Month: November 2022
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Day 122: Plavi Horizont to Prçanj
The security guard came and shone his torch across the beach on to my tent as darkness fell and I went to sleep a little on edge after my last brush with the authorities. A scream from the woods woke me with a start in the night and I left the beach at dawn, scrambling…
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Day 121: Cape Kricivacto to Plavi Horizont
The wind blew all day and the clouds hung heavy with the threat of rain but never dropped their load. But I’ve talked about the weather enough, so here’s some stuff about Montenegro, which you may not know much about. Well like Albania it’s a mountainous country and its name means ‘black mountain’, since that’s…
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Day 120: Ulcinj to Cape Kricivac
The weather had turned by the morning, a blustery wind blowing and a new freshness in the air. I feel blessed to have only had a few rainy days thus far on this section of the trip, but the outlook from here on is rain with no end in sight. Mentally, that’s quite hard to…
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Day 119: Lumi Jetes to Ulcinj
A digger arrived at the crack of dawn and started scooping up gravel from the riverbed, apparently a common practice here and in Montenegro, and one that’s destroying the river ecosystem. I got paddling and soon re-entered Montenegro, without any formalities on the border. The river gradually slowed to an ooze, but my journey to…
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Day 118: Lake Shkodra to Lumi Jetes
The two fishermen blundered back in the night roaring drunk, having caught no fish of course, they were bloody useless at catching fish. The days paddle was uneventful. What took a whole day on the way up flew by in less less than two hours. I’d seen this scenery before, but looking at it from…
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Day 117: Lake Shkodra
I don’t know if it was a warmer night or if sitting by the fire before I climbed in to the tent did the trick, because it certainly felt warmer. At sunrise I left my tent to dry and followed the meanders of a river through the reeds and bullrushes, letting my boat glide as…
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Day 116: Lake Shkodra
Half of lake Shkodra is Albanian, half Montenegrin, and yesterday I crossed back in to the latter. The fishermen arrived early in some clattering old cars and had caught buckets of huge fish by the time I set off. I stopped at Beska, an small island with a Serbian orthodox monastery. After putting a gown…
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Day 115: Shkodër to Mola Sjercit
Luckily the new day started with warm sunshine and my clothes quickly dried hung up on a branch. My sleeping bag and jacket are goose down, which is great until it gets wet. A mistake like that could be serious when it gets chillier. I walked up to the Rozafa castle, which was incredible, the…
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Day 114: Daçj to Shkodër
The new day came with the feeling of a new season, the air fresher, the ground littered with leaves decaying in to mud. A strong breeze rustled through the willows on the river bank, sending showers of heavy raindrops to the ground. That wind whispered the threat of winter, that cold times are coming, and…
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Day 113: Shëngjin to Dajç
BBC weather forecast a thunderstorm so the next day I paddled closer to the town centre and sat in the Rafaelo resort to write. The Rafaelo resort has been used to house hundreds of Afghan refugees since the August 21 evacuation while they wait for visas to the US. Fitting then that there was a…