Whitewaker Kayaking on the Vjosa
A voyage on Europe's longest undammed river. Or, What I Did On My Summer Holidays
What I Did On My Summer Holidays
In late June and early July 2024, just a few weeks after the conclusion of my month of reporting from India, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a weeklong holiday to go whitewater kayaking on the Vjosa River in the rising Balkan democracy of Albania. This article1 is the story of that sojourn.
Some time ago, during research for my regular weekly news roundup, I had been absolutely captivated by the story of the Vjosa. It’s the longest undammed, “wild” river left in Europe, without so much as a weir or lock to impede its natural flow from its origins in the mountains of Greece across southern Albania to its terminus on the Adriatic Sea, making it an absolutely unique microcosm of premodern Europe that has managed to survive into the Anthropocene 2020s.
And it’s in Albania, which is an absolutely fascinating country with one of the strangest modern histories to be found in the world. Albania (or Shqipëria in the local language) has had an incredibly rough twentieth century. The isolated majority-Muslim nation became independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, was instantly thrown into the bloody maelstrom of World War I, in which parts of tiny and militarily unintimidating Albania were invaded and occupied, at different points, by Greece, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, France, and Italy. Albania then was ruled by the authoritarian King Zog I from 1922 through 1939 (literally just a dude born Ahmed Muhtar Zogolli who seized power and declared himself king) then invaded and essentially colonized by Mussolini’s Fascist Italy2. Albania was then known as the “North Korea of Europe” under the brutal rule of totalitarian dictator Enver Hoxha and his successors3 from the 1940s to early 1990s, followed by a period of near-anarchy after the regime fell and “Albanian mafia” became an international byword. At one point in 1997, the country collapsed into violence after the failure of several pyramid schemes in which a substantial chunk of the population lost their live savings. The 1999 eruption of the Kosovo War right on the border must have looked like a particularly inauspicious omen for the nation’s future in the new millennium.
But the twenty-first century has brought an amazing new dawn for Albania. The country is now (relatively) peaceful, (relatively) democratic, a close U.S. ally in the region and a NATO member since 2009, actively working to join the European Union. The new, friendly, open Albania is starting to gain recognition as a hidden travel gem — a chunk of classical Mediterranean beauty where everything’s still incredibly cheap. The Albanian Prime Minister recently floated the idea of declaring the Tirana headquarters of the local Bektashi religious order to be a Vatican-like independent state, with the goal of promoting the Bektashi style of liberal, un-veiled, alcohol-tolerant Islam on the world stage.
The Vjosa has become a key part of this national rebirth, and it’s now widely regarded as a symbol of Albanian identity and nationhood. It’s even a proper name: the current president of Kosovo4 is named Vjosa Osmani. Essentially ignored for decades, the Vjosa river valley ecosystem is relatively intact but suffers from overgrazing and consequent erosion.
Its future is looking brighter and brighter: just a few years ago, the American sports outfitter Patagonia helped provide the necessary funding for the Albanian government to administer Vjosa River as a protected area. The years-long dream of local conservationists was fulfilled, as the Vjosa River became Albania’s first-ever national park.
Day Zero: Arrival in Albania.
This kayaking trip was a party of two: myself plus one trusted traveling companion who wishes to remain anonymous. The first night, we had flown into Tirana airport5, where we were picked up as planned by a car from the kayaking and rafting company that we had chartered. They deposited us around midnight (after a late evening trilece break!) at an Airbnb in Permet, situated on the banks of the Vjosa itself.
Day One: The Greek Border to the Abandoned Bridge.
The next morning, we picked up provisions for the journey in the sleepy markets of that charming riverside town: nuts, fruit, bread, and delicious potato-pie byrek of the sort that we had savored for breakfast. We then made our way to the kayaking and rafting company’s headquarters, where we enjoyed a refreshing beverage and chatted with a totally unexpected American staff member (from Tennessee, of all places) as the company dealt with equipping other clients. It was past one p.m. by the time we drove from Permet to the Greek border, with our own gear and food joining the company’s provided helmets, life jackets, and a new inflatable two-person kayak. We would be the first to use it.
We had specifically asked to rent just one two-person kayak and its associated equipment, refusing the usual addition of a guide, with the intention to explore and discover the river for ourselves. As this individual kayak was unfamiliar to everyone there, we ended up Googling the manual for instructions on how to properly inflate it with the attached pump. Then we simply donned helmets and life jackets, strapped our bags to the kayak, and placed the lot on the riverside beach. Part of me subconsciously expected a safety lecture or a warning of upcoming river hazards, but our driver just smiled and waved us goodbye as we pulled the kayak into the current. (We had, after all, refused a guide). This is a great example of why I love traveling in developing countries: in a less litigious society, you can often just go and do things if you feel like it, to a dangerous yet really liberating extent.
As we got started, the hum of cicadas filled the air, the hot summer rays of the sun beat down upon our kayak, and we began to realize in earnest the scope of the voyage we had planned. A wild river is to a dammed river what a wolf is to a dog. I’d kayaked plenty on dammed rivers before; even my “wildest” previous river experience, on the Allagash in northern Maine, has one small dam at a strategic point that regulates its flow. The Allagash got pretty wild, but the Vjosa was on another level. White-capped waves splashed us every minute, and challenging rapids came one after another like hurdles in an Olympic track-and-field race. We bounced off quite a few rocks and let in quite a few waves when traversing the first few, and soon had to stop at the shore to drain the resulting excess water from the inside of our kayak, using the stopcock built into the bottom for this purpose. Once, we even were caught between two pincer-like rocks mid-rapid and capsized in the middle of the river, fortunately in such shallow water that we could simply drag it to the shore. But we quickly got into a good rhythm, with post-rapid water-draining stops becoming more efficient and less frequent and were soon feeling confident enough to enjoy the beautiful landscape we were traveling through.
Beautiful little micro-waterfalls tumbled from the rocky cliff-like embankments abutting the Vjosa more times than I could count. Each time we stopped to drain the water from our kayak, schools of adorable baby fish played around our feet, scattering occasionally but reforming only a foot or so away. The river thrummed with a life, a vibrant ecosystem that was a pleasure and a privilege to paddle through.
Eventually, we came up on a bridge that looked like something from an Indiana Jones movie, made of rope and wooden slats with visible gaps between them. A sun-weathered Albanian herdsman watched over his sheep as they huddled in the bridge’s shade and drank at the river’s edge. We waved at him, and as he waved back we marveled at this vision of pre-modern Europe: herdsmen might have watered their sheep at the Vjosa just like this for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks knew this part of southern Albania as Epirus, and famous Epirotes like the Roman-fighting King Pyrrhus, from whom we get the term “pyrrhic victory,” might well have seen just such a sight if they ventured up these waterways. The depth of history in such a place can seem almost vertiginous, like a sudden realization that you stand on the edge of a precipice of time.
We really seemed to be getting the hang of things by now, maintaining our good rhythm as we approached the next set of rapids, and we quickly discussed the optimal path forward. The left bank was sandy and flat, but the left side of the river was choked with rocks. The right side was bounded by a rocky cliff face, but a faster-flowing current seemed to pass hard by without overmany impediments. We opted to steer towards the right.
It was a grave misjudgment. The current was swift indeed — too swift — and it forced us up against the rocky cliffside, with our kayak scraping on the edge and nearly overturning again. Then, as the river began to bend, we realized to our horror that the current had carved out a sort of low cave with a rocky overhang over the river at just the height of our kayak’s rim. And the current was pushing us into it. Pushed up against that low lying roof, the kayak did overturn, plunging us into a disorienting whirlpool of water.
It took a few seconds to form a coherent thought, and those thoughts were not of the sunniest kind, especially when the first instinctive rush to breathe again at the surface was blocked by a hard unyielding substance that seemed to stretch in all directions. We were still underwater, and I choked down panic when I realized just what had happened: the strong current had pushed us into a sort of shady cul-de-sac of the river that lay completely under the rocky overhang. We were now trapped under a kayak which itself was wedged upside-down between the water’s surface and a stone ceiling. There was no chance of going straight up from here to get air. If we couldn’t get out of this claustrophic pocket, we would unquestionably drown. This was now a serious survival situation.
Fortunately, my travel companion and I were both strong swimmers, and we grabbed each other’s hands and kicked our way out into the main course of the river. The relief when our heads broke the surface was extraordinary, but our disorientation rendered us still vulnerable: the current bounced our disoriented selves between rocks and the sandy bottom like spheres in a pinball machine (we were thankful for our helmets then!), and even when we got into a good swimming rhythm it took us quite a few minutes to reach the shore. By which time, unfortunately, we were a good long way down from the spot where our kayak had overturned, hundreds of meters at least. We pulled ourselves up out of the water and sat down on the shore’s water-slick rocks. Safe and sound.
Just as we had begun to catch our breath, I noticed one of our bright orange paddles surging down the river towards us, and launched myself out into midriver to retrieve it, feeling like a Labrador on a duck hunt. The current pulled me a good hundred feet downstream in the process, but I swam to shore diagonally and made my way back to our rocky abode.
We paused for a moment then to take stock in earnest.
What it amounted to, in fact, was that we were on the edge of the wildest river in Europe, in a country where we spoke about three words of the local language, with our passports and all of our phones, money, food, water filtration, shelter, and extra clothes stowed away securely in bags tied to a kayak that might be upriver behind us, or sunk, or downriver ahead of us.
Our current inventory consisted only of the clothes, life jacket, and helmet we each stood up in. Plus one paddle.
We discussed things for a bit, and eventually came to the conclusion that dramatic as the situation seemed, we were really quite fortunate, all things considered. We were alive and unharmed, that was the great thing. Even if we lost all our material possessions, we could probably make it back to the bridge, and from there to the road, whence we could hitchhike to Permet, rendezvous with our kayaking company and plead for assistance, and perhaps eventually contact an American consulate and get some kind of replacement for a passport. But we would rather not, of course; we would rather recover our belongings, re-board our kayak, and continue the voyage. It would have been positively ignominious to be defeated like this, on the very first day no less.
The key question now, the preeminent unknown variable to resolve, was the location of our boat and baggage. Was it upriver, behind us? Still trapped under the rock, ran aground, or entangled in some trailing tree branch? Or had it passed us all unknown in that crowded half-hour of rushing water, and was it now merrily on its way downriver to the Adriatic, unlikely to be retrieved unless it was spotted by its corporate proprietors while passing Permet? We decided that the clear thing to do was to make our way upstream
Okay. Okay. Things were, if not quite under control, at least getting there. We set off, clambering among the rocks and roots on the steep slope of the riverbank. We were making good time and beginning to be in relatively good spirits, with the adrenaline rush and consciousness of the epic quality of this particular adventure leading if not to gaiety then at least to a new equilibrium. We were level-headed. We were focused. We were steely-eyed adventurers who could resolve this calmly and resolutely, without question.
At this point, we saw the snake.
It was a lively young snake, industriously winding itself along the tree roots at the edge of land and water, and the fact about it which drew the most notice – apart from its size, which to our excited imaginations seemed prodigious indeed – was that it was directly in our path, occupying exactly that lip of riverbank that offered a reasonably navigable middle course between the strong, swift current to the right and the hardscrabble, thornbush-laden steep slope to the left. I was reminded of an exchange from a Discworld novel (The Fifth Elephant, I think) where one character said “It couldn’t be worse,” and another replied “Oh, it could if there were snakes in here with us.” At that moment, it seemed very much as though we had fallen into the middle of some Indiana Jones movie.
But in these first half-frenzied thoughts, I had done the snake a grave injustice. It was a perfect gentleman (or lady6; hard to tell with snakes), and nothing could have been more obliging than the way it slid aside for our passage and completely eschewed rearing, hissing, or any other impoliteness. Overall, I’m rather grateful for the sighting!
Just after passing the snake7, we noticed the second of our two paddles floating downriver. This seemed a good omen. I retrieved it once again, and we continued, nearing the rocky rapid-choked bend of the river where we had capsized with our hearts in our throats.
Imagine our surprise and relief when we saw the kayak detaching all on its own from the rocky overhang just as we arrived, with the current obligingly pushing it towards us in a prompt and helpful manner. It was upside-down, true, but all our gear was still strapped to it, and we jumped into the river to grab it with the feeling that Lady Luck had truly favored us. It could have been much, much worse, but we had improvised, adapted, and overcame our early inexperienced missteps with no serious harm done. Thank the gods.
After retrieving our kayak, we dragged it into a shallow corner, turned it right side up, and spent a while catching our breaths and taking inventory of our sodden baggage. We paddled a little more that day, but not much further, eventually winding up beneath another abandoned and highly dilapidated bridge. We tried setting up camp on the left bank of the river, were served our eviction notices by a sprightly nest of wasps, and retreated in disorder, wading into the water and pulling our kayak and gear with us, to move a little further along.
Unfortunately, once we did find a good spot to stop for the night, we discovered that the little inconveniences originating in the capsizing event weren’t quite over yet. When we opened the backpack in which we’d put all of our food, we found as we’d feared that it had been completely submerged during that chaotic hour on the river, creating a soaking wet nut-fruit-bread-potato paste. This might have been almost okay if it weren’t for the fact that we had most unwisely put our soap in the same bag, which had made it a soapy soaking wet nut-fruit-bread-potato paste, frothing with white bubbles and impossible to consume. All that was even remotely salvageable were two small bags of peanuts that were plastic-sealed and a single solitary orange.
So we split the orange and one of the two bags of peanuts, spread our soaking wet clothes over a tree’s branches like the world’s weirdest Christmas tree decorations, set up our damp hammocks, and went to sleep.
Day Two: The Abandoned Bridge to Petran.
The next morning, we woke up, furled our hammocks, ate our one remaining bag of peanuts, took our half-dried clothes down from the tree, repacked, said hello to a passing Albanian teenager8, reinflated the kayak, and set off again.
It was hot. Really, really hot, hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit through most of the day. This was just a few weeks after I’d experienced the hottest day in Delhi’s history, and it still struck me as distinctly hot. It would have been an absolutely punishing day to go hiking or climbing, but fortunately the Vjosa river waters were resolutely cold and we still had our LifeStraw water purification bottle, so we could hydrate with fresh, cold water more or less constantly. We made good progress, and despite the heat it was an absolutely beautiful day, with magnificent stone mountainsides towering above the river.
Nevertheless, we were getting hungry, and we began scouting for opportunities to replenish our supplies at some reasonably river-accessible settlement. Eventually, we stopped at a tiny village called Kanikol, which we thought seemed a strangely appropriate stopping point for such a hot day because it sounded like the French canicule, or “dog days” of summer. Or rather, we stopped at where the map said Kanikol was; we couldn’t see it due to high embankments, but the two bridges overhead (one rickety-looking but functional, one consisting of a few broken planks hanging off rope) seemed to testify to the existence of a town. After lodging the kayak on a sandbar and wading through a scramble of water and rocks to access a climbable surface, we won through to the road at the top of the embankment, with Kanikol’s houses visible in the distance.
Away from the cooling influence of the river water, it felt much hotter. We’d been drinking cold water all morning, and we’d brought the LifeStraw bottle of cold water up with us, but we still felt parched and dehydrated within minutes. (We didn’t know it then, but we were in the middle of the 2024 European heatwaves). There were a few houses right by the river, densifying in a “suburb” like pattern towards the further inland village core, and we hoped to find someone we could buy food from at one of them. (Fortunately, we’d had our phones, passports, and Albanian lek in plastic dry bags, so they’d more-or-less survived yesterday’s immersion, unlike the food, and were only slightly damp).
But the more we looked and knocked and declaimed greetings, the less promising our chances of making contact appeared. We actually shimmied over a garden wall to knock at one particularly inviting-looking house’s door, received no response, and went back again. We went so far as to shout and halloo at the top of our lungs in the middle of the street in the hope of attracting some attention from any of the buildings within earshot, but no responses were forthcoming. Kanikol seemed a ghost town, without a single solitary human being visible. I still have no idea why.
At last, with walking through the heat becoming positively punishing, we had to give it up as a bad job and make our way back to the river, where at least we could have endless cold water.
Then, just as we prepared to climb back down to the river and paddle out to the next town, came our salvation. Ahead of us, coming from the other side of the river towards Kanikol, there was a pickup truck grinding its way over the one functional bridge. We leapt on that pickup truck like starving wolves on an unfortunate caribou, said the one word of Albanian that we were really confident on (“Përshëndetje!” for “Hello!”) and did our best to convey to the driver with animated gestures that we were in the market for food and drink.
The man (perhaps thirtysomething, bearded) didn’t speak a word of English or French, but bore himself up remarkably well given that he was being practically accosted by crazy foreigners. His destination was just a hundred yards down the road, one of the abandoned-seeming buildings we had fruitlessly shouted at earlier, and he gestured for us to sit down on the porch and refill our water bottle from an outdoor spigot. We then discovered that this building was not a house per se, but a small seemingly independent dairy, as the inside was filled with barrels of milk in various stages of the journey to cheese. Our host offered us a just-off-the-presses square of soft feta-like cheese, with we gratefully devoured with our fingers.
The man waved away our first attempts at payment, but we positively pressed the banknotes into his hand. Somehow monetary thanks felt even more imperative when we couldn’t speak enough of the language to verbally thank him as fulsomely as he deserved. We left that little dairy feeling cool, refreshed, satisfied, and energized. We crossed the bridge, climbed down the other embankment, and swam across the river with our bags on our heads, returning to the kayak with fresh enthusiasm for the voyage.
Truly9, blessed are the cheesemakers.
A few hours later, as afternoon faded into evening, we pulled up on the beach at the riverside town of Petran, deflating our kayak, stowing it behind a rock, and taking the reinflation pump with us to render theft impracticable. About a minute away on foot was a restaurant, and we decided to stop there, before even finding a place to sleep for the night.
At that restaurant10, with whiplash-inducing speed, our day seamlessly segued from a rugged outdoors experience to a luxurious rural European vacation. We ate a gigantic and delicious home-cooked regional-specialty multi-course dinner, while seated on an outdoor terrace overlooking the gorgeous Vjosa with rich vines laden with juicy grapes twining through a trellis overhead. When we left, the bill, for a lavish multi-entree meal for two, was equivalent to about eight euros (not a typo: 8!). It was the sort of experience that would have cost hundreds or thousands in Tuscany or the Napa Valley, and here we were having it in rural Albania for about the price of a fancy Starbucks coffee.
We then walked inland a bit to an equally lovely guest house (the Green House), and got a room for the night just by walking in and asking for one. We hadn’t planned any sleeping spots in advance for the entire kayak trip, and setting out a journey each morning knowing where one would sleep that night was “on the knees of the gods,” gave a delightful sense of freedom, amply rewarded on this trip by the gems of hospitality we found along the way.
Day Three: Petran to Piskovë.
We woke the next morning and set out in excellent spirits. It was a beautiful sunny day, but a little less hot than the day before, which (in addition to having eaten and slept well) made the day’s kayaking a much more pleasant experience. The terrain was highly varied: at one point, a giant rock overhang put seemingly half the river in its shade, allowing us to paddle underneath it for a delightful ersatz “cave kayaking” experience.
Strong rapids occurred at least every kilometer, as or more difficult than those we’d found so challenging during the first day, but we navigated them with ease.. By now, we were old hands, with my traveling companion scouting an ideal route from the front of the kayak and myself steering between the indicated rocks from the back. Occasionally, we would have to step out to coax the kayak through particularly shallow or difficult bits, which was a challenge due to the swiftness of the current but feasible due to the fact that in this dry summer the water rarely came higher than our knees (at least in the relatively shallow rapids: we saw substantially deeper pools in the Vjosa, but they rarely coexisted with the difficult rocky bits). In a runoff-swollen winter river, we could never have dared it.
As we approached Permet, we noticed a vast flock of goats and sheep occupying the slope of an embankment, and called out our solitary word of Albanian (“Përshëndetje!”) to greet the associated humans.
There’s a concept in ecology called “subsidized predators,” where humans feeding predator species can enable a higher predator population than would be possible naturally, often with harmful impacts to nearby prey species. The classic example is cute feral cats getting gifts of cat food in addition to hunting birds, leading to lots of cats and few birds. It occurred to me that one way to think of overgrazing is as an example of “subsidized herbivores,” with the primary subsidy being not food but security. (Food being a factor as well, come to think of it, especially in winter). Since the Fertile Crescent domestications of these species, humans protecting flocks of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats from predators has allowed unusually large populations of grazing animals, sometimes leading to major ecological shifts as trees, shrubs, and even grasses are eaten over and over again past the point of recovery. Much of the Middle East may once have been substantially greener before centuries of overgrazing reduced it to desert. Environmental degradation is nothing new in human history. According to the conservation articles I’ve read, overgrazing is one of the major issues in the Vjosa river basin today, but reforestation efforts have begun and the new national park status should help catalyze a more sustainable community-based management framework.
After navigating a particularly tricksy set of rapids, we arrived in Permet proper, where we stopped to check in with our kayaking outfitter’s and got lunch. That afternoon, we restarted in fine spirits and made excellent time, zipping between rocks with deft aplomb and speeding through calmer stretches like champion kayakists. We were stopping to empty wave-sprayed water from our kayak less and less frequently, which helped our speed as well, and when we did stop it seemed a privilege to have an excuse to savor that fragment of the landscape more closely. It was a positively beautiful day.
Eventually, as the evening faded into twilight, we wound up at the little town of Piskovë, which like Kanikol was situated on a high embankment without any clear access point from the river. Eventually, we found a beach, perhaps a kilometer out from the town center, that had a clear path up a grassy slope and through a few farms to reach the streets.
On the walk up on the grassy path from the beach to a guesthouse in the town, we passed a barn and a donkey that could have come straight out of the 1700s, with a glorious rainbow auguring good luck overhead.
Day Four: Piskovë to Tepelenë.
Setting out from that Piskovë guesthouse the next morning (after being regaled with a truly extraordinary homemade breakfast, including preserves from a nearby garden and butter that our venerable hostess had churned herself), we were full of excitement, for the map said that Kelcyre Gorge lay ahead, and we knew almost nothing of what to expect. The morning started well, with wonderful warming sunny weather and a fortuitous sighting of a fine Hermann’s tortoise (Testudo hermanni) just before the donkey’s barn on the path down to the riverbank.
Once in the kayak, we made excellent progress from the outset, and were beginning to entertain hopes that we could make it from Piskovë to Tepelenë by nightfall instead of camping in between as we had expected. Then, a great massif crowned by the romantic ruins of a castle arose before us, and we knew we had reached the entrance to Kelcyre Gorge itself.
Kelcyre Gorge! Kelcyre Gorge! I had been absolutely unprepared for the majesty of this geographical feature; it had not featured much in the few available articles I had read about the Vjosa, and now it appeared before me as a surprise gift from Nature, a sublime reward for our hard work of the last few days, a tree-lined Grand Canyon of Albania worthy of wonder beyond all expectation.
Perhaps due to moisture trapped in the shadow of the great rock walls, it was by far the greenest and wettest area we had seen so far in Albania; the contrast was so great that to my inflamed imagination we almost seemed to have transitioned in a kilometer from semi-desert to cloud forest. The water was turquoise, and wonderfully clear and pleasant to paddle through; we had worried that it would be another rough passage full of rapids and rocks, but in fact it was relatively easy, and we were quite at leisure to admire the magnificent sequence of little waterfalls and cascades pouring through trees, mosses, and ferns from the lip of the forest above to the murmuring waters beneath.
As we continued, the sense of wonder was not dimmed nor its natural force abated. Two birds of prey circled overhead, and we watched it for minutes on end as they navigated the gusts and thermals. We stopped on a sandbar in the middle of the gorge to swim a bit and savor the natural beauty. A little while later, we saw a snake swimming across the Vjosa, its head held impressively high above the water as its body coiled and arced through the wavelets. Strangely beautiful in its own right, a testament to the poetry in motion and autonomous individual determination of vivacious vertebrate life-forms.
The wind had been picking up since around midday, and as we left Kelcyre Gorge it started to blow straight in our faces. The going became more difficult: even aided by the river current, there was an increased sense of fatigue in defying the winds. Eventually, as the river widened and slowed with tributaries in the following kilometers, we got to a point where any halt in our paddling led to the kayak going backwards. The wind was now stronger than the current. Our arms ached, and we began to talk of stopping for the night.
We looked for places to hang our hammock, but the landscape had changed: no longer did forest-worthy trees crown the slopes, but only patches of reeds and saplings adjoined the river. Not only did these not offer any branches sturdy enough to hang a hammock from, they didn’t offer any protection from the wind at all; we would have passed an unpleasant night.
The storied town of Tepelenë was nearby now: we could see the road leading to it, and as the river turned and widened again into a sweeping sandy floodplain, we caught sight of the settlement itself.
Striking, indeed: Tepelenë stood (still stands, for all I know) atop what seemed to us to be a positively gigantic cliff, surmounted by very impressive medieval stone walls that seemed to add half the height of the cliff again. As we approached, we noted the absence of moorings, docks, or other boats tied up in the area, and failed to catch sight of any path or trail visibly linking the riverside to the town. Eventually, we just pulled up on a random beach — that seemed to have been recently frequented by a large number of cattle. There would surely be a little path leading up from the cowflop-strewn beach to the town proper. Surely.
Well, there wasn’t.
The thing about fortified cities is that they’re built to not be easily accessible on foot from the outside. Sensible, walkable, mixed-use urbanism when you’re on the inside of the walls, DEATH TO THE INVADERS! NEVER SURRENDER! when you’re on the outside. I’d just reserved a room in that town using an American app on a South Korean smartphone, using a global communications network designed and built on the other side of the world from Albania. And as fancy as all these appurtenances were, I was as limited by the sheer facts of geography and defensive architecture as any Byzantine or Bulgar or Ottoman warlord that might have roamed the Vjosa in centuries past.
At this point, the situation was as follows. We were increasingly hungry, and beginning to edge from tiredness into exhaustion. Night was falling, and it was growing colder. We had left the forests, and the shrubs and bushes along the river now would not support our hammocks. We had gradually crept up on this town for some time, looking for any sort of path upwards, and were now reluctantly obliged to conclude that such a path did not exist. We knew there was food and lodging to be had up there — we had already paid for the lodging — and it now seemed that we simply had to work a bit to attain them.
So we deflated the kayak and hid it in a little hollow behind a tree, took our backpacks and the pump to re-inflate the kayak with, and began a lengthy mini-odyssey in search of food and our lodgings for the night, which indeed would have ranked rather well as a hike in its own right under other circumstances. We traversed meadows, gravel patches, and grassy knolls, with quite steep and rapid elevation gain as we endeavoured to climb past the great expanse of cliff and walls off downriver to our right. At one point, we were obliged to wade knee-deep through a charming little reed-lined pond before emerging from the woods into a little group of houses catty-corner to the city proper, at last above the walls and on the right elevation to enter through proper and authorized paths. When we had nearly reached the sign, we even saw an encouraging notice-board describing reforestation efforts in the region, a nascent corrective to centuries of poverty-driven overgrazing.
That evening, while eating at a Tepelenë pizzeria with a beautiful view over the looping curves of the Vjosa, we ran into an American Peace Corps volunteer who regaled us with stories of local colour, from problems like corruption and even pockets of nostalgia for Hoxha’s brutal brand of Communism to more hopeful signs like burgeoning conservation efforts, rapidly increasing wealth in material goods, and general expectation of imminent surges in tourism. We learned that she had advised the Tepelenë restauranteurs to add French fries and melted cheese to their menus in the hope of enticing hypothetical future American tourists, and I was half-embarrassed to realize that it had worked perfectly, her projections were spot on; I had already ordered fries as a side before the conversation began.
We climbed to what was nearly the highest point in Tepelenë11 to attain our Airbnb, where our hosts were munificently kind and charming, just as we had found at every single one of our previous hospitality encounters in Albania. Tired from the day’s work, sleep came quickly.
Day Five: Tepelenë to Memaliaj.
The next morning, when we waded back through the little pond on our path to retrieve our kayak, we noticed that the surrounding reeds were festooned with absolutely gorgeous damselflies, sapphire-blue with iridescent black wing-tips. I took photos, and my iNaturalist app later informed me that these were banded demoiselles, Calopteryx splendens. On the beach where we had left our kayak, dung beetles were rolling feces into little balls, the originals of the Egyptian god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky with the same motion, while a multitude of birds passed overhead. Their movements were oddly hypnotic, reminding me of gears in a machine with their almost mechanic-looking adaptive regularity, and I began to see how they could have been worshipped.
The majestic cut-stone mountain vistas that we had glutted our eyes on since the Greek frontier fell away as we kayaked on from Tepelenë12, easing diminuendo into gentle rolling hills that wouldn’t have been out of place in the New England landscape of my childhood. Nearly-flat farmers’ fields began to adjoin the riverbanks, and a haughty grey heron (Ardea cinerea) stalked the pebbles at the water’s edge. Contrary to this general sense of pacification, the current grew stronger than ever as more tributaries snaked in from other mountain valleys to swell the main Vjosa channel.
We eventually stopped at Memaliaj, a charming little village in the bend of the river, and relaxed for an hour on a stony beach after texting the kayaking company to come pick us up. A Eurasian kingfisher flew by (Alcedo atthis), and a little while later we saw another snake swimming across the majestic Vjosa torrent13. Once again, tiny baby fish were abundant in the shallows, where we splashed and played to cool off. The contrast between the still, hot air and the fast-moving cold water was profoundly pleasant, allowing precise calibration of body temperature. If I let myself detach from the riverbed, I began to float downriver at quite a surprising clip, and I did so several times just for the thrill of it.
Eventually, the kayaking company came to pick us up, and we deflated our kayak for the last time. They dropped us off back in Tepelenë, and after avoiding the unwanted entreaties of the two sleaziest-looking taxi drivers I had ever seen14, we took the bus all the way up to the charming coastal city of Durres, or Durazzo in Italian.
And so our journey was over. All in all, it was an absolutely lovely experience15. Albania is radiantly beautiful, culturally and ecologically fascinating, and 99% of the folks you’ll meet are incredibly friendly and hospitable. Seeing a country with such a nightmarish history beginning to blossom into a thriving part of a globally linked civilization of unprecedented abundance was a powerful reminder of the human capacity for progress.
A much-delayed article, as immediately after my return from Albania I began the “Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope” project in collaboration with Climate Action Now. It seems a bit odd to be publishing an account of my summer trip during the following winter, but that’s how long it took me to find the time to write this article!
During which, to give them great credit, heroic ordinary Albanians covered themselves with glory by safeguarding Jewish refugees en masse, which led to Albania becoming the only European nation to end World War II with more Jews than they started with.
Albania is still littered with tiny concrete bunkers that Hoxha ordered built to defend against an imaginary invasion.
Why does the President of Kosovo have a name denoting Albanian-ness? Kosovo is a majority ethnic-Albanian region that declared independence from Serbia in 2008 — it’s a long story.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to travel quite a lot in recent years, but it’s had something of a discreditable effect on the physical condition of my cherished passport – particularly the part where it stayed in my pocket 24/7 through over a month of intense reporting across India. When I entered Albania at the Tirana airport customs, the official eyed my passport with visible disfavor, held it up and pointed at the raggedy bits of string peeling off its cover and binding, and said, in English, with a thick accent and a distinctly accusatory mien, “DOG?” (No dog had molested my passport, but to be fair it did rather appear chewed). I smiled and shrugged, and they let me through anyway.
What species was this snake? I didn’t get a photo for iNaturalist and I’m terribly ignorant of Southeast Europe’s serpents, but I recall that it appared solid-color (no stripes or pattern), sort of blackish/dark gray, and its smooth head didn’t have the “horn” of a European horned viper. After checking Wikipedia, I’m guessing it was a Balkan whip snake (Hierophis gemonensis), though there are several other possibilities.
Dressed somewhat ominously in a black T-shirt and ornate crucifix necklace. Kind of a Goth vibe. Nice guy, though.
Almost one of the first things that occurred to me about this incident was that I had been granted a not-to-be-missed opportunity to use this classic Monty Python quote in a manner accurately describing real life.
Checking the spot on Google Maps reveals that it was the Bar Restaurant Alvi, incidentally.
A few days later, I was absolutely shocked to see Tepelenë cameo as the referenced hometown of the character Haidee in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, which by an amazing coincidence I had already started reading on my Kindle before going to Albania and before I’d even heard of Tepelenë. It was just happenstance, of course, but it felt positively eerie to go in the span of a week from never having heard of Tepelenë in my life, to visiting Tepelenë by kayak, then to see it pop up a few days later in a classic novel that I was already reading.
Notably, I noticed hardly any solar panels at Tepelenë, or indeed anywhere I went in Albania. Given the ongoing exponential solar growth worldwide, I suspect this will change in the next five years - the market opportunity must be considerable!
Alas, I didn’t get a picture of either of the occasions when we saw a snake swimming across the Vjosa. It looked really cool!
Sporting gold chains, exposed chest hair, and sunglasses at midday, they looked like the most lazily stereotyped of gangsters. Their behavior did nothing to rebut this; these taxi drivers lied through their teeth and told us that there was no bus today, only for it to pull up a few minutes later.
Seriously: if you have the means and the time, go to Albania! On top of everything else, it can be astonishingly inexpensive for travelers with developed-world budgets. It’s awesome! Would recommend!
Wonderful story. We had a similar experience in a rubber raft on the Santiam River in Oregon, when we were swept by the current beneath a bankside strainer (fallen tree), were tossed from our raft, scrambled to the shore and, while wondering what we'd do next, the raft popped out from under the submerged branches of the tree and we were able to scramble back on to it and continue our float.
Thank you for sharing your adventure! It reminded me of the wilderness stories of Algernon Blackwood written in the 1890s.