Imogen Lepere was awarded Young Travel Writer of the Year
2022 for this article, which first appears in Vol. 34:
Revival. For more award-winnning journalism, subscribe to
SUITCASE.

It

It
was while clinging to the handrail of a boat on its way to
Greece that 11-year-old Catherine Bohne saw Albania for the first
time. She couldn’t believe how green it was. Or how dark –
electricity was still years off for most of the country. When she
asked her father about this mysterious Shangri-la, Europe’s last
Communist state that was closed to foreigners until 1991, he
replied: “That’s Albania and nobody can go there.” More than 30
years later, Catherine sold the bookshop she ran in New York,
headed for the remote region of Tropojë in the Accursed Mountains
and never looked back.

For someone who fancies themselves an adventurer, the name alone
is irresistible. But a journey here is not for the faint-hearted,
as I discover over four days that push me to the brink of my
comfort zone – and sometimes thrillingly over the edge. Local
legend has it that God made the earth, sky and sea in six days, but
Satan carved these mountains in one. He harnessed all his devilish
guile to plot a landscape so fierce that the Romans, Ottomans and
Serbs never managed to conquer it. The fact that this wilderness is
a mere three-hour flight from London is almost
incomprehensible.

The journey from Komani to Tropojë has to be one of the most
magnificent ferry routes in the world. For three hours myself and
photographer Mark Rammers perch on a sack of onions as suffocating
heat bounces between the limestone cliffs that line Lake Komani.
Every so often locals disembark and toil up vertiginous tracks with
their weekly shop, melting into the forest long before there’s any
sign of a building.

Catherine’s instructions were to “look for the car with a
smashed window”. When she pulls up and greets me, it’s not the
car’s window I notice, but the scar running down its driver’s
cheek. A memento, Catherine explains, “from the time a brown bear
whacked me in the face”. “I had to walk 45 minutes to the nearest
village,” she recounts, “literally holding my face on. But the
whole time I was thinking, ‘wow, I survived a bear attack, I’m
going to be a local legend.” I scan the forest nervously from the
car window.

The reality is that Catherine is already a legend. Locals refer
to her simply as “the American” and view her a little like a patron
saint – if an eccentric and, at times, scandalous one. There aren’t
many divorced women in these parts. Her website, Journey to
Valbona, which she runs alongside Aferdita Mirakaj and Gerta
Demiraj, is the most comprehensive source of travel information on
Tropojë. It allows travellers to book authentic experiences
directly from locals, providing drastically needed income in an
area with 80 per cent unemployment. It also leads to travel
experiences that go far beyond the Theth-to-Valbonë hike,
currently the only activity on most westerners’ radars.

Over a lunch of flame-crisped goat in Restorant Mustafa, she
explains more about Tropojë’s appeal. “Until the Communist
revolution, there was no higher authority in these mountains, so
communities organised themselves according to an ancient
constitution called the Kanun, which states that hospitality is a
way to gain honour. As soon as a visitor sets foot on someone’s
land, the owner is honour-bound to put their guests’ wellbeing
above even their own children’s.”

We experience this for ourselves that night at a goat farm
called Stani I Arif Kadris on Gjarpërit Mountain. Driving from
Bajram Curri through Valbonë National Park is breathtaking and
terrifying in equal measure. The road dips low beside Valbonë
River, which thunders through the mountains, guzzling minerals
until its waters resemble turquoise dye. Locals paddle on limestone
beaches and every so often we stop to move sluggish tortoises out
of the road. As the climb begins in earnest, the asphalt is
replaced by a rocky track that sends the car heaving like a ship on
a stormy sea.

Elisa Metaliaj is waiting to greet us, hushing the dog that
howls at the end of its chain. We eat homemade cheese in a rustic
lean-to perched on the mountain’s knife-edge and watch the shepherd
herding her family’s goats down the mountain for the night.

With Catherine translating, she explains how hard it is to
scrape a living from tourism. “We charge 1,200 lekke (£8) a night,
including breakfast, but Eastern European visitors say it’s too
much. They want air conditioning and ensuite bathrooms.”

As the sun rises, I hike up the mountain and perch on a bench
outside an abandoned shepherd’s hut. The only sound is the humming
of bees kissing wild orchids and a donkey bleating as it’s led to a
meadow hundreds of metres below. For frazzled urbanites, what could
be a greater luxury?

But when Catherine pulls over a few hours later to show us
Valbona School, I begin to grasp why Balkan people have such a
different idea of what constitutes a holiday. It’s a crumbling,
clinical building and many of the classrooms are completely empty.
Sports facilities constitute a piece of string that serves as a
volleyball net and football goals drawn on the wall in black pen.
In the entrance hall, Communist signs proclaim the glory of serving
the motherland.

Albania’s 46 years of Communism were defined by grinding
poverty. The majority of them were spent under leader Enver Hoxha,
known as much for his brutality as his paranoia. The countryside is
speckled with the remains of more than 170,000 bunkers, designed
both to deter invaders and to make sure his citizens stayed put.
Indeed, no modern maps of the mountains existed until Catherine
drew them up in 2016; Hoxha destroyed them to make sure his
subjects didn’t take it into their heads to tiptoe into the taiga
forest to the relative freedom of Montenegro.

As we drive the 7km from Bajram Curri to the hamlet of Velishte
to watch the sun set at the Brengaj family’s new café, I avert my
eyes from the many memorials to those who’ve met an untimely end on
these rippling bends. “Why would someone build a café all the way
up here?”

“That’s such a western way of thinking,” Catherine says, shaking
her red mane. “They built it here because this is their land. A
family’s land is literally like their soul. Most people’s was
confiscated by the Communists and they’ve fought hard to get it
back.” As I breathe in the scent of 600-year-old chestnut trees
while watching shadows swallow the valley below, I begin to think
that this might just be the perfect place for a café after
all.

The next morning, a cluster of country folk set up piles of
homegrown produce on the side of a street called Rruga Beselidhja e
Malesise in Bajram Curri: crates of tomatoes, a bucket of shallots
the size of my thumb, bunches of “mountain tea” – a purple-tipped
herb from the mint family. Unpasteurised cow’s milk in Coca-Cola
bottles hints at Albanians’ tendency to laud western culture. Coke
was the first foreign drink to arrive when Communism fell and, as a
result, eminent people in the community are still referred to as
“Colas”.

The town of Bajram Curri somehow appears both not quite finished
and completely worn out. Grandfathers play chess on the lawn
outside the museum and every third building is a café filled with
men sipping Turkish coffee. In the Journey to Valbona shop, which
sells beautiful handicrafts and berry jams made by local women,
Aferdita Mirakaj explains why there are so few women out on the
streets.

“There’s this attitude here that women should take care of
everything in the house as well as taking on cleaning jobs while
the men sit around drinking raki. Now we women are beginning to
work together, there’s real potential for the whole community to
progress through tourism. We’re doing this,” she gestures around at
the shop, “to earn money, but also to show our children that they
don’t have to move away if they want to start their own
business.”

Of course, this isn’t the case for all mountain men. In our four
days we meet several twentysomethings starting tourism initiatives.
There’s Liridon Mustafaj who offers kayaking expeditions in the
glittering blue of Valbona River, and the Nikoci brothers, who
recently returned from Tirana to open an ambitious restaurant
called Chestnut Hill on their grandfather’s land. In fact, the
godfather of Tropojë tourism is Alfred Selimaj, who opened the
first hotel in Valbona town in 2004. What initially began as a
spare room on his family’s farm has burgeoned into the 21-room
Hotel Rilindja – which means “Rebirth” in the Gheg language of
Northern Albania.

Over a meze lunch in the shady garden, he explains that he is
also struggling to attract the right kind of visitor. “I’ve tried
to create somewhere beautiful that really represents our region.”
As we are shown around the cosy bedrooms, gable-roofed and carpeted
in locally woven kilim rugs, I am filled with hope that more
adventure travellers will take the plunge to explore this dazzling
yet little-visited region.

That night, Catherine leads Mark and I through the undergrowth
to a cave filled with trailing ivy on the bend of a river on Sadik
Hasandocaj’s land.With classic mountain hospitality, Sadik and his
wife Tale bring us an enormous byrek (a swirl of filo pastry filled
with onion and tomato) to tear off in steaming chunks. After they
leave, the darkness – barely punctuated by a sputtering oil lamp –
begins to feel significantly more threatening. Something rustles in
the undergrowth and I shriek as a wolf spider scuttles over my
face. Dignity in tatters, we retreat to a lean-to in the field
above. The sky groans ominously and ashes of lightning bathe the
mountains in orange. I’ve rarely felt so small.

The next morning, we rise with the sun and walk to Tale’s house
for breakfast. Every few steps, my foot lands in a patch of blue
flowers that reveal themselves to be clouds of delicate
butterflies. She plies us with vegetables from the garden and warm
milk from her own cows.

The five-hour bus to Tirana International Airport leaves from
Gjakova, a 45-minute drive over the border in Kosovo. A bored
border guard asks to see our Covid-19 vaccination certi cates but
shrugs and waves us through anyway when we say we don’t have them
with us. It’s yet another reminder that this region never has – and
probably never will – play by anyone else’s rules.

After the brooding silence of the mountains, the airport feels
like an anthill. Take o is an hour late because no one checked
tickets and several passengers are on the wrong plane. The young
Albanian woman behind me complains to her English boyfriend: “This
country, it’s just chaos, mountains and tradition.” I smile to
myself, because for a certain type of traveller – the type that
hears the call of a mysterious land as a child and feels compelled
to answer it 30 years later – those three things are
irresistible.