BBC report for Albanian Alps, Rama: Good plan for promotion

For decades, few travelers knew something about Albania's golden beaches, wild mountains and Roman and Ottoman tracks. But since the years that this Balkan nation opened up consciously to the world, it has drawn travelers eager to discover one of the last and least explore corners of Europe” are some of the lines of the article published by the BBC today.

Rama pointed out that the article is a perfumed invitation with the smell of the sea, the flowers of alpes, and the impressive hospitality of Albanians.

The prime minister said the article also comes as a good omen for Albania's international promotion in the early season.

Complete scripture published in BBC:

Spreaded across 192 miles [192 km], the Balkan Maya connect three countries and pass through some of the continent's least explored landscapes, writes Peter Elia for the BBC.

” Walking through green valleys and wildflower meadows, under flaming sunlight, was hit by the landscape of the Albanian Alps. Unlike Europe's most famous alpine resorts, there were neither hotels nor ski elevators on the horizon. Instead, the sweeping environment aroused a surprising feeling of isolation, and I could not help but feel that I had entered a secret earth that had somehow avoided the attention of the outside world.

Spreading from northern Albania to southern Kosovo and northeast of Montenegro, the Albanian Alps are better known by their local Albanian names (Bjeshs and Inmuna) and Serb-Croatian (Prokletije).

However, the question of how these jagged limestone slopes took their unusual name remains a mystery.

According to local legend, the devil escaped hell and created the steep glacier cards in a single day.

Some say that the name of the alpes is derived from a woman who cursed the mountains as she walked through them with her children on a hot day and could not find water.

Others claim that Slavic soldiers gave the mountains their names while trying to march through them. In a way, the strange history of Maya origin is something like a metaphor for Albania as a whole.

Long called Europe's <x0mengma” by the authors of books and tour guideships, Albania is probably the most misunderstood country in Europe.

Its language is a semantic abnormality without any known relatives in the Indo-European language family.

After World War II, authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha effectively closed the mountainous country from the outside world for four decades, halting religion and travel.

This prompted Edi Rama, the country's current prime minister, to say that Albania was once “the North European Centre”. During the Cold War, Hoxha convinced the nation that the rest of the world wanted to overthrow their communist state, so he filled the country with up to 500,000 bunkers for people to hide in the event of attack.

For decades, few travelers knew nothing about Albania's golden beaches, the wild mountains and the Roman and Ottoman ruins. But, in the years since the Balkan country opened up carefully to the world, it has drawn travellers eager to discover one of Europe's last wildest and underexplored corners.

One of his most courageous projects is the Balkan Maya.

The vision for this cross-border project came in 2013, but its roots go much farther. Many Albanians and Kosovars refer to their close relationship as “one nation, two states”, as highlighted in the popular Albanian slogan “we are a”. In fact, 93% of Kosovars are ethnically Albanian and speak Albanian. Kosovo (formerly part of Serbia) and Montenegro were organised into newly formed Yugoslavia in 1918, but the country's breakup in 1992 triggered a series of fierce ethnic conflicts, as Serbia and Montenegro are mostly Christian Orthodox. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars fled their country, with the passage of the Nemuna Beckes in Albania far too. In 1999, NATO air strikes ended a war between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs. Kosovo eventually gained independence in 2008, but tensions along these borders continued.

In an effort to restore peace, leaders of the three countries suggested a walking path linking Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox communities (Serbia and Montenegro were a country until 2006), with the Albanian and Kosovo guerrillas walking in partnership with Montenegrin hotels. Since its opening, the road has encouraged local rural economies and helped establish a greater link between these remote enclaves.

The creation of the path meant designing roads known only to shepherds and encouraging farmers to open the town. The final stamp of approval came when trail planners persuaded authorities from all three countries to give up passport checks at a time when free movement across borders was unimaginable.

To learn more, I decided to walk about 59 miles [59 km] of the path from the Albanian village of Valbona to the village of Theth.

My adventure began in Albania's capital at the airport in Tirana, where my guides greeted me with smiles and introduced me to a dozen other mountaineers from Britain, Germany and New Zealand who formed our group. After a four-hour trip north, we arrived at Lake Koman, a large emerald-sereel reservoir over the Drin River. To enter the Nemuna Bjeshks, we boarded an old ferry for a three-hour passage into the Valley of Valbon, and the eagles lifted up.

We walked along the crystal river of Valbona through an ahu forest filled with strawberries and sweet, wild berries that I stopped to enjoy. After three hours, our hotels appeared, a collection of buns in front of the Nemuna Bees.

Mustafa, a former shepherd, runs the hotels with his two sons and asked him why he gave up the shepherd in order to run a guesthouse.

In my previous work, I had many traveling travelers who stayed with me, but I never got money. A shepherd cares not only for animals but also for humans,” he said.

Later, Mandy explained that Mustafa had so many guests who had stayed one night that he convinced him to change his job. So Mustafa used his savings, built more hotels, and has since devoted himself to caring for full - time travelers.

The next morning, a two-hour soft climb saw us reach the top of Mount Trefitri (266m). Here, the natural borders of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro joined in a deepening panoramic view. A weather - beaten sign welcomed us to Albania, and within minutes, my mobile phone provider received me to Montenegro. Today, these signs are the only indicator of international borders, but they have not always been so.

When I was growing up wandering in the mountains felt like freedom, but war meant I couldn't always come here”, Agon told me, as we passed a stream fed by the ice peaks of the mountains.

When the war ended, I wanted to become a guide and help children in my hometown of Gjakova explore their beautiful homeland”, he adds.

In 1998, when Agon was 13, his father had to protect his family from Yugoslav forces coming from Serbia and Montenegro, while tensions arose between ethnic Albanians, Serbs and the Yugoslav government.

We were scared, nobody was coming to help and we had to protect”, Agoni says suddenly and becomes too emotional to talk about what happened next.

This story is inevitable along the way, as he soon showed us a memorial dedicated to three members of the Kosovo Liberation Army killed there by Serb forces...

French geologist Ami Boué described this part of the Nemuna Bees as the “vargolin most inexplicable, most elusive and vicious in the Balkans”...

We move to Theth, an Albanian village surrounded by green pastures and imposing mountains, whose cold mountain streams flowed under Ottoman arch bridges.

In the early 1900 ' s, British traveler Edith Durham wrote about the village of “I think that no human living place has given me such an impression of the great isolation from around the world”.

If Albania is the enigma of Europe, walking in this path helped me to understand it.

It seems that this former Italian state, which once tried so desperately to keep the world out, is using travel as a way to invite people in and teach them something about how a country can heal and change”, ends Peter Eli in a report for the BBC./A.