Enchanted Ohrid, Albania

“We’re not going there!”

I’ve had a lifelong subscription to the ‘If you look at it and think you’re gonna die, you probably will’ school of risk management. It has worked for me thus far, so I saw no reason to change.

My comments related to the film of the SH71 road from Maliq to Moglicë Mark showed me on YouTube. It formed an essential part of our route from Berat to Korçë.

I had already vetoed the SH74 – State Highway 74. Understandably, with such a grand and reassuring title, it appears on maps of Albania as a major road. Yet, it has caught out many an unwary driver who wishes to pop between the UNESCO World Heritage cities of Berat and Gjirokastër via Këlcyrë.

Nicknamed ‘The Albanian Death Road’, State Highway 74 is a crumbling cinder path on the edge of a precipice. The Dangerous Roads website advises that to combat deep holes, huge rocks, mud, and landslides, a 4×4 with good ground clearance is a must. Plus, if you meet someone coming the other way, bad luck. There isn’t room for two vehicles to pass.

YouTube videos showed most people who attempted the SH74 turned back. One chap in an 8 m Hymer said he made it, but only because it was too hairy to turn around. I noted that despite being two metres shorter than our Beast, he had cracked both his front and rear bumpers. Also, at six tonnes fully loaded, his Hymer was ten tonnes lighter than us.  

Mark dismissed my worries about the SH71.

“The canyon part you just saw is the worst bit. The rest isn’t so bad.”

When I looked again, most of the route looked okay. Bits of it even looked like a reasonably normal road, and unlike the SH74, parts of it were paved.

I must have been in Albania too long, because I can’t believe I agreed.

En route, we stopped at Gramsh, where the roads divided and we had to commit. Over pie and chips Albanian style (byrek and French fries) we contemplated our options. We hadn’t reached the SH71 but already, we’d encountered unpaved roads and a few sections where we didn’t want our 16-tonne truck to stray too close to the edge. The temperature made the final decision, however. Once again, it was a sizzliing 39°C (102°F). Rather than terrify ourselves on the SH71 to end up in Albania’s eighth most populous city, we opted to make haste for Lake Ohrid.

With his stitches removed, our pup, Kai, could now go into the water. For The Pawsome Foursome, we thought a lakeside sojourn would be much more enjoyable than ‘Albania’s Most Charming City’. They’d had a torrid time in the heat, which Bona, the owner of Riverside Camping, told us was unusual for this time of year.

The adrenaline-head within me felt a pang of regret that we would not be driving the SH71. It looked scenic as well as terrifying, although I had no complaints about the drive from Berat to Lin. It was truly beautiful.

Ohrid is one of the oldest lakes on the planet, along with Titicaca, Baikal, and Lake Tanganyika. Its oldest sediments date back 3-5 million years. It covers an area of 138 square miles (358 square kilometres) and is the deepest lake in the Balkans, fed by underground aquifers from the higher Lak Prespa. The average depth is 500 ft (150 m), but it plunges to a maximum of nearly 1,000 ft (300 m). I don’t know if it has a monster, but it is old enough to have developed over two hundred endemic species. One unique occupant is the Ohrid trout, known locally as Koran. It is a gastronomic speciality, with a flavour somewhere between brown trout and Atlantic salmon.

In the Bronze age, settlers built stilt or pile houses on the lake – archaeologists discovered two near Lin. On the North Macedonian side, there is a reconstruction of the pile houses at The Bay of Bones.

Unsurprisingly, UNESCO inscribed Ohrid a biosphere reserve, and later incorporated its cultural heritage.

After several simmering hours in the truck, my dip in Ohrid’s soothing waters was like being smeared with honey, then having it licked off by an angel.

Our lakeside park up was exceptional. From our windows, a mirror flat stretch of cornflower blue water merged into the indigo mountains of North Macedonia on the far bank. It was like the world’s largest infinity pool. At night, we felt as though we were on a boat. All we could hear was the gentle lapping of water against the shore. Moment by moment, the light and colours changed. During our stay, we had red skies, pink skies, a full double rainbow – and a couple of lively thunderstorms. The photographs are all true to nature. I haven’t enhanced the colours or used any filters.

On a lake renowned for its delicious trout, we had fish fingers and beans for dinner. This used up a few emergency supplies that had been loitering in our freezer since Italy. To give it a gourmet touch, I fried up a slice of red pepper.

A small van pulled up next door. She introduced herself as Loreen, travelling solo with her Albanian rescue dog Linus. Lisa and Pierre rocked up later. They told us a rescue centre in Shkodër was helping them to get the required paperwork to take their own Albanian rescue back to Switzerland.

Lisa was a photographer. She asked to do a photo shoot of us wearing socks.

“Socks add to the story!” she explained. They certainly did in our case.

I revealed my aversion to plastic crockery and how I use socks to protect my stemmed wine glasses in transit. As we were chatting, a massive storm blew up on the lake. A sudden gust of wind swept up my last but one be-socked stemmed glass and hurled it to the floor.

It smashed!

At that point, I discovered an alternative reason for storing glasses in socks. The sock neatly contained the shards of broken glass, which made the clear up straightforward. I simply dropped the lot in the bin!

We had a long discussion with Lisa. At one point, we got on to the odd subject of whether we actually lives in a computer simulation like the Matrix, and are being played with by a teenage boy.

“The lightning might be the boy zapping us!” she said.

Lisa and Pierre were heading to Theth and Valbona. We donated our hiking maps to them, since we had decided not to go there. I was quite jealous, but we don’t know when we will come back to Albania to visit those places, and it’s just stuff to carry.

Little Kai soon found his swimming legs. We got out the SUPs and he swam after his dad, who was miles offshore. We think he may have crossed an international boundary. Two thirds of the lake is in North Macedonia, and when we checked the map later, the border was just off the Albanian shore. That really is puppy love!

Yet, even in this beautiful and remote haven, we collected three bags of garbage. After learning of our SUP exploits, my friend Tim also warned of another hazard.

“I was told that in the dark days of post communism there were so many spare stolen ammunitions that Ohrid fishermen used to drop bombs into the lake to catch more fish, so I didn’t eat Ohrid trout on principle. There could still be unexploded ammunitions down there… but that was 22 years ago and the explosives would have been locally made… So, Mark’s probably okay…”

Well, that was a relief! We didn’t hear any explosions, but on Friday night, a 24-hour boom box party started on the far shore of the lake. North Macedonia restored peace at 4.30 p.m. on Saturday!

We wanted to walk up the coastline to the delightful fishing village of Lin, which is cradled within the curve of a peninsula. Its ruined early Christian basilica on the plateau above is home to a 4th century mosaic, one of Eastern Europe’s oldest. At the peninsula’s highest point, there is also a unique bunker church.

Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, outlawed religion. He destroyed all places of worship, or repurposed them into warehouses, cinemas or sport halls. The bunker church close to his summer retreat is a curious manifestation of his bunker obsession.

He capped the existing Orthodox church with a concrete dome and used it to observe Albania’s border with Yugoslavia. I’m not sure St. Nicholas, protector of sailors and fisherman, would have wholly approved of aiming military hardware from his sanctuary at defectors, or towards an enemy who never came.

We’re not good at early starts, but even first thing, the shore side footpath was in full sun. Despite having the whole lake to dunk in, it was still unbearably hot.

After living in a furnace for weeks, thankfully, one afternoon, some cloud rolled in.

Immersed in pure green nature, the lakeside walk was stunning, although we were on full alert for stray dogs. We’d worked out that strays seemed to be okay with humans, but you couldn’t predict their reaction to other dogs. We didn’t meet any strays on the lake shore, even where there was livestock, or allotments. Just as we entered the village, a friendly stray girl approached. I bought her a pack of sausages in the local shop, which Mark fed to her well away from The Fab Four.

Lin was gorgeous. We peeped down tiny winding alleyways and coveted a house tumbling with flowers that opened up directly on to the sapphire blue waters of the lake. In the late afternoon, the sun seared through the cloud, but the mountain backdrop shaded us from the heat. The zing of lemon balm fragranced our entire pilgrimage, interspersed with all kinds of other herbs, such as mint, rosemary, and thyme.

We were so sad to leave this beautiful spot – our favourite stopover in Albania. Talk about saving the best to last. Our plan was to go on to Pogrodec and meet Loreen, but travel is ever a dance with the unexpected.

The teenage boy controlling our lives chose to zap us again.

Mark said he felt a little woozy and unwell. We put it down to the heat, but on a whim, he used a lateral flow test left over from the months we’d spent caring for my dad.

It prompted a flurry of apologies to Loreen, Lisa, and Pierre and threw our plans into disarray.

He tested positive for COVID-19.

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For detailed information on taking dogs to Albania, see my post Travel With Dogs to Albania – What You Need To Know