Lake Koman is a limestone canyon in northern Albania, between Shkodër and Kukës, drowned by a dam on the Drin river in 1985, and it is crossed by a working village ferry that runs three hours through walls no road follows, between green water and cliffs of a thousand metres, on a route that is not a cruise but the road the villages do not have. The lake exists to feed a power station, four turbines in a hall hollowed out inside the mountain at the dam, and the ferries that carry the people of the Drin valley to the town of Fierzë carry travellers with them, on the way to the Valbona valley and the Accursed Mountains beyond; the boat leaves Koman in the morning through a tunnel to the dock, and the canyon closes in almost at once, the water the green of the limestone dissolved in it, the walls rising sheer, and the channel turning so tightly that the way ahead seems shut until the boat rounds the corner. Stone houses show up high above the water on the slopes, singly or in twos, some reached only by boat, and the ferry stops at their landings for a woman with a goat or a man with a sack of flour.
A side channel with no road to it, the Shala arm, leads to shallow water so clear the gravel bed shows through, backed by cliffs, and a few families there put up visitors in summer for the swimming. In spring the snow coming off the Albanian Alps drives the Drin, and the porous limestone leaks it back out in thin waterfalls down the canyon walls, mostly dry by high summer. Archaeologists opened graves beside the Dalmace hillfort near Koman in 1898 and found the jewellery and weapons of an early medieval people they named the Koman culture, the link between the Illyrians and the Albanians. Lake Koman is a road made of water, and the ferry is how the valley gets home.