The reason I made the trip to Shkodër was to take a ferry across Komani Lake from Komani to Fierzë. The problem when doing this trip is that there is no reliable information about the busses to and from the ferry and the ferry itself. The 2 hour ferry ride is supposed to be one of the most amazing things you can do in Albania as the long narrow lake snakes through the giant canyons and gorges of the Albnian alps.
With no certainty of the ferry running and no confirmed way to return to Shkodër I boarded a 6.30am bus headed for the port at Komani with two Swiss girls and a dude from Taiwan who also wanted to make the trip. The 2 hour bus ride through the pothole filled mountain road was really interesting. We stopped every now and then to collect groups of school kids and then drop them off at their schools along the way. All of the kids that got on were of course mesmerised by my dreadlocks and bundled us up to practice their english and ask questions.
When we arrived near the port the bus driver pulled us off the bus and piled the four of us into a fuel truck which took us the rest of the way to the ferry. We weren’t really sure what was going on most of the time but just trusted that we would eventually end up on this mysterious ferry.
About 10 minutes later we arrived and boarded the ferry. It was more of a barge that had been converted into small a passenger ferry. They had actually just cut the top off of a school bus and stuck it on top of the barge, and converted a part of a shipping container into a makeshift toilet on the back. We watched locals pile their supplies onto the ferry before heading off down the canyons.
Their were about 20 people on the Ferry and I started talking to Nickoli who was a high school student with perfect english. His parents owned a BnB in a nearby village so he had learnt English by talking to the guests there. He explained he was heading into the mountains to help out his uncle harvest a “herb”. The ferry kept making stops along the river at small embankments and paths which were barely noticeable to the untrained eye. People would randomly jump on and off the ferry and make their way up the cliffsides and toward houses hidden in the forests.
The ferry ride took roughly 2 hours and wound through some amazing canyons, the views were spectacular. Once we reached the “port” at Fierzë (just a slab of mud and concrete with rusted boat shells floating around) we were piled in a van and driven to the nearby village of Bajram Curri where we were told we would be able to find a bus back to Shkodër. However once we arrived it became apparent that this wasn’t true. The only way to get back to the Shkodër was either to stay the night and catch the ferry back in the morning (there is only one each day going in each direction) or go all the way back to Tirana and then take another bus to Shkodër which would total another 7 hours on busses.
Because I had all my gear with me I decided to just head back to Tirana, however my Taiwanese buddy had to return to Shkodër to pick up his bags and bike. The only problem for him was that the bus passed through Kosovo which he didn’t have a visa for. Luckily the border guards were really relaxed and let him sneak though.
This trip was really worth the effort. The only suggestion I would make would be to split it over two days and maybe spend the night in Bajram Curri in one of the hotels. When in Bajram Curri expect to be stared because this place doesn’t receive many outside tourists at all…
