While I was standing in 40 degree shade (104 F), eating rose-water and pistachio baklava in a small town on the Albanian coast during August, I thought of you.
I did, honestly.
OK, a significant part of my conscious mind was on the fig ice-cream to follow, but I can multi-task.
I thought of you because I was making a pilgrimage, of sorts, and I remembered that I’d meant to tell you about J. F. Penn’s 2022 book, Pilgrimage, in case you hadn’t already heard of it. It’s a simple book that draws you in. It takes St. Augustine’s maxim, solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking) as its theme.
It is not a book about faith, but about choosing to be alone for a few days, to walk long distances, to cope with discomfort, and to allow one’s thoughts to stir up and to settle in the rhythm of walking.
Technically, in book-speak, it’s a combination of Memoir, How-to, and guide book.
It elevates the soul.
It was a bit odd that I remembered I wanted to tell you about it while most of my mind was on food.
And I wasn’t walking, nor was I alone. I was travelling with my husband and younger daughter.
We were about to travel for a couple of hours by a dilapidated old car.
But I was on my own pilgrimage.
How did I come to be there?
A lifetime ago, in 1985, I was browsing and found a book called Albania: A travel guide, by Philip Ward.
You know when a book calls – shouts – out to you? This one did.
I took it home and read it. And read it again, and again.
I was curious about the paranoid society created by Comrade Enver Hoxha. It was possible to visit Albania in the eighties, but very hard, and only if you joined a tour arranged by the authorities. I travelled to Albania through that book. For me, Albania became a place of the imagination, fairy-land: Grimm, not Disney.
The years went by and the world changed. Even Albania opened up a bit. I wanted to see the hidden parts of ancient Greece and Rome that lay along its shores, mostly unexcavated. But I never actually entered it. I’ve travelled around Albania’s land borders in all the neighbouring countries, and I’ve stared at its mountains from 30,000 feet in planes, but that was it.
To put this into perspective, this was a country that until a couple of decades ago had only one point of entry and required you to walk through a trough filled with disinfectant before you were allowed in.
Albanian customs point in Hellenistic times?
39 years later
This summer, our family joined up in Corfu and I found myself staring across the straits at the rose-pink mountains of Albania, barely three miles from my nose.
Local wisdom encouraged us to wait until the weather was cooler later in the year, or to return in spring to see the wild flowers along the shores of Lake Bütrint.
I’d waited 39 years and it would have been tempting Fate to put the chance off any longer. We crossed by ferry to Sarandë and made the journey to Bütrint, first settled in neolithic times, beautified by the Greeks and valued by the Romans as a comfortable home-from-home on journeys east.
It was exquisite. Albania was still wild, although in different ways to those of Comrade Hoxha’s time.
What I am saying is:
Hold those dreams tight and seize the chance to make them real when you can.
