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25 September 2017

The Guardian: Trekking in the highest peak of Albania

The British prestigious newspaper “The Guardian” has recently published the article written by Ben Lerwill, describing his adventure in Albania starting in the high peaks of Accursed Mountains, continuing along the trail of Kosovo and Montenegro.
Albania is offering many kinds of tourism, including the adventurous tourism, for all people who love hiking trails, climbing and outdoor lovers.
Rocky road … trekking in the Accursed Mountains. Photograph: Ben Lerwill

A short summary of the Ben’s Lervill article for the Guardian:

The hiking begins a few hours’ drive to the south, with an ascent of Albania’s highest point, the 2,751m Mount Korab. Functioning as an appetiser to the week’s main walk, the climb is a long, hot slog. The slopes are full of grasshoppers and buttercups. We pass only tough-faced, welly-booted shepherds. There are snow patches in the higher cols. At the summit, just to muddle the multi-country element further, the panorama reveals the cushion-soft valleys of western Macedonia.
The Korab walk takes most of the day. Radomire, the trailhead village where we start and end, is a cluster of minarets, cheap beer and unsealed roads. All its bathroom taps are left on round the clock, even in the local bar, which baffles me until it’s explained that the plumbing wouldn’t cope with the pressure of being turned off. And like the water, we keep moving. By nightfall we’ve mini-bussed into Kosovo, ready(ish) to begin the hike proper.
When we arrive into Valbona Valley at the journey’s end, the sun is fierce overhead. Albanian flags flutter from village rooftops, flashes of red and black against the unforgiving grey of the hills. There is more to come from our trip – time in the capital city Tirana and a sailing along Lake Koman, the latter an accidentally lovely product of a Chinese-built dam – but this is where we take our boots off.

It’s funny the memories that stay with you from a journey like this. Mighty horizons and forested slopes. Doorstops of sheep’s cheese for breakfast. And a tatty plaque, on top of a big mountain, adrift in a sea of Balkan peaks." 

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