Dear Conchlers,

13 ago, when I visited first Albania the main road between Shkoder and
Tirana was an extremly bad quality "footpath" or road(?) with very few cars
but with very big holes on the road and without benzin station.Now you can
go on a highway.
But in the mountains today you can go only on foot and can't use your Land
Rover (if you have). íthe main reason: there is no road.If you want to find
and collect news and some endemic species you must use for legs in the next
decades.
An example : There is a new border office between Albania and Montenegro but
if the river has a highwater you can't use this point to climb the
mountains.Must go back + 100 km in the Montenegrian mountains.
I have been in Hawaii but I think not Hawaii is a remote place, but Kosovo,
FYROM and Albania.
I agree with Guido: the most important thing is the emotion, I will never
forget my first collection trip in the much closer Transsylvania 30 years
ago, when a heard a bear behind a big rock but on this rock living a lot of
Alopia snail. I chosen the collecting, but the situation was frightful...

regards,  Zoltán the Clausiliidae lover

Zoltan Peter Erőss,1151 Budapest, Bem street 36. HUNGARY


>From: Guido Poppe <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Conchologists List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Remote places
>Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2006 00:34:42 +0800
>
>Indeed nice the read all these adventures.
>
>One of the great things in shell collecting IS to go to remote
>places. REMOTE is also in our head. I remember great days as a young
>man in the Belgian Ardennes - nothing "remote" but if you walk 10
>kilometers i a forest, plant your small tent near a lake and stay
>there for two days, one does feel as very remote from everywhere. And
>the Clausilia rolphi I found gave me about the same emotions diving
>later Conus granulatus in the Tobago Keys.
>
>Another funny thing is that remote places from yesterday are the busy
>ones of today.
>
>An example: in 1982 I was on Boavista, Cape Verde Islands.  This was
>an adventure at that time, I was the only not-African there for two
>weeks, could hardly find any food except lobsters and the fish I
>shot. Water was the major problem. Even being young and slender, I
>lost 8 kilograms over a 25 day period in the Archipelago. (The Dutch
>man visiting this Island broke his leg there and got infected - he
>died in days).
>
>All the malacological explorers visiting these Islands in the late
>seventies and beginning eighties got memorable times.
>
>But two years ago I went back to Boavista: guess what. I stayed there
>in a 4 star hotel and rented a car !    (there were only 6 cars on
>the Island in 1982).
>
>It was great to visit my old diving buddies still living there today
>- they didn't forget me, so seldom they got a visit from Europe in
>1982.   We went diving again together in Gatas Bay. It took us one
>hour to get there, instead of a whole day in 1982.
>
>Guido
>
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