E ven a week after I returned from Albania , in my mind I was still in the Accursed Mountains, a fitting name for the dramatic limestone karst and thick beech forests that stood before me. With scenes resembling the Peruvian Andes, it was hard to believe it was just a three-hour flight away from home in the UK . These untamed landscapes have few signs of civilisation (not counting the increasing number of hikers on the Valbona Pass).
A detox to modern life, the valleys are sporadically dotted with kullas (north Albanian farmhouses), which are hundreds of years old, quite possibly the same ones Victorian travel writer Edith Durham passed by. In her 1909 travelogue, High Albania , she noted how “time stood still” in Theth and the surrounding villages. One could argue it hasn’t moved on much since, with a few exceptions: you can take a Land Rover Defender taxi to your guest house rather than a mule; there are a handful of hotels after a post-millennium tourism boom, and, thankfully, the isolation tower is just a museum these days as blood feuds are a rarity.
There is, of course, hot water and wifi now, too (unless a storm knocks it off), so you’re not totally off-grid. Read more on Europe travel : The farms there have passed down through the generations and are tended in traditional ways; the family I stayed with still leads their cattle up to high summer pastures in Theth and back down to the foothills in Shkodër to escape the harsh winters. Many like them are now ope.