THE PEAKS OF THE BALKANS TRAIL
MONTENEGRO, ALBANIA AND KOSOVO
by Rudolf Abraham
JUNIPER HOUSE, MURLEY MOSS,
OXENHOLME ROAD, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA9 7RL
About the Author
Rudolf Abraham (www.rudolfabraham.co.uk) is an award-winning travel writer and photographer specialising in Central and Southeast Europe. He is the author of over 10 books, including the first comprehensive English-language hiking guidebooks to Montenegro and Croatia, and his work is published widely in magazines. He first visited the mountainous borderlands of Montenegro and Albania in 2004, having already lived and worked in neighbouring Croatia in the late 1990s – and has been a frequent visitor to this little-known corner of Europe ever since.
Other Cicerone guides by the author
The Islands of Croatia
Walking in Croatia
The Mountains of Montenegro
Torres del Paine
St Oswald’s Way and St Cuthbert’s Way
© Rudolf Abraham 2017
First edition 2017
ISBN: 978 1 85284 770 8
Printed by KHL Printing, Singapore
All photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Contains OpenStreetMap.org data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. NASA relief data courtesy of ESRI
For Tamara and Ivana
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank Endrit Shima and Ricardo Fahrig at Zbulo and Vlatko Bulatović at Zalaz for all their help, support and enthusiasm during the time I researched and wrote this guide, for which I am extremely grateful. It’s people like you who help make this such an amazing part of the world to visit, so a very sincere faleminderit shumë and mnogo vam hvala to all three of you. Thanks are also due to Ahmet Reković in Plav, Pavlin Polia and family in Theth, Vucija Martić in Plav, Armend Alija and family in Babino polje, Montor Bojku in Pejë, Emma and Ben Heywood in Virpazar, Hayley Wright in Herceg Novi, and Nicky Brown at Black Sheep and Germania for generously providing flights to Pristina on my last trip to Prokletije. And to my wife Ivana, with whom I first fell in love with Prokletije in the early noughties.
Updates to this guide
While every effort is made by our authors to ensure the accuracy of guidebooks as they go to print, changes can occur during the lifetime of an edition. Any updates that we know of for this guide will be on the Cicerone website (www.cicerone.co.uk/770/updates), so please check before planning your trip. We also advise that you check information about such things as transport, accommodation and shops locally. Even rights of way can be altered over time.
The route maps in this guide are derived from publicly-available data, databases and crowd-sourced data. As such they have not been through the detailed checking procedures that would generally be applied to a published map from an official mapping agency, although naturally we have reviewed them closely in the light of local knowledge as part of the preparation of this guide.
We are always grateful for information about any discrepancies between a guidebook and the facts on the ground, sent by email to [email protected] or by post to Cicerone, Juniper House, Murley Moss, Oxenholme Road, Kendal LA9 7RL, United Kingdom.
Register your book: To sign up to receive free updates, special offers and GPX files where available, register your book at www.cicerone.co.uk.
Front cover: Maja Kolata from the 4WD road above Çeremi, Albania (Stage 3)
CONTENTS
National parks and nature reserves
Accommodation and food
Public holidays
Language
Money
Phones, internet and electricity
Cross-border permits
Local tour operators
Where to start/finish
Variations, transfers and highlights
Trail markings
Maps
Equipment
