Another Long Walk: Day 4: The Dolls are Watching....

May 7, 2025: According to the weather forecast, it was supposed to rain all night. However, it did not rain at all--until I woke up in the morning and wanted to start hiking for the day. Looking at the current forecast, however, it appeared that the rain would pass quickly, so I decided to try waiting it out before pushing onward.

And... I was successful! After an hour or two, the rain stopped, and I started packing up camp. While doing so, two northbound hikers came up the valley. Other hikers! Wow! These were the first hikers I had seen on the entire trail! One of them came from the UK while the other one was from Belgium, and we chatted for a few minutes.

The trail would head to the bottom of this steep valley before climbing up the other side. (Not all the way to the tops of those mountains in the distance, though. Not that high!)

They reported passing a few other hikers along the route--which was news. But since I was hiking in the same direction as those other hikers, I just hadn't crossed paths with them. Most people hike the trail from north to south (southbound), but apparently if you want to see other hikers, it's better to go northbound! Although you'll just pass by them and not actually see them for very long.

Anyhow, the hikers continued onward and I finished packing up camp and headed immediately down a steep, rocky slope. The going was slow, and due to the recent rain and the sun coming out, the humidity was unbearable. Steam rose from the trail like it was being baked, and it felt miserably hot. At least I was going downhill which didn't take so much energy as going uphill!

After a few miles, I finally reached the bottom of the valley but as all things go, what goes down must go back up, and I was now heading uphill again to the small hamlet of Kudhës.I took a short break at the bottom by the river running through the bottom of the valley and it started to sprinkle a bit. Nothing serious, and it didn't last long, and while getting wet wasn't pleasant, at least the temperature felt a bit more bearable when the clouds blocked the sun.

Even that didn't last long, however, since the rain stopped and the sun came out again.

I crossed the creek at the bottom of the valley over this bridge.

The climb up to Kudhës followed a narrow, windy road that was super steep and utterly exhausting to get up. It wound its way through an olive grove, and at one point there was a flock of sheep ahead guarded by several "angry dogs." After yesterday, that's what I started calling them. They were definitely none-to-happy to see me.

However, looking at the map ahead, the road switch-backed numerous times through the area and I suggested to Karolina that we could basically cut a switchback to largely avoid the flock and angry dogs, and that's what we did. I had to check my GPS to make sure that the road would still switchback so we could get back on the trail quickly, but it all checked out so we cut off the road, through the olive grove and directly up the hillside before reconnecting with the road several minutes later. The angry dogs were still close enough to see ne trying to sneak by and barked and howled at me with anger, but they didn't seem to want to leave their flock behind to chase me so I got by without having to throw any rocks, wave trekking poles or shout at them. One of the easier places where I got around the angry dogs.

At the edge of town, I reached a small church with a few graves that had a water spigot running out front. The spigot itself didn't seem to work. Water flowed out of it and jiggling the handle didn't make it flow faster or better, but it also didn't turn off the flow either. In any case, it didn't matter to me--it looked like good, clear water and perfectly suitable for drinking and I definitely needed to fill up with more drinking water.

I was not sure where the source of the water was, however. Did it come out of a spring? Was it piped down from higher up in the city? I had no idea, nor had I any idea if the water was treated, so I pulled out my Sawyer Squeeze and used that to treat water for us.

A giant pig with a family of piglets passed by, seemingly not really caring about my presence.

I filled up with water from the facet at this church/cemetery.

I continued into Kudhës. Kudhës is a relatively small town, but it's long, built along a steep ridge of a hill. The one road I followed was basically the main road through town that the whole town was built around, and it was steep from top to bottom.

One thing I had started to notice was that many of the buildings had stuffed animals or dolls hanging off them. I first noticed it yesterday and thought it was just something that that one person had done, but then I saw another one. And another one... and I slowly started realizing that it was a "thing" that some people did here. I theorized it was probably supposed to ward off evil or bring good luck (kind opposite sides of the same coin, really), but they had often been hanging there for months or perhaps years and usually had a haunted look. It didn't help that they often seemed to be strung up by their necks or impaled in their bums with rebar. These did not look like happy toys!

Definitely not a happy toy!

Later, Karolina would message her Albanian friend whose wedding we had attended to ask about those, and she confirmed my suspicions that it was meant to ward off the "evil eye" and bring good fortune, and that elderly and superstitious people were more likely to do that--especially on newly constructed or purchased properties.

There's not much to say about Kudhës except note it's unusually steep, linear layout on the crest of a ridge. This town marked the end of another stage in the guide, so I stopped long enough to check the maps for the next stage and figure out where I might be able to stop for the night.

This is the town of Kudhës. Notice how long and narrow it is, sprawled out over a steep ridgeline.

Another view of Kudhës, but this time from the other side. (The previous photo was taken from the other side of the valley, while I was still descending to the bottom of the valley. This one was taken on the way out of the city.)

About halfway through the stage was a small town of Old Qeparo, which was roughly my minimum goal for the day to stay on schedule. On the maps, just before the town, it looked like there might be some decent places to stealth camp, but I wanted to go into town in the hopes of scoring a cold drink. After the town, the opportunities for stealth camping were less clear. To be fair, the maps were never designed to point out good places to camp. They were meant to provide directions, not point out campsites. But you can read a map and see if there might be nearby roads or civilization that would make stealth camping more difficult, or if there are trees and bushes around to stay better hidden, and see where terrain was flat and therefore more suitable for camping. But none of those factors were guarantees about finding a good campsite just by looking at the maps.

In any case, I decided that I had time for a longer break. On the maps, it looked like there might be a shady area not far out of town near a dry streambed which might make a good place for a break, so that's what I did.

And it was a perfectly lovely place to stop for a break for an hour or two. =)

A dry streambed. (This is not the dry streambed where I took a break, though!)

After a lengthy rest, I pushed onward toward Old Qeparo, noting an abundance of very nice stealth camping sites along the way. The section between Kudhës and Old Qeparo had so many amazing campsites! I took note of them, especially as I got close to Old Qeparo and considered the idea of going into town for a cold drink and backtracking ten minutes to a stealth campsite out of town.

The town itself was slightly off trail according to my sources, but the trail markers actually did lead through the town itself. I wasn't sure if that was because the route was officially rerouted through town or if every hiker stopped in town anyhow that they may as well mark the trail that way. In any case, I descended a steep hillside off the main trail into a short side trail into town and made my way to what I first thought was a restaurant with an outdoor patio but turned out to be a small market with an outdoor patio.

Overlooking the town of Old Qeparo. There are cold drinks down there somewhere!

Either way, however, there were cold drinks available and a shady place to sit outside, and I took the opportunity to do so. I got a Coke, and after finishing up, I went back for seconds this time I got a Fanta.

While resting on the patio, a couple of the cattle in town decided to get a little frisky between two cars, making a racket that sounded like it might be denting the cars until a woman from the market went over and shooshed the cattle away. She looked at the vehicles as if checking for damage before returning to the market. Another exciting day in Old Qeparo.

Looking at my options, I didn't feel like backtracking to the last nice campsite. Backtracking just felt wrong, even if it wasn't more than about 10 minutes or so. And now with a visual line of site ahead, I felt confident that I could find a good place to camp on the far side of town further down the trail. There were fields of olive trees ahead (which the guidebook suggested were actually abandoned and no longer farmed), and I had noticed that even when olive trees were planted on steep hillsides, that the ground had been terraformed into flat terraces that the olive trees were planted in and surely I could camp on one of those flat areas, even if it was on a steep hillside.

So I pushed onward, walking perhaps a quarter-mile out of town before following a gravel road into an old olive grove and finding a wonderful place to camp with commanding views of the Mediterranean Sea and overlooking Old Qeparo. Sunset wasn't for a few hours, however, so I suggested that we not actually set up camp just yet. Let's not look like we were camping there just in case somebody wandered by, but rather try to look like we were just taking a nice, lovely break.

I pulled out my groundsheet to lay on, then spent the next few hours reading my Kindle and finishing the latest saga of Jack Reacher kicking butt. By sunset, not a single person had wandered by and we finally set up camp.

And thus ended day four on the trail.....