Month: November 2022
-
Day 112: Cape of Rodon to Shëngjin
I camped on top of a low grassy cliff and made a fire where others had before, cooking my pasta on it and eating it with olive oil, having nothing else. It was a cold night, a heavy dew sinking down from the scrub covered hills above me. The beach was covered in rubbish, a…
-
Day 111: Portez beach to Cape of Rodon
After my ramblings in the last post I never actually said where I ended up. Well I decided to by-pass Durress and landed on a mosquito infested grey sandy beach for the night. In the morning a man came over with a German shepherd that looked like it wanted to eat me, and told me…
-
Day 110: Spille to Portez beach
Diabetes. I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but of course it hasn’t gone away. Dealing with it everyday is consuming enough that I don’t really want to waste more thought on it. Anyway, the first couple of weeks were easy – my blood sugars were good – and then they started getting erratic –…
-
Day 109: random beach somewhere to Spille
It gets dark around 5 now, so I’ve tried writing the blog in my long evenings, but I keep falling asleep at around 8 o’clock. Normally we fight the seasons, stay indoors longer and longer as it gets darker and colder outside, become disconnected from the world around us. Living outside I feel so connected…
-
Day 108: Mouth of the river Vjosë to random beach somewhere
I woke up at first light with a fisherman zooming past my tent on his motorbike, the beach around here is the road. Paddling the river Vjosë would be a great trip, but paddling against the current was very slow and I quickly gave up, heading out to sea instead. It was a hard day.…
-
Day 107: Vlorë to mouth of the river Vjosë
I spent the morning in the museum of independence. The seeds of Albanian national identity were planted in the mid-15th century when for 25 years George Skanderbeg successfully led a military alliance of feudal lords against the invading Ottoman empire. After Skanderbeg’s death the Ottomans took control but the national identity never died and from…
-
Day 106: Orikum to Vlorë
A heavily pregnant stray dog ran around the beach barking all night, clearly distressed, and my sleep was somewhat disturbed. I half expected to hear a hotel window creak open, followed by a gunshot and then silence. Once the morning sun had burnt the dew from my tent I set off for Vlorë, aiming to…