Day 17 – Komani Lake

After a pretty short 5-hour-night, I stood up at 6 this morning (I had treated hours of sleep for juggling lessons, so that was a pretty good deal). Yesterday evening, a Finnish girl had told me about a boat trip on lake Komani and said that it had been very nice so I spontaneously decided to do that too. I had been planning to do some kayaking on that lake, but (same as the hiking trip I had planned) this is only possible in summer.
The minibus set off at 6:30 and took us to the shore of lake Komani, heavily shaking and vibrating. We drove for two hours through stunning mountain landscape on extremely bad roads.

There were only a couple of other passengers on the bus: an English brother and sister that had slept in my hostel too and that I got to know a little later, and two Albanian guys who talked for two hours straight without taking a breath. Obviously I didn’t understand much apart from “Rhakia” and “Turkish coffee” which were the dominating topic for the first hour, but it gave me the chance to get a little more used to the sound of the language.

At 9, we set off at the “harbor” and the ferry took us for three hours through incredible landscape along the turquoise-green Komani lake until Fierze.
There was a small German girl on the boat which pretty much represented what all the other passengers were feeling. One moment she was jumping around happily and saying “Wow, this is so cool!”, Then sat down the next moment and said to her dad :” I don’t like it anymore, it’s actually pretty boring”. The landscape was amazing but two hours would have been perfect. Nevertheless, I had lots of fun with the English guys who turned out to be very funny.

After getting to Fierze, they went on by another mini-bus to a mountain village and I had to wait for one hour until the ferry took the same way back to its starting point. Between getting to the end point and going back, there was literally nothing else to do than entertaining myself by throwing stones into the lake and having a snack.
It didn’t get much more interesting on the way back. I sat on the lateral of the boat this time and got a closer look at the mountain walls to our right and even spotted a few goats and sheep who were climbing around in the bushes. All in all it was pretty boring and cold and noisy but still beautiful. As being on the boat without any higher goal had been the hole purpose of the trip, I hadn’t thought of bringing a book. Then it got a little less boring because I managed to fall asleep on a very narrow and hard wooden bank on the outside of the boat. And then I reach maximum level of boredom right before coming back to where we had started in the morning.

From there I took another Mini-bus which took me through the same holey roads another two hours back to Shkoder.

In total, I have spent 4 hours in mini-buses and 6 hours on a ferry today. I saw beautiful landscapes and this was probably the only way to do this, but it is still a very weird thing to do; travelling all day without going anywhere. This is where the saying “The journey is not about the destination but about the way” really gets its meaning. It has also been my most expensive day to date, because the mini-buses on that kind of mountain roads are much more expensive than the normal ones.

I spent the evening with the people at the hostel, discussing machine learning and generative design with somebody who actually understood it, because he is an Indian PhD student for information science engineering.

My original plan had been to spend one night or two here but yesterday during dinner, conversation somehow came to mountain experiences. It turned out that two other guys and I all had adventurous, weird, getting-lost stories to tell that happened in the last week. Inspired by the fact that 3 people with the talent of getting involved in mountain adventures found each other, we decided to go to the mountains together tomorrow (just to see what happens), which is why I will be staying another night.

P.S.: Maybe it’s because of the 5-hour night or maybe because my brain got shaken a little too much today, but I am not able to talk nor write proper sentences, so sorry for that.