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Tuesday, July 31, Thethi Valley, Albania
An easier
day, a leisurely day, a rainy evening.
We left the
guesthouse around 8am as usual and descended a few hundred meters to the
village below. The weather was cool, the scenery was scenic; mountains to the
left of us, mountains to the right of us, mountains all around us. We found the
local waterfall:
The water
was too cold for me. The best I could do was to enter up to my ankles, but
Francesco was more thick-skinned:
Tomorrow is
our last day and it will be spent driving back to Tirana.
“Johnny”,
Francesco’s dad was our most voluble and enthusiastic member despite the fact
that he is 72 years old. If we met other travelers, as we repeatedly did today,
it was Johnny who quickly found openings for rapid-fire, animated
conversations. It helped that he spoke respectable amounts of several
languages, his native Italian, Albanian, French, German, English, and Arabic.
There were probably others that he didn’t get to use here.
It is from
Johnny that I learned three lessons:j
1.
Don’t give up on learning the local language. A
little grasp of the tongue gives you opportunities to communicate (and thus
rapidly increase your fluency with that same language). Because I spend so
little time in any one nation I give up on the idea of trying to use at least
some of the simplest words.
2.
Every year I ask myself if I’m too old to keep
doing this traveling thing—or at least too old to do the athletic things. But
Johnny showed me that you can still bound over rocks and climb steep pathways
in your 70’s.
3.
I need to get back into the gym and do at least
some minimal exercise every week so that I can remain active in the summers.
Johnny hikes in the Italian Alps every Sunday.
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| Francesco in the waterfall |
It’s amazing how far away Oakland
seems from here. By here I don’t only mean an isolated valley in NE Albania; I
also mean five weeks into the summer. I hardly feel as if that other part of my
life exists.
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