WALK on the WILD SIDE With a diverse range of geographic, historic and cultural features along the way, the Peaks of the Balkans trail winds through breathtaking Montenegrin scenery to offer one of the most unspoiled hiking routes in Europe, says rudolf abraham
I FIRST VISITED SOME OF THE TRACKS and paths which would later become part of the Peaks of the Balkans trail, in the remote northeast corner of Montenegro, back in 2004. I remember the Ropojana valley as a hauntingly beautiful place, silent and still, with fingers of low cloud clinging to the surrounding crags and obscuring what would otherwise have been a breathtaking view of saw-toothed ridges and jagged limestone peaks. We followed a 4x4 track along the valley floor, then hiked up through the trees on a forest path to emerge on a grassy saddle above an elongated, slate-grey lake, somewhere on the far side of which lay the unmarked border with Albania. The continuation of this path, I knew, led over a high pass to the Theth valley in Albania, but the border
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here was closed to trekkers and required a great deal of paperwork to negotiate. Once upon a time (in 1900, to be exact), the intrepid British traveller Edith Durham rode over this way from Theth village, journeying in disguise to avoid detection as this corner of the Balkans was still an outpost of the Ottoman Empire. She described the nearby village of Gusinje as ‘the Lhasa of Europe’ in the book High Albania, her account of her journey. How nice it would be, I thought, if this route was one day opened up to hikers… Fast forward a dozen years to 2016, and I was back in the Ropojana, writing the first English-language guidebook to the Peaks of the Balkans trail, which was published in 2017 by
THE 200KM PATH CROSSES RUGGED, WILD AND STILL WONDERFULLY REMOTE REGIONS
Cicerone. The valley really hadn’t changed that much in the intervening years, I found. The only real differences were that I no longer needed to go and apply for a hiking permit at the police station in nearby Gusinje, and that, this time, the lake at the head of the valley had disappeared. (The lake owes its fickle nature to the fact that it’s fed only by snowmelt, with the water then gradually draining away through karst drainage holes.) The Peaks of the Balkans is a long-distance, cross-border hiking trail, stretching for just under 200km through the rugged, wild and still wonderfully remote borderlands of Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo. The route takes in some staggeringly beautiful mountain scenery, from peaceful valleys to lush pastures, glittering lakes, rocky passes, stupendous cliffs and national parks. It also passes through unspoiled villages, some of which seem to have been forgotten by time, and where food and accommodation are provided by a handful of traditional village homestays. It takes around 10 days to walk the whole thing, or you can dip into parts of the route and, in a couple of places, create shorter circuits. There are some excellent local tour operators offering knowledgeable local guides, as well as baggage transfers for those who don’t fancy carrying their own pack. There’s plenty of cultural interest on the trail, too, from stone tower houses or kula (the best of these are in Theth and Plav) to diminutive village churches, mosques, and, on the Albanian part of the route, a handful of small concrete bunkers. These are some of the half a million built by Enver Hoxha across Albania between the 1960s and 1980s, now long abandoned and slowly being subsumed by the surrounding landscape. With a couple of exceptions in Kosovo, where route-finding can be more of a challenge, most of the trail is well marked, using existing paths and 4x4 tracks that are not technically difficult. However, anyone setting off on the Peaks of the Balkans needs to be aware that these mountains are remote and subject to notoriously fickle weather changes – hikers need to be suitably kitted out with decent walking boots, and warm and waterproof clothing, even on short trails, and even in the summer. One other thing every hiker will need on the Peaks of the Balkans (at least, if they’re doing a chunk of it which crosses a border) is a cross-border permit. These are issued as a
