Albanian explorations 2023🇦🇱
- matt phillips
- Jan 23
- 3 min read
The Vjosa River
October 2023 saw myself and five other British whitewater stand-up paddleboarders heading to the former soviet state of Albania. This wasn’t a country I’d ever really considered visiting before, but once it was suggested I was immediately on board. We were there to take on the Vjosa River.
The Vjosa starts high in the mountains of Greece and winds its way across Albania and eventually ends in the Adriatic Sea. It’s one of the last truly wild rivers in Europe, because it has never been dammed.
For the first two days, the river was a beautiful glacial blue colour, we passed through stunning canyons and down grade 2 with some grade 3 rapids thrown in to keep things interesting. The water was warm and inviting, we had no issue finding surf spots and places to jump or spin the boards over.
Then the rain came.
Heavy rain overnight completely transformed the river. The clear blue turned to thick brown water, this murky water was harder to read and we had a lot more fin clips. Whilst paddling through a rock garden I clipped my fin and flew off the board head first but I saved the beer I was drinking at the time!
The Vjosa winds its way through some incredible scenery, but also through towns that feel frozen in time. Run-down Soviet-era concrete buildings sit alongside a countryside where tourism hasn’t really arrived yet. In the rural areas, people still live very traditionally, herding goats and turkeys, going about daily life largely unchanged for decades.
For the first few days, we worked from a base camp, heading out each day to explore different sections of the river. After that, we committed to a three-day bivvy expedition. We started the trip in lashing rain and a cold wind, whilst waiting for the cars to do the shuttle we lit a fire on the riverside to try and keep warm while looking up into the Greek mountains. Once we started the weather behaved itself, we had blue skies and calm days but the night-time temperatures were cold. It got far colder than any of us were expecting.
We were travelling very light. No tarp. No roll mat. Just cook pots, sleeping bags, safety gear and, in my case, a mug and tea bags. Two things I very rarely travel anywhere without!
Our camps were right on the riverbank, each night we lit a fire and cooked dinner before laying round it in our sleeping bags. In the morning we rekindled the fire and got the pots on for a morning brew and cooked sausages on a stick.
Before the bivvy expedition had begun we had to get supplies from a small remote town. We were standing in a butcher shop, He spoke no English. We spoke no Albanian. Communication consisted entirely of pointing at various anonymous lumps of meat and making increasingly questionable animal noises: “moo”, “baaa”, “oink”. it worked! We left with half a goat!
This goat fed us for most of the week in the form of different variations of goat stew.
One of our get-out points sat beneath a suspicious suspension bridge. The river was in a deep valley. We carried a couple of boards up the steep sides but decided to get creative with the others. We dangled a rope down from the bridge, clip the board on, and haul it vertically up to the road.
Getting around Albania was an adventure in itself. My bus journey across the country took several hours longer than planned, largely because the bus refused to leave until it had enough passengers to make the trip worthwhile. The online timetable didn’t match the printed timetable at the bus station, and neither of those matched whatever the driver felt like doing that day.
Every day we spent on the Vjosa felt like a proper expedition. Albania surprised me in the best possible way, the river, the landscape, the people, this is a country that hasn’t yet been smoothed out for visitors. It’s not a place I’d ever planned to go, but it’s a place I’ll remember for a long time.
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