July 31, 2012
A journey in hell, part 2: Mreg - Hani Hotit (Montenegro)
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WE HAVE NEVER needed to be rescued on a touring trip. Today we did. And we have no shame in saying so. It was truly a dreadful day. What seemed hard yesterday was nothing.
Of course, you will reasonably ask what we were doing on this road anyway. The answer is that it is on a cycling map we bought in Belgium as a bike route. And Parisians with whom we have become friends, touring the same road in a rugged camping car, have a conventional map of Albania and there, too, it is shown as a perfectly good highway.
And on this perfectly good highway we were rescued by an Italian who, with his Albanian driver, drove us to the top. Even their van bumped and rolled and struggled on the bare stone.
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"We'd have been up there all afternoon and maybe all night otherwise" was Steph's assessment. And she was right. Except that my guess is that we would have slept beside the road on the mountain and then struggled on again, forceless, at dawn.
Today we skidded and slipped so much that I have torn the rubber blocks off the sole of my left touring shoe, the one most ground into the loose stone. My cleats have become sharpened to a point by rocks. After a long descent and then four hours of struggling in the heat on the shelterless and ever-rising road, I all but collapsed on a heap of scree. And it was there that Davide, an Italian working for a charity organisation, saw us.
"Are you all right?" he called from his white van. "I have water and I have fruit. You want some?"
Davide Caliando was dark eyed, olive skinned, with bright eyes. His driver was older and paler. I heard Steph explain the situation. She asked tentatively if Davide, a man of about 25, would turn round and take us to the top. Without hesitation, he agreed. For two and a half years he has worked in northern Albania for VIUS, an aid organisation.
"We work on community development," he said, apologising for his occasional lapses in English, saying that his brain searches for words in Albanian rather than English. "We ask the people what they want and need and we try to provide it. Of course they want many more things than we can provide but we have built a hospital here, and a bridge, and we are helping bring them work by expanding tourism by finding trekking routes. And we have started a micro-credit scheme, that sort of thing. And we are working on improving this road to connect the valley to the rest of Albania, but it is very hard work because they have to cut into walls of pure rock.
"It is a three-year project and we have been here two and a half years. We want to stay longer but we are funded by the Italian government and things are not good at the moment.
We couldn't have been more grateful when he dropped us off on a windy plateau where the road, dusty now rather than rocky, pushed through a long scruffy village without a centre. We asked for Davide's card and promised to send money to his organisation.
"Not for this, though," he said, meaning the lift up the mountain. "This is just..." He meant it was just help from one human being to two others. No man was more born to do the job he does. The Albanian driver turned the van and drove off the way they had come. We waved, they waved and our saviour vanished from sight.
It seems mean now to complain about the descent. But that too was awfully hard, although down rather than up. At times we walked because the bikes would no longer stay upright on the rocks or the scree. Yesterday we both fell twice. Today we were taking no chances.
We got to the bottom and crossed into Montenegro. We camped at the first field on the right, where the landowner found us and far from shooing us away invited us home for coffee. We were grateful but too exhausted to accept.
We were asleep by seven o'clock. It had taken us nine and a half hours to ride 36 kilometres, half of that downhill.
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