In 2022 I spent a few days in Elbasan, driving out to places around it with a camera. One of them was Funar, about twenty kilometres north, up in forested highland with lakes sitting in steps down the hillside. They call it the little Switzerland of central Albania.
You climb the entire way there. The road is good, properly surfaced, but it’s steep enough that I couldn’t picture doing it in winter. The ground either side is all rock, and partway up there’s a tunnel with no lighting in it at all. The asphalt inside was new when I drove through. They’d done it recently, I was told, because they want people to come to Funar.
A paragliding runway had just been built up there and I wanted footage of it. Everything I know about off-roading in Albania comes from that one afternoon, and I wasn’t planning on doing any of it.
At a glance
I drove a Peugeot 307 station wagon over an hour up a mountain track above Funar, alone, in first gear the whole way, with no recovery gear and no second car. On the way back down I gave a lift to a man walking home from work. He’s a teacher. He walks that route every day.
Table of Contents
The Road That Wasn’t the Road
I didn’t set out to go off-road. The road just stopped being a road at some point and I kept going. Things started catching on the underside of the car. I was in a station wagon, not an SUV, not anything with clearance, and I was moving at walking pace picking lines between rocks.
Then a man came down the track towards me with his dogs. A hunter, as far as I could tell. He spoke Albanian and I don’t, so what passed between us was mostly gesture and guessing. I asked how the road was further up. What I understood from the answer was that he didn’t know how I’d got as far as I had, and that I needed to go back.
I kept going. I wanted to see how far I could get, and I thought it was the way to the paragliding spot.
It wasn’t the way. That whole section, the worst driving of the day, the part where I ignored a local telling me to turn around, was the wrong road entirely. I didn’t need to be on it at all. I turned around eventually, came back down, and found the actual route: across the bank of land that runs between two of the lakes, then up from there.
The lakes look like somebody built them. I asked about that while I was there and was told they’re natural, and I wasn’t going to argue with people who live in the place. Reading about it since, it seems they were made from 1967 onwards, which is what my eyes thought in the first place.
An Hour in First Gear
From the lakes it’s over an hour of climbing, and I spent all of it in first gear with my foot working the clutch.
I had M+S tyres on the car, mud and snow, technically a winter tyre, and they probably did more for me that day than anything else. I let a bit of air out of them but not much. I was worried about pulling a tyre off the rim and then being a man with a flat on a mountain with no second car.
That was the whole calculation, really. A flat I could deal with. Anything worse than a flat and the plan was to leave the car where it stopped and start walking back towards civilization.
I got to the top, parked, and ate lunch, because an hour of clutch work is an hour of clutch work. The spot itself sits on a ridge line and looks like any paragliding spot on any mountain. If I’m honest it didn’t look ideal to me, but nobody asked and I’m not the one who decides where these things go. I got what I came for. It was midweek and there was nobody else up there at all, no paragliders, nobody out for a picnic.
Then I put the drone up. That was the first time I actually saw where I was. For the whole climb I’d been looking three metres ahead at the next rock, and it hadn’t registered how far up the mountain I’d come or how long the track behind me was. The experience comes first and the vehicle is just what got you there, but it’s a strange thing to only understand your own afternoon once there’s a camera above it.
There were sheep up there, and horses. And when I looked down from the high point before getting back in the car, there was a man on the track below me, walking down.
Going Down Was Worse
Everybody who does this will tell you the same thing and it’s still surprising every time.
Going down was slower than going up. Properly slow, slower than walking in places, with my brakes squealing the entire way. You can hear it on the videos I took with my GoPro. I kept thinking the same sentence over and over, which was: how did this car get up here.
That’s also when it landed as one of the dumbest things I’ve done. Not because of the risk of hurting myself, the speeds were far too low for that. Because if the car had broken somewhere up there, properly broken, I would have walked away from it and that would have been the end of the car. Nobody is driving a recovery truck up that.
What it actually cost me was one knock on the oil pan and a slow weep of oil afterwards. Nothing serious.
Somebody Else Was Up There
I caught up with the man from the high point partway down. We were going the same direction, so I stopped and asked if he wanted a ride.
He got in. He spoke Albanian and Italian, having lived in Italy for a while, and I speak neither, so the conversation was slow and full of gaps. We worked it out between us over the next hour of crawling downhill. He was going home. He lives in Elbasan.
Three to five kilometres further up the mountain than I had been, past the paragliding spot, there’s a small village. It has a school. Five children go to it, all different ages, all taught together in one class, because there are only five of them. There’s no road up there. The track I had just spent an hour driving is how you reach it.
He’s the teacher. He gets a small van from Elbasan to Funar, leaves it by the lake, and walks the rest. Up in the morning, down in the afternoon, every day, for years. It doesn’t matter what the weather is doing. He was in a shirt and jeans with a laptop bag over his shoulder, the same as any teacher at any school.
Partway down he asked me to keep driving until we had signal, because there’s none up there at all. When his phone came back he called the van driver to say he wouldn’t need the van, so the man wouldn’t sit waiting and assume something had happened to him. We had a coffee in Elbasan.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you go off-roading in Albania?
Yes, and a lot of the mountain roads turn into off-road tracks whether you intend it or not. Surfacing stops without warning and there’s often no sign that it’s about to. Around Funar, north of Elbasan, the route to the paragliding area is a rough climb of over an hour from the lakes. There’s no formal permit system, but there’s also no recovery service, so anything that goes wrong is yours to solve.
What is Funar, Albania?
A forested highland area roughly twenty kilometres north of Elbasan, ringed by seven mountains and known for its lakes, which sit in steps down the hillside with a strip of land between two of them that you can drive across. It’s sometimes called the little Switzerland of central Albania. A paragliding runway was built there in 2022, and it’s increasingly used for hiking, kayaking and mountain biking.
Do you need a 4×4 for the Albanian mountains?
It would be the sensible choice. I did it in a front-wheel-drive Peugeot 307 station wagon on mud and snow tyres, in first gear, very slowly, and the car made it up and back with one knock to the oil pan. That says more about going slowly and picking lines than it does about the car. If you’re going alone with no recovery gear, the vehicle matters less than your willingness to turn around.
Are there villages in the mountains above Funar?
Yes. There’s a small village several kilometres above the paragliding area with a school in it, attended by five children of different ages who are taught together in one class. There’s no road to it.
I told everyone about this when I got back, and I still tell it. I’ve done the same kind of thing a few times since, in other places, and I’d do this one again.
The car is old enough now that the time for being precious about it has gone. Branches scratch it, and that’s fine, because a scratch comes with a story attached. I’m still careful with it. I’d rather have an SUV and I’ll get one eventually, and until then this is what I’ve got and it keeps going where I point it.
Filip Petreski is the founder of AFIELD and a multi-sport outdoor athlete. A two-time national cross-country MTB champion, snowboard instructor, and former dirt bike rider, he writes about the people, gear, and culture worth paying attention to in the outdoor world.