アルバニア・ヴョサ川　ヨーロッパ最後の原生河川、パタゴニアの映画『Blue Heart』の川を旅する（中編） | パックラフト・アディクト ＃63

The Vjosa Packrafting Trip: From Bridge to Bridge in 7 Days（Part２）

　
The second day started with a hike to the border crossing, which was a bit of a detour. We had to pack all our stuff and walk towards the bridge over the Sarantaporos River (the Vjosa’s tributary), which forms the border between the countries there.

　
From the logistical perspective, it would have been much easier to paddle down the Vjosa for another kilometer or so until we reached the border, leave our packrafts there and walk without the luggage and talk to get the passports stamped. However, from what we could read on the internet, no one has done that so far. And we decided to play safe as well – eventually we were crossing the border of the European Union there and from my previous experience this could be quite an ordeal.

　
However, this time it went really smoothly – both the Greek and the Albanian border officers we very friendly and did not have many questions to us. “Just a week ago we had some people who were paddling the Vjosa as well,” one of the Albania custom officers told us. “So, if you are going all the way to the sea, make sure to pay attention to the tides,” he added. As it turned out he had been a rafting instructor and had done this trip a few of times before.

When asked, he also stated that it would have been ok to paddle all the way to the border and then go through them. “As long as your names are registered in the system it is fine,” he explained. “Enjoy Albania!”

The waters of the Sarantaporos river were silver-grey in color – it must have rained a lot up the river the night before. After it joined the main river, the Vjosa’s waters became muddled up as well and we could not see the bottom anymore. (Over the course of the next days, the water gradually became more transparent, but, unfortunately, we never saw how clear it can be).

　
The riverbanks here became even higher. At a regular distance they were joined by scary-looking pedestrian bridges, the design of which was ingenious in its simplicity. Unfortunately, they were also covered in leftovers of clothing that was dumped into the river by the locals and then scattered around by the floods.

You could see them hanging on the trees or stuck between the rocks. It looked disturbing and fascinating at the same time. Why only clothing? I started to wonder if that was not a local tradition that I was not familiar with. (That night, at the camping, I asked the owner and she explained that unfortunately it was no tradition, but more of a bad habit. She could not still make it clear to me why it was mostly closing.)

That day we started two traditions of our own – stopping for a lunch at a restaurant or a café and having a siesta. Though a wild river, the Vjosa is not remote at all. There is a road that is running along most of it and there are a lot of villages and a few larger towns that are located on its banks. The first place we stopped at (just shortly after the border) we had a large lunch. It was simple food, which was tasty but cheap.

　
We could not even finish all that was brought for us. (Later we learned that the lunch is the main meal of the day in Albania.) Such a meal in combination with the temperatures in the 40s made us really sleepy. “It would be nice to have a siesta,” I said. As it turned out, Didier was also used to doing it on his wilderness trips. “Just a nap for 15-20 minutes makes all the difference,” he said. “Would you like to sleep on the water or go ashore?” I have only slept in my packraft on the water once, but it sounded like a good idea and that was what we did.

　
The section of the river that we paddled that day was probably also the most interesting one when it comes to whitewater. Even though we did not have much water, we still had a number of rapids that were Class 2/2+ and had somewhat of a different character than the rest of the river.

The majority of the rapids on the Vjosa are rather straightforward – the whole river throws itself against a vertical wall (often with an undercut), at which point it makes a 90 degree turn and carries on just to repeat the same process on the other side a few hundred meters below. At times it felt as if we were playing a giant pinball, where we were the balls. And while most of these sharp turns were manageable at this water level, we had to stay on our tows not to end up on the rocks.

　
That section is also the one that seems to be used for rafting. While we did not meet anyone on the water, when we arrived at the takeout point for the day, there were two rafts waiting to be picked up and some people hydrospeeding in the rapids.

　
The place where we decided to stay the first night in Albania was Albtourist Ecocamp Permet. I had followed them on Instagram for a while and when preparing for the trip I also asked them if there were enough water in the river (to which I received a laconic “Yes”). It is a nice place (with free Internet and an opportunity to charge your phone), but it is also a relatively long walk up from the river (around 500 meters).

And when I had to carry a fully loaded packraft, that walk felt even longer. I also made a mistake and tried to carry the packraft by putting it over my shoulders and stabilizing it with the headrest over my forehead. By the time I reached the camping, one of the attachment points got loose – good thing I had some glue with me.

　
The next day we took it easy at the beginning (I had to repair the packraft) and we only got on the water close to noon. Our plan was to go to the town of Permet, where we could get an Albanian sim card. And that was what we did. We paddled to the center of the town (just before we entered it there was probably the most interesting rapid in the river), hid our packrafts in the bushes and climbed up to the top by using crudely made ladders, used by local fishermen.

　
The town did not look too big, but it was it had everything. We got a tourist sim card with way too much data limit. I withdrew some local currency from a bank. Though it was also possible to pay everywhere in Euro, which we did before, I felt it would be good to have local money as well. We had an extensive lunch and decided to buy some milk to drink as both Didier and I “love us some milk” after a dinner.

　
This, however, turned out to be impossible as most of the shops were closed for Albanian siesta (from 1 pm to 5 or 6 pm). What we did find in a bakery was some cow-milk yogurt that came in a bottle, but it was so thick that you had to shake chanks of it and jew them. Still it was surprisingly refreshing.

When we got to the river, there were a lot of youths swimming on the other side. Some of them swam down the rapids like that was nothing. Having a PFD and a helmet made me feel somehow overdressed in comparison to them. Later on, after the trip, Didier found an interesting book about the Vjosa.

　
In its introduction, they talk about the relationship that local communities have with the river. The book mentions the inhabitants of Permet, who say that the river gives but it also takes – every year the Vjosa takes two or three lives due to flooring or unexpected whirlpools. Still the river is their life. And we could see that as well.

　
Even though it was a short and lazy day, we managed to cover some 16 km and decided to camp on the riverbank near the village of Piskove, where we had a great dinner (goat and sheep meat) and experienced the xhiro – an evening stroll around the village or a town in which almost all inhabitants take place.

　
The first time I saw that was 9 years ago in the town of Ulcinj in Montenegro, where a lot of Albanians live. There, the who city centre was blocked for car traffic (we even had to pay a fine as we unknowingly ended up in the middle of it). In Piskove it was on a much smaller scale, but you could still see people strolling hand in hand up and down the main street.

This night, as the weather was good and there were no mosquitos, we decided not to pitch a tent but to cowboycamp instead. Somehow the stars in the cloudless Albanian night sky look especially bright.

　
The next day paddled over 27 km. Just after the first 8 km of pinballing, at Kelcyre we were flagged down by a German guy who came down to the river after seeing us paddling. He told us that together with a friend of his they were thinking about canoeing on the Vjosa. They had even brought their folding Aly canoe with them. But as they did not have too much whitewater experience, they were not sure if they could manage.

　
Didier, who has over 15 years of canoeing experience, said that according to him, the river should be ok to paddle in an open canoe. Still they had to be careful.

　
Just ahead of us was a beautiful gorge that cuts through a mountain range, the entrance to which was guarded by an imposing ruin of a castle. This gorge was one of my favorite parts of the trip by far. But it was not just the scenery that I liked, but also thanks to a microadventure and a serendipitous discovery we had there.

About one third of the way, we saw that there were a couple of restaurants. The river was narrow there and its banks were high. Finding a place to get out was not easy. We did find some gravel bank just past the restaurants and we managed to climb up onto the top.

　
However, it turned out that we were at the back of someone’s fenced property to leave which we had to go near their house. As we approached the exit, the gate seemed to be closed. So, I tried to climb over it, at which point the owner of the property came out and started to shout something in Albanian. I tried to apologies, but he was definitely not very happy. Having enjoyed our lunch at one of the restaurants, not to antagonize the owner unnecessarily, we tried to find a different way back to our packrafts.

However, there was none. And so, having prepared extensive apologies and having them translated in a google translate app into Albanian, we ventured back into his property. Luck for us, this time he did not seem to notice, and we managed to get back to our packraft without waking him up.

　
As for the serendipitous discovery, at the restaurant I bought five different bags of dried herbs – sage, chamomile, mint, oregano and something else the name of which I do not know – and I put them inside the T-zip of my packraft. And while usually, when at the end of the day you deflate the packraft, the air that comes out of it does not necessarily smell too nice, that evening I was stunned at how fresh it was. And as I had the herbs inside the packraft all the trip, I was able to enjoy the freshness all the time (Didier said that he would use this idea in the future as well). And thus, an air freshener for a packraft was born.