Category: Around Europe
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 –…