, is standing in front of me, his behind hits me in the face on the left side occassionally. To my right is the window, which if I turn my head, I can stare out of blissfully, at the more than amazingly beautiful view. Someone sitting on packing crates behind me (I think it’s Azem’s brother, he looks like Azem, but with a mustache) is leaning heavily on my back, but if I jam my elbow against the window, and my fist against the edge of the front seat, I can push back enough to hold him up. At some point he shifts his weight, and his dusty suit-jacketed arm snakes past my right shoulder, to grab onto the seat back in front of me. This means I have to rest my chin on his arm to keep looking out the window, and I do, and this is fine. It’s a compliment from both of us, to the other. At one point I scootched to the edge of the stool and patted the space revealed, suggesting someone sit. “Nuk Ashtu!” said Azem’s maybe-brother, smiling at me, “Not like that!”

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Oops – sorry it’s taken me so long to add anything new here – I’m still getting the hang of using modern technology here in the land where we still cut hay with a scythe . . . but lest you think it’s all grim winter (I realized the other day that most of what I’ve written sounds like a lost chapter from Cold Comfort Farm), here are lots of pictures of a cute baby bunny that came to live with us for a while . . . .

The Malësori or “Highlanders” are famous for (and pride themselves on living with) the harshness of the mountains, and the winter in particular. In summer, one of the first things Alfred told me as I was oohing and ahhing about the beauty of Valbona, was “Yes, but the winter is very harsh – Three Meters of Snow! and Very Cold. And very Boring.” In fact, it was then that I thought Oh Yeah? I’ll come back in January! (I’m weird that way.) Of course, a little conversation revealed that in fact, like everywhere else, it doesn’t snow as much here anymore.

Still, the Malësori live with snow. The word for snow “Bora” peppers most conversations. In Valbona, the snow stays year round on the mountain tops, as you can see from the pictures of the snowcaves that Alfred and I took last July. As you can also see from the pictures, the mountains are all around us, very present. Even if, in winter, you don’t go up into them as you do in summer, they’re still there, always rising up around you, and we live with them. In winter, we watch the snow move up and down the mountains – drawing closer, then pulling away. Even if there’s no snow on the ground here in the valley and it’s raining, there is snow above us, just a short walk up. We wait for it to arrive. Usually of course (like many magical things?) the snow comes in the night.

Last night it snowed. The sun rises around seven am, and I woke up in the warmth of my covers to a different light. Pulling myself into the cold air, I peered out the window. SNOW! There are some magics that never grow old, and this is one of them. A world transformed. I pulled on any clothes I could find, and left my bed. In the corridor, I stood at the open window (rooms are heated here, but not the house – that Malësori toughness leaves windows open so the snow blows in, and doors are thrown open wide and left so, if people are going in and out). I stood for a while, looking out, then . . . . Sometimes, often – I mean, a couple times a day in winter – the snow breaks free on the mountainsides, and there’s something like a waterfall of snow that crashes down for a couple hundred meters for a minute or two, and it was as if this happened inside me. So I slipped downstairs in the halflight of dawn. Sose was in the kitchen already, in the warmth of the woodstove that appeared for the winter, and laughed at me as I slipped in, stole a piece of burek, and slipped out again. I wrapped myself in coat and scarves and boots, and went out into what was becoming the morning. I climbed through the snow, up through the cow pastures behind the house. That good, warm, close silence of a world in snow, as more fat flakes fell around me. Perched on a rock on the hillside, I sat and smoked, and heard the only sound – a far away call of something small and lonely. Three short calls in a row. Of course, I am always hoping to see, or even hear just one of the estimated 400 wolves that still live in these mountains. I listened, as the call came again and again. Then, after a while, when it was fully light, the call stopped, and I went back home again, into the house.

I went and found Alfred, still asleep, and woke him up. I told him about the snow, and the call I’d heard. He didn’t open his eyes, but said “How did it sound?” And even though I’d practised it in my mind as I was listening, I couldn’t remember it exactly, back inside the house. But I remembered it was three calls: hoo hoo hooooo . . . . I tried to make the sound. “Did it come from over there?” asked Alfred, gesturing under the blanket at his cousins house across the field. “Yes!” I said, “Yes it did.” “Chicken” said Alfred, and went back to sleep.

Which I suppose it was.

Long may the wild Albanian chicken roam the wild wild mountainsides, striking a respectful fear into the hearts of all romantics who are silly enough to get out of bed before they have to . . . .

Bayonne, NJ, USA

Something that’s been puzzling me slipped into place this morning. The question is something that people keep asking me, one way or another, and I haven’t been able to answer to any of our satisfaction yet. Put simply, it amounts to: Why do you prefer Albania to New York? By every system of modern reckoning, I seem to be indulging in a fit of the most stubborn and quixotic recidivism, and even Alfred, who loves his mountains fiercely, is suspicious that I will wake up one morning and flee in a panic, back to Civilization.

I went out to dinner with some friends last night. They are a little bit older than I am, and almost certainly wiser. They are the sort of people who keep up with events and news and politics. One is an academic who’s spent her life studying American Culture from an anthropological bent, another is a labor organizer, another works in the intestinal depths of the largest financial company in New York, and the last makes her living editing non-fiction books which of course seem to be mostly one long anatomizing of modern horrors. These are charming and likeable people, kind and intelligent, funny. There wasn’t any bombast of what my friend Stefan calls “Big Talk” (as opposed to ‘small talk’), but of course Things got touched on: the debacle of modern factory farming, the healthcare fiasco (really? People protesting against being able to go to a doctor? really?), the friend who works in finance stating clearly and calmly that she no longer wants to work in a world whose basic assumptions about what matters or what is even desirable are so clearly wrong . . . and each note of it strikes on this tired feeling I’ve had as long as I can remember, that something, somewhere – almost everything perhaps – has gone terribly wrong. For this I have been continually labeled a romantic, or impractical, but now, I wonder. I mean, these things really ARE wrong. The environment is heading for tatters. This most trend setting country has a social system that alternates being vicious with being criminally uncaring. The only real goals to aspire to are the accumulation of wealth (but what will there be to spend it on?) and the avoidance of difficult emotions by the judicious use of pharmaceuticals. Everyone seems to be able to pay lip service to the fact that it’s all heading for a big crash – is crashing? And yet no one tries to fundamentally change anything . . . .

Walking home with one of the friends after dinner, I try to mention, without sounding crazy, some of this sense of a very grim future here. “Oh yes,” she says calmly, “We’re in big trouble.” I wonder about what this will look like, when it comes home to roost. I go on to talk about reading accounts of France after WWII, those months when the Germans were gone but there was no government or system of order in place: the complete chaos and worse than chaos . . . and that was in living memory. Heck, I remember the days after 9/11, when there was no infrastructure of communication, and everything was reduced to word of mouth. I try to say that it seems to me that it’s possible that all our sense of order and assumptions of the inevitability of our mode of progress is just a veneer – a strong one at the moment, but one that could get swept away, and in this increasingly ruined environment, with this hapless, uneducated-about-anything-practical society, what would that leave?

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On October 11th, Alfred and I traveled back to Valbona from Tirana. A strange feeling of weight lifting, the closer we get to the mountains – to home! It’s strange to travel with Alfred, because of course he must have done this journey a thousand times, seriously and probably, and for me, COME to think of it, it’s only the second, which is ridiculous, but I can’t help it. It’s like every Christmas morning any child in the world has ever known, and all of mine twice, or maybe four times, rolled up into one big ball and delivered with lashings of whipped cream. I’m going home! The turn-off through Lezhe, the funny little village by the water, the old woman by the spigot on the mountainside – they’re still there, and of course, what I dream the most of seeing, the mountains, my mountains, his mountains. My mountains. Only of course, smart mountains, you can’t see much of them. It is raining. It is raining as if it’s always been raining, with fog and mist complete. I scrub at the window of the minibus as we leave Bajrum Curri, trying to keep a patch clear, but it’s ridiculous, and I can’t, as even as I clear the condensation off the inside, more forms outside and raindrops chase each other down the glass, and truth be told, I don’t even care. I can’t SEE the mountains, but I can feel them all around me, and feel the air changing, crispening, beginning to snap a little. The rain beads on all the windows, the fog and mist wrap the ‘bus, and we are traveling blind. But the mountains, nonetheless, are there. I can feel them.

At Rilindja we get out – here are Naim and Lirim, grinning and waiting. “So!” says Naim, “You made it, did you?” And shakes my hand. I had thought we were going on to the family farms at Dunishe, but Alfred tells me “We’re staying here.” Oh? Oh, okay. Lovely (bukur!). Only, I have dreamed of seeing Sose and Rugova for months (well okay, only two, but they were two long months, and definitely plural), imagining their surprise at my return, my, dammit, homecoming . . . . So we sit and eat, gather ourselves together, and then “There are no clean sheets” says Alfred so, oh yes, I’m back now, finally back, because “Well, I’ll just run up to the houses and get some,” I say. And before you know it, I’ve bundled the old sheets into a sack, and gathered up my presents, and swathed myself in coat, hat and scarf, and am saying “No really, no bother, I’ll just run up the road.” It’s getting dark, and raining wolves and eagles. Alfred wants me to borrow his waterproof, but I want to wear my “going back to Albania” coat purchased with a gift from my grandmother. I’ve been waiting two months to wear it! Alfred says his coat is better for the rain, “But mine is so fashionable,” I say, and Naim laughs at me saying “Oh yes, Catherine – You’ll really impress the cows!” “Of course,” I say, “You always have to keep up with the Cowses” and Alfred does his Alfred act, and Lirim always thinks I’m mad, anyhow, and so I tear away from these dear men (boys?) and then, there I am, trudging up the road to Dunishe. I am alone, in the rain and dark, on the road, with the mountains around me, and I am so HAPPY that it would be unbearable to have anyone else around. I walk, and hug my sack of laundry to me, and could sing or laugh out loud, but I don’t and as I’m thinking “I’m here, I’m HERE, I’m really here,” I realize there are two women coming down the road, toward me, carrying umbrellas. I am just getting ready to say “Mirembrema” when I realize that one of the women is Sose, and just about the time I am realizing this, she is beginning to realize that I am ME – I see the same confusion and wonder dawning in her face, as my arrivals seem likely to always cause her. So I just rush forward and hug her. I’m not surprised she’s confused. Alfred, being Alfred, has not told her I’m coming. Typical. (But the mountains knew.) When she pulls herself out of wonder with a shake, she tells me she’s out looking for the cows, which have gotten out. I say I understand, that I’m just running up to the house, and we leave each other, carry on, on our ways. For some reason I thought she’d be more overjoyed to see me, but . . . . nevermind. I am so happy to be here, that my happiness is enough for everyone. “Ben shetitje” I say, meaning bej shetitje “YOU take yourself for a walk,” instead of “I go for a walk,” and Sose laughs and repeats it and we pass on. I struggle up the last twist of the road-which-is-barely-a-road, make the turn to the farms, follow the road, and pass, two cows, which look suspiciously like Sose’s, trying to get into an auntie’s neighboring hay-rick. Huh. But what do I know?

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