Peaks of the Balkans

: I’d first heard of the Peaks of the Balkans route about three or four years before I ended up doing it in the summer of 2022. Since I’d just done a group hike in the Cordillera Huayhaush range of Peru a few months beforehand, I wasn’t really in the mood to join another group to do this hike. At the same time, I was too busy with work to deal with figuring out the logistics of getting to and from the trail, where I’m gonna sleep as well as the question of how I was gonna get the international border permits needed to cross back and forth between Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro throughout the hike. While doing a little research, I found out that this Albania-based company called Zbulo! organizes what’s called a “self-guided tour.” You of course still gotta figure out your international flights, but beyond that they handle everything else. You tell them when you’ll be arriving, how many days you wanna hike and they’ll propose an itinerary based on that. It sounded really cool, but the only problem with Zbulo! was that they ended up telling me that they don’t arrange self-guided tours for solo hikers. They said the trail is too dangerous to do without a hiking buddy and for legal reasons, they couldn’t do it. So, I asked around seeing if I could find someone to accompany me and no one I know was down to come and do this hike with me. So then at that point, I almost just said “fuck it” and started looking for a different hike I could go do somewhere else. But then I decided to do a little more research and found the Kosovo-based Balkan Natural Adventure who also offers self-guided tours. Unlike Zbulo!, they had no problem arranging an itinerary for a solo traveler. So, for something like a thousand Euros, they handled my transfer from the airport in Tirana to the trail up in the Accursed Mountains, all my food and accommodation for the entirety of the 10-day hike, my border permits and all the GPX files necessary to navigate my way from one place to another along the trail. Shown here is the official Peaks of the Balkans route which I didn’t follow to a T. I ended up doing a modified “best of” route that’d been proposed to me by Balkan Natural Adventure

: Covid testing center outside the airport in Tirana, the capital of Albania. So uhhhh…”tampon” is Albanian for what word? They’re using feminine hygiene products to swab for covid here or what? I don’t get it

: A driver hired by Balkan Natural Adventure picked me up from the airport and we immediately began the 2-3 hour drive from Tirana north up to Shkodra

: Painting on the wall somewhere in Tirana

: Summer sun dippin low

: A hilltop castle along the way. Pretty sure “shqiponja” is Albanian for “eagle” and references the double-headed eagle on the country’s flag

: A skinny peepee with big balls on a wall somewhere in Shkodra

: Bird-bearing bicyclist in Shkodra

: Kastrati is the name of a historical Albanian tribe as well as a region in northwestern Albania. From what I gather, it also seems to be one of the most popular brands of petrol in Albania. To me, the name sounds a bit like “castrated,” which is very appropriate because that’s probably how most people feel after filling up their tank with gas prices as outrageously high as they are right now everywhere in the world

: The national currency of Albania – the lek. As of writing this 1USD = 114 lek

: The following morning, a different driver came to pick me up from my guesthouse in Shkodra to take me to the village of Theth from where I’d be starting my hike. Sure, it was only ten in the morning, but my driver thought it an excellent time to stop off for a beer

: Somewhere along the line between Shkodra and Theth had been this prison that had a bunch of stupid motivational quotes written in English and supposedly directed at the prisoners it contained even though they obviously can’t see it from inside. This one says “Stay strong. You’re one day closer”

: “Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow”

: “Just because some people make bad choices doesn’t mean they are bad people”

: Big load

: Traffic jam

: Starting to get high up into the mountains

: Not too reassuring how the guard rail was broken down on many parts of this road that had nothing but a big drop on the other side

: My driver didn’t speak English but, upon arrival to Theth, used the translator on his phone to ask me if I was happy with the ride he gave me. Errr…I think that that’s what he was trying to say

: Path leading out of Theth towards this natural pool of freezing-ass water called Blue Eye

: Get stoned

: Albania’s population is about 60% Muslim and 17% Christian. Theth is actually a Roman Catholic village and perhaps this “Jesus loves you” spraypainted on a rock just outside town is a reflection of that

: Around Theth

: Grunas Waterfall as seen on the way to Blue Eye

: It was like 90 degrees that day and a bunch of people were splashing around in the water there

: This was the best lunch I had on the whole trip. Fresh trout, fresh salad and all the bread and olive oil I could eat

: That building on the bottom right of the photo is the restaurant where I ate the lunch in the photo previous. I was sitting out on a balcony and a bunch of people were down there swimming in the cool, refreshing turquoise water below

: Graveyard

: Bee boxes for cultivating honey

: Here had been some dude selling beverages along the path on the way to Blue Eye. The way he – and many other people in this region of Albania – had been keeping his drinks cold was by pumping the icy cold, fresh mountain water onto ’em

: This photo was taken in Doberdol later on in the trek, but I just want to highlight what I mentioned in the caption from the previous photo. Even when the guesthouses up in the mountains had coolers like this, they weren’t plugged into anything because electricity up there is scarce. Everything was mostly solar powered and not super reliable. So, what they would do to keep the shit inside refrigerated is they’d connect hoses to the top of these machines that would be pumping water from the nearest stream and just dumping it onto all the cans and bottles within. It was very confusing to see a fridge behaving like a dishwasher the first time I saw it, but after a while I got used to it (Image provided by fellow hiker Rensie)

: Blue Eye. By the time I got here I was pretty soaked in sweat and was considering a swim but couldn’t really commit to the idea. So, to cool off I just splashed some water on my face and then took off my socks and shoes and sat at the edge then dipped my legs in knee-deep. The water was so cold that after two minutes, I could not feel my feet

: Guys working on a roof around sunset back in Theth

: The Church of Theth. This place has a pretty interesting story, but instead of plagiarizing it, I’ll just post the link here in case you’re interested in reading more about it… https://www.intoalbania.com/attraction/church-of-theth/

: Portrait of Mother Teresa in the guesthouse in Theth. Mother Teresa, though born in the capital of modern-day North Macedonia and famous for the work she did in Calcutta, is ethnically Albanian

: Looking back towards Theth village as I start creepin up and out of it on my way to Valbonë

: Pretty much every day of the hike started down in a village in a valley and to get up and out of it, I needed to hike through dense forest. Then the forest would end and I’d be up on some bare mountaintop, go over the pass and then descend through another forest on the way to that night’s accommodation

: View of an adjacent mountain during a break in the forest

: Back under the canopy

: Very steep climb

: Out of the forest

: Almost at the top

: Spot where I ate my lunch up at Valbonë Pass

: The route taken to begin the descent down to Valbonë

: Heading down. Still above the forest, but about to dip down into it

: Entering a tree zone

: Interesting area where the trail suddenly makes a steep turn down to the valley below

: In the thick of it

: Almost at the base of the valley

: Rock bed at the bottom of the valley

: Cigarette health ad on a pack of cigs warning that smoking can turn you into a crippled Streetcar-Named-Desire-era version of Marlon Brando that requires assistance when blasting diarrhea into urinals

: Had to walk along this road for about 4-5km

: Entering Valbonë

: My accommodation for the evening. The second-floor unit, that is. Had a private bathroom up there. This was definitely the nicest place I slept during my ten days on the trail. Can’t remember the name of the place though and I already deleted the email I got from Balkan Natural Adventure with the names of all the places where I stayed. Oh well…

: The second dinner in as many nights that I shared with these two Dutch girls and their guide

: Some sort of spinach pie

: When leaving Valbonë, I had to walk along this road for a few kilometers until…

: …I crossed a bridge on the left side of the road and then started making my way up the dirt road there on that mountain to the left

: Looking back down on Valbonë

: Continuing on

: Forest followed by…

: …more forest

: Finally above the trees

: There were a couple kilometers’ worth of walking through terrain like this up at the top of the mountain

: Snail shell?

: Still heading towards the top of Persllopi Pass

: Almost there

: Other hiker going over the last hump before beginning the descent towards Çerem

: The start of the descent

: A cave at the top of the pass from which an icy breeze perpetually emanates

: The last bit of this green rocky terrain before a big steep downhill

: The terrain a half-hour after beginning the big steep downhill mentioned in the previous caption

: Pretty sure I briefly left Albania and entered Montenegro when up on Persllopi Pass and this stone delineates the border

: A bit further down from the stone in the photo previous, making my way down to Çerem

: Horseys

: Another horsey

: Obligatory passage through dense forest before reaching the next valley where I will sleep

: The room I got in Çerem was in a building without a bathroom – the john was in another building on the other side of the property – and it was raining at night so…I was looking for alternatives. They didn’t sell bottles of water at this guesthouse but they did sell beer so I was considering using these coins to buy a bottle and offering the contents to a fellow hiker then keeping the empty bottle for myself just so I’d have something to pee into if I had to go in the middle of the night. Didn’t do it though. Just avoided drinking water for like three hours before bedtime

: Dinner

: Arianit, the guide for the two Dutch girls, pouring up shots of raki. I did not partake in this evening’s shenanigans but I did observe them closely. Close to two whole bottles of this hard liquor were consumed in under two hours and Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop (That Thing)” was played at least twenty times at an unreasonably loud volume given the time. It’s reported that a total of three people vomited, and one of those three people’s vomit dripped through a crack in the floorboards on the second floor of one of these huts and down onto the television of the grandma who lived there on the property

: The road up and out of Çerem on the way to Doberdol. It pissed rain the entire time I was walking on this day

: The skin of this lizard on the road gives the impression that someone squirted mustard all over it

: Heading towards the forest

: In the forest

: At the top of a mountain, but you can’t really tell

: Some shepherd’s huts I’m about to pass on my way down to Doberdol

: Cow grazing in the forest. One of the locals told me that when dealing with sheep, a shepherd always needs to be there to keep them all together and to make sure that none of them run off while out grazing. Cows, on the other hand, they just let out the pen in the morning and they’ll go wherever they want but will instinctively always return of their own volition to the pen before sunset

: Very wet

: Very close to Doberdol

: There’s the place I’ll be staying just behind that flock of sheep there. Right before getting to the accommodation there was a stream you had to cross and the bridge that used to go over it had collapsed. And the way this bridge had collapsed gave the impression that maybe, since there weren’t any good stepping stones to get across the stream, you could use the broken parts to hop on to avoid getting wet. Well…I personally was so wet at that point that I just decided to walk right through the stream. Like, I couldn’t possibly get any wetter, ya know what I mean? And like, that bridge I figured looked pretty dangerous and I didn’t wanna deal with it at all. So, fuck it. So I just walked through then got to the guesthouse and they directed me to a hut where they had a wood-burning stove that I could use to dry all my belongings. In there had been a French-Canadian guy who was already doing the same thing. We started chatting and he told me that he had good rain gear and good waterproof boots and had managed to stay relatively dry the entire day until he reached the aforementioned stream. Unlike me, since he was still pretty dry, he decided to try to cross the stream via the broken bridge. When doing so, he slipped and fell face-first into the water. He fell so hard that even his hiking pole had snapped in half. And that, he said, was how he got so wet and why he’d been spending the entire afternoon at my side, feeding log after log into the wood-burning stove, trying to dry out all his shit

: Though heavily overcast, it thankfully did not rain on this day

: Climbing up and out of Doberdol Valley towards Kosovo

: I’m not sure exactly when I passed from Albania into Kosovo, but it happened somewhere up around here

: Heading towards Mt. Gjeravica (2656m), the highest peak in Kosovo

: Interesting rock formation

: Getting higher and higher. Even though this is mid-July, you can still see some patches of snow there at the base of the mountains on the upper right side of the photo

: Walking through a patch of the aforementioned snow at some point in the hike

: There’s the peak up on the right

: Home stretch to the peak

: At the peak

: View from the peak towards from where I just came

: View in the other direction

: Some flowers I took notice of as I retraced my steps back down to Doberdol

: More flowers

: Reentering Doberdol Valley. Take note of the huge flock of sheep grazing on the upper right-hand side of the photo

: The shepherd attending to the aforementioned flock

: Albanians singing Albanian songs around the wood-burning stove back in Doberdol. The one guy, standing, the third from the left – a profession guide – was a bit of a strange bird. One story he told was how he was once in New York City for a couple months and was looking for a volleyball group to join and the first group he found had too many guys that looked gay so he passed them up and found another group. And then he played volleyball with them until it was time to come back to Albania. And on one of the last days, he said he really wanted to eat some pussy. So he was talking to this Chinese girl from his volleyball group. She was telling him about a recent breakup she’d gone through and he was pretending he cared. And what he had to say to her in return was that, “I’d like to eat your pussy.” And then she said back to him that, “Sorry, I don’t have a pussy. I’m trans.” And that was the end of the story. Then he said he was in Cancun, Mexico, and was hanging out with some Americans and they were going to buy drugs from some friendly Mexican guy they met. But then once they were at the place from where they were gonna buy the drugs, the Mexican guy turned out to be not so friendly and started demanding a bunch of money from all them or he’d call the police on them for buying drugs. And at one point in all this, it came up that this particular guy wasn’t American – that he was in fact from Albania. And all the Mexican guys were like, “Oh, really? Respect. Albanians are badass. We’ve seen the movie Taken. Since you’re Albanian, you don’t have to pay us any money. You’re cool to just chill while we keep robbing all these gringos.”

: The second floor of this building is where I spent my two nights in Doberdol

: My room as seen from the inside

: The grounds as seen from my accommodation. Everything in Doberdol is very basic because it’s not a place where people permanently live. It’s just a seasonal shepherd village where people take their flocks up to graze during the summer months. Only within the last ten years, with the growing popularity of the Peaks of the Balkans trail, have tourists started to regularly come here. One thing that I found interesting at this particular place – and several others – was how the owners (who grew up during the communist era) don’t speak any English, but their little children speak it perfectly. Like here, the owner was this enormous bear of a man who’d come out to shake my hand and greet me when I walked in, but then almost immediately after called out to his daughter to come over and translate. The girl, Layla, probably seven or eight years old, ran right over and served as the intermediary for my and pretty much everyone else’s transactions here. And I heard one couple ask the girl, “How is it that you speak such good English?” And the girl responded matter-of-factly, “It’s because I work with tourists every day.”

: Heading up towards the peak of Mt. Tromedja where the borders of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro all meet

: Big climb. It was right around here that some hikers at the accommodation in Doberdol had said they saw a sheep that’d supposedly been stolen by a bear from a pen on the Kosovo side of the border then carried up here and torn apart. Although I was looking out for them, I did not see the remnants of the destroyed animal

: That’s the peak on the right. The path to the left bypasses it, so I just kinda forged my own path up to the top

: View from the top of three-borders peak. That line down there on the ridge of the mountain in the middle of the photo is the path that I’d soon be walking on

: On the path from the photo previous

: It woulda been hard to get lost on a day like today with such a clear path to follow

: The dark-brown horse and the white horse made a little light-brown horse

: Continuing along

: Lovely day

: Heading deeper into Kosovo on my way to Milisevc

: Very peaceful area

: Some pine forest

: As opposed to the day I went over Valbonë Pass which was packed with tourists, I didn’t see another living soul for hours on my way to Milisevc

: The start (or end?) of a road at the bottom of the valley I’d just traversed

: Big honey-cultivating operation at a settlement I’d been passing

: Bee boy

: Road-walking the rest of the way to Milisevc

: The cabins on the right side of the road here is where I’d be spending the night. At the time, it was the owner (a hang-gliding aficionado) and his two sons here – one school-age kid and the other a young man with aspirations to become a professional rugby player

: The solar panels on the roof here must’ve served for the lighting, nothing more. Because the hot water for the showers was heated by a wood-burning stove. I thought this was a nice setup in a nice area and so, when I was chitchatting with the owner who runs this place, I asked if he’d grown up in the area. And he kinda took offense to this question. He said something like, “Why would you think I grew up out here? No one grows up out here. There’s no schools. There’s no market. There’s nothing. I’m going to have to hang a sign above the door for everyone that stays here that says, ‘No, I didn’t grow up around here, I don’t live out here, so don’t even ask.’ I live in Peje. And before Peaks of the Balkans started getting popular like ten years ago, I wouldn’t spend more than a few days up here each summer.”

: Briefly following the road leading out of Milisevc

: About to enter a pine forest

: Gettin piney

: A break in the pine forest

: A neat little path cut out of the chaos of the forest

: Another nice day out on the trail

: It was right around here where I sat down and stopped for lunch. On this day, I did not see a single other hiker out on the trail

: Probably at the maximum elevation I was gonna reach for the day

: About to descend

: Lower

: Rasta sheep

: Before leaving on my trip, Balkan Natural Adventure recommended I read two books to better understand the local culture up in these “Accursed Mountains” of Albania. One of the books was called “Broken April” by Ismail Kadare and the other was “High Albania” by Edith Durham. “Broken April” was a decent piece of fiction that I gobbled up in a couple days and “High Albania” had a lot more facts and stuff like that and I only managed to read about 200 of the 400 pages before I gave up. Both of these books – although they’re great at explaining the way things were in this area a hundred years ago – are now pretty outdated. Both of these books talked about this honor code called the Kanun that Albanian people used to live by and back in Milisevc I brought it up to the owner of the guesthouse and like my “Did you grow up around here?” inquiry, this question also rubbed him the wrong way. He said, “We are modern people with governments and police and courts. Nobody lives by the Kanun anymore. Nobody.” So, I guess reading these books was a waste of time. Nonetheless, the rasta sheep in the photo previous inspired me to change the cover of “High Albania” to mean something entirely different

: Last little leg of downhill before reaching the Babino Polje area of Montenegro

: The day ended with about 3-4km of road-walking before I arrived at the guesthouse. I can’t believe I don’t have any photos of the dinner, but it was probably the best one I had on the whole trip. The owner, a very big man, just kept coming out with more and more food and kept piling it on everyone’s plates until we begged him not to. All kinds of meats and veggies and a soup and potatoes and rice. Very good meal

: The breakfast was not as impressive as the dinner the night before, but satisfying nonetheless

: Plowing through yet another pine forest

: Country cabin

: At this point in the hike, after having heard the story a few days beforehand about the bear ripping up the sheep, I was always super attentive to the sounds around me in the forest. Luckily I did not have any bear encounters

: Brief break in the trees

: Back out in the open

: Easy walkin’

: About to begin a big descent here

: Comin’ down this country road

: Grasshopper on the road

: Cabin in the hills

: I did probably like 6-7km on this road at the end of the day

: First glimpse of Plav, Montenegro

: Getting closer

: Entering Plav

: Colgate restaurant – where the only thing they serve is toothpaste

: To get from Plav to Grebaje Valley, it’s better to have a transfer than to walk the 20-something kilometers along the side of a relatively busy road to get there. So, one of the guys from the guesthouse was gonna give me a lift over there. Before he did, however, he took me out to the back of his family’s guesthouse to show me the garden. He said that all the food that we had for dinner the night before and everything we had for breakfast that morning was grown fresh in their backyard

: Beginning the hike up to Taljanka Peak through some dense forest

: Heading up

: View to my left-hand side as I went along following the trail in the photo previous

: Bunch of goats blocking the path to the top

: Walking along the ridge at the top

: There was a doggy hanging out up there at the top of the mountain

: On top of the world, looking down on creation

: The path I was following down on the other side of Taljanka Peak

: To the right was a pretty straight drop a few thousand feet downward

: View of the drop

: View of a nearby cliff from where I took the previous photo. Very, very difficult to see, but at the top of the green part on that mountain in front of me, those little dots are other hikers hanging out up there and having lunch

: A lot of cars in this area of Montenegro had New York or New Jersey license plates. I asked one guy about it and he was trying to explain to me that, yes, these are old used cars that are imported from the US but then added that, “We are poor people around here and doing the car registration with new license is very expensive. We all live in small towns where everybody knows each other. We all know the police. So they see us driving around in cars with New York plates and they don’t cause a problem for us because they know we are all poor and have better things to spend our money on.”

: The town of Gusinje, Montenegro, as seen during my car transfer from Grabaje Valley to the village of Vusanje

: Dinner at the guesthouse in the village of Vusanje

: Vusanje as seen from my guesthouse just as I was getting ready to kick off my last day on the trail

: Heading back towards Albania

: Nice leisurely morning stroll

: Jagged peaks

: More woods

: More open fields

: Just puttin one foot in front of the other

: This was part of the last big climb

: Think it was somewhere around here where I crossed from Montenegro back into Albania. This hike wouldn’t have been possible back in communist times because this border between Albania and Montenegro (formerly part of Yugoslavia) was heavily guarded and no passage was granted to anyone. Like, even though all the people in this area share a common culture, they were divided by these political lines. One guide I met said that his grandmother ended up on one side of the border and her sister was on the other and they didn’t get to see each other for almost forty years until the borders opened back up again

: Defunct military bunker on the Albanian side of the border

: Huge descent back down to the village of Theth at the bottom of this valley where I began my trek ten days beforehand

Getting there

Day 1: Theth to Blue Eye back to Theth

Day 2: Theth to Valbonë

Day 3: Valbonë to Çerem

Day 4: Çerem to Doberdol

Day 5: Doberdol to Mt. Gjeravica then back to Doberdol

Day 6: Doberdol to Milisevc

Day 7: Milisevc to Babino Polje

Day 8: Babino Polje to Plav

Day 9: Plav to Grebaje Valley to Vusanje

Day 10: Vusanje to Theth