The Peaks of the Balkans is a roughly 190-kilometre circular trek threading through Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo, and it's usually sold on wild ridgelines, shepherd hospitality and alpine lakes. One hiker's final day on the route, recently written up on The Trek, is a reminder that the last kilometres can be the hardest — and that the trail delivers its best moments even when you're at your lowest.
The walker in question had picked up some kind of illness on the Kosovo leg and, by day seven, was in bad shape: unable to keep food down, dizzy in the heat, and rattled enough after a rough night that a hotel room in Plav was booked remotely via an inReach satellite messenger. With no breakfast and no lunch stop, the plan became simple — one long push back down to Plav, the Montenegrin town that marks the classic finishing point of the circuit.
Oddly, that grim march produced two of the trip's highlights. After a week of seeing nothing, the hiker spotted a brown bear up a tree, then wild boar within a few hundred metres. Later came the kind of encounter that makes multi-day treks worthwhile: a local family — parents, young children and grandparents minding horses — foraging for wild blueberries on the mountainside, planning to move higher as the day went on. With little shared language, they still managed a genuine exchange about the trail and each other's lives.
Plav eventually appeared through the heat, and the town did what finish-line towns do. A supermarket dinner of cornflakes and lemon sherbets, a shower, and an afternoon-to-morning sleep. There are no photos from the day — some endings don't get documented.
The aftermath is worth noting for anyone eyeing this route. The writer was still fatigued more than two months later, struggling through workdays despite a job spent mostly walking. It's a fair caution: the Peaks of the Balkans is a remote, hot, physically demanding trail with long stretches between resupply and patchy phone coverage. Carry a satellite communicator, build rest days into your itinerary, and don't push through illness to hit a schedule — the trail will still be there next summer.
For everyone else, the takeaway is that this route deserves its growing reputation. It links three countries on one continuous path, sleep in guesthouses or camp, and costs a fraction of alpine trekking in Western Europe. July and August are scorching at lower elevations, so early starts matter. And Plav, with its lake and easy bus connections, makes a low-key place to decompress when you finish — even if your celebration dinner looks more like cereal than a feast.
