Yesterday we saw a motorcycle (a Royal Enfield!) with Great Britain plate parked in front of the guesthouse. We were curious about the identity of the rider, and I had assumed the rider would be a man, even though Gabriel had pointed out my sexism and said that the rider could be a “she”. So I was delighted to be proven wrong and see a twenty-something year old woman working on the motorcycle this morning. I said hello and we started chatting. She’s been traveling from London for a few months by land and heading towards Azerbaijan. Her goal is to be in Azerbaijan by September because she could hitch a ride back from there with one of her friends. We wanted to invite her to have dinner with us, hungering for more stories from her travel but she had a tight schedule and was only staying in Tirana for one night. “Besides, it’s expensive to stay in the city,” she said. “It’s cheaper to camp on the countryside.” We nodded in agreement, wished her luck and let her go back to her motorcycle maintenance. I just regretted not getting her contact information; it would have been nice to email her in September to see if she made it.
I always find it funny when we encountered someone on a trip like that and they asked us what we’re doing. Often I admire their goals so much that I felt our aimless walkabout is quite silly. Very unpurposeful and juvenile in comparison. So I would minimize what we’re doing and sheepishly admit that we are traveling for a year and have no planned itinerary. But then I could see their eyes widen —perhaps out of curiosity as to how we manage to take a full year off, or perhaps out of wishful thinking that they can extend their trip longer — and I wonder what they’re thinking.
Well, aimless as we are, we did have a plan for today: Dajti National Park. It’s a national park right outside of the city. We thought it would be nice to escape the city pollution and cool off for a day.
We took the cable car up the mountain with a girl from South Africa on sabbatical from her legal career. All of us were on the same bus and since the conductor knew that we were going to Dajti, he somehow managed in a mixture of English, Albanian and sign language to task us with making sure that the girl got to the cable car station safely. Funny enough, like the other South African we met on the trip, she didn’t recommend Johannesburg either, which made me want to check out the city even more.
The view from the cable car was quite impressive. Everything looked so lush and green.
At the top, we came upon an “adventure park” consisted of two bouncy houses, a few homemade shooting game setup – the kind you found at county fairs, a large grass field for horseback riding. There were two cops who were testing their marksmanship with the shooting a game and a few people watching them. This was entertaining and all, but weren’t there supposed to be hiking trails around here?
We finally found the trailhead at the far northern edge of the field. The first few hundred meters of the trail were covered in horse manure. Piles of manure in the middle of the sloping footpath. We tiptoed around this manurefield though at some point I gave up and resigned to the fact that I would have shit on my shoes. Luckily the trail eventually opened up to a wooded area covered with thick canopy of beech trees. Tall, majestic old trees with moss growing all over their trunks, spreading out their limbs upwards and outwards. Thick carpet of fallen leaves from the last few seasons felt like soft leather underfoot. With no one in sight and quiet descended all around us, I noticed the temperature dropped down a few degrees and I was in the kind of woods that form the settings of many children’s stories.
We kept walking along the trail to one of the peaks (Tujanit) and had lunch there, a cheese & ham sandwich we bought at the pastry shop close to the guesthouse.
We then tried to find the other peak (Dajti) but the trail led to cell towers instead. Three story buildings crammed with satellite dish. And someone had poured sulfur powder all around, which often meant that they were trying to prevent snakes from nesting inside the building, which meant that there must be snakes around. Since we couldn’t make out any discernible trails to go past these satellite dish village and weren’t so eager to hang around this snake-infested area, we started walking back to the trailhead when we came upon an area with a large amount of plastic trash – bottles, bags, wrappings, random bits of plastic components. Where did they come from? Someone clearly had brought all these trash up here… It’s always depressing and at the same time, mind-boggling to try to understand why the idea of nature conservation is so foreign to some when it is the most natural thing we human beings should know since our livelihood depends on nature.