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
