Albania: Lake Koman, the Alps and the South

Shkodër first, and a castle with a woman in the wall. The story goes that three brothers could not get Rozafa's walls to stand until they built in whichever wife brought them lunch the next day. She agreed, with one request about her baby, and women still scrape a little of the stone to take home for luck with their milk. Folklore does not do gentle.

Then up. One road climbs out of the plain, over the pass at Qafa e Thorës and down into Theth, a village at 750 meters that snow cuts off most winters. It is the only road there is. Most of the families who live here come up for the summer, and tonight you sleep in one of their houses and eat what they cook, with mountains on every side, close enough to feel personal.

The stone tower at the edge of Theth has almost no windows, on purpose. Under the Kanun, the old law of these mountains, a man whose family owed blood could shut himself inside and wait while somebody tried to talk the families round. It has stood for about four hundred years and the same family still owns it. You get the tour from the inside, which was always the safer side.

Then the easy part: about forty-five minutes along the valley to the Grunas waterfall, past the stone church from 1892 that is in every picture of Theth, and back for lunch.

In the afternoon, down to Shkodër, where an Italian painter opened a photo studio in 1856 and his family kept it going for three generations. Their archive, hundreds of thousands of negatives, is now the Marubi museum. Somebody in the group will find a face from a century ago that is exactly their cousin.

Sorry about the alarm. The boat goes from Koman once a morning, so the group is on the road before Shkodër's cafés open. It is worth it.

In the 1980s a dam went across the Drin and the river backed up into its own gorge. What it left is thirty-four kilometers of green water between walls of rock that go straight up out of it, and about two and a half hours on a ferry to the far end. Your minibus rides along with you, so when the ramp drops at Fierzë the driver is already there, which up here counts as a magic trick.

An hour up the road is Valbonë, the valley next door to Theth. On paper the two have been one national park since 2022. On the ground there is a mountain between them and no road over it, which is why you came round by boat. Dinner tonight is in another family's house, and the comparisons with day 2 start immediately.

Day 5 is a travel day and it is a long one: out of the valley by the only road south and most of the way down the country, six to seven hours with the stops. Better to hear it now than on day 4.

It has its moments. The Rruga e Kombit, the Nation's Road, was built to cross the mountains toward Kosovo, and the Kalimash tunnel takes it five and a half kilometers through one of them in one go. Then the mountains fall away behind you and the road runs south.

Berat is worth the drive. Its old houses climb the hill in rows, so many windows stacked over each other that the town's nickname is One Window Above the Other. See it first from the river, in the evening, as the lights come on in all of them.

Berat in the morning, up inside the castle walls to the icons of Onufri, the sixteenth-century painter Albania calls the greatest of his time. Then south to Gjirokastër, a town of gray stone right up to the roofs, which are slabs of stone laid like scales. Ismail Kadare was born here. So, as promised on day 1, was Enver Hoxha.

The castle on top holds the best thing in the country. On 23 December 1957 an American reconnaissance jet strayed into Albanian airspace and two MiG-15s forced it down. The pilot was eventually sent home. The plane was not. It has been in the castle ever since, shown for decades as proof of what the West was up to, and nobody has come to collect it.

Dinner is yours tonight. Order qifqi, the town's own rice balls with mint, fried in a pan of little round molds.

The Blue Eye is a spring, and a slightly ridiculous one. Water comes up out of a hole in the ground at more than eighteen thousand liters a second, clear enough to see a long way down and blue enough to look edited. Divers have been to fifty meters. They have not found the bottom.

Then Butrint, in the bottom corner of the country: a city for well over a thousand years, then a ruin in the trees beside the water after an earthquake flooded it. Virgil wrote that Aeneas stopped here on the way from Troy. Its theater was already old when he wrote it.

Farewell dinner in Sarandë, looking across at Corfu, which is Greece and close enough to be distracting. The boat from day 4 will come up. It will have gotten longer.

Last morning in Sarandë. Corfu is half an hour away by fast boat, and some of you are about to be on it.

A week ago this group was a table of strangers in Tirana. Now there is a group chat named after the jet in the castle, a camera roll that is mostly rock walls and green water, and the Theth against Valbonë argument is officially unresolved. Hug everyone. Some of them you will see again sooner than you think.