I am planning for my gap year where I am hoping to do a lot of hiking. I have done a fair number of trips in Canada, particularly in my home province of Saskatchewan and in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia. Over the years I have tried more overnight camping and back country excursions. The hope was to do the same in Eastern Europe.
In looking at hikes in the Balkans, I realized there doesn’t appear to be national park groups where you can book camp sites or shelter spaces on these hikes. I may need to dig into this a bit more but my initial searching hasn’t found too many in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. My searches tend to take me to groups that will support hikes, both in helping you plan and in providing guides for a fee. Some even suggest that you shouldn’t go without the guide.
The High Scardus Trail is one such trail. They have a great website that provides a lot of information at https://www.high-scardus-trail.com/en/. This includes details on trail sections, accommodations, conditions, and booking.
The site appears to offer some pre-managed tours that appear to support the challenges of a trail that crosses the borders of North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania multiple times. In reading on other hikers trips, it is apparently harder to get the passes for the border controls without some supports. This makes the option to hire for this beneficial. However, as a lone hiker, the minimum group that would be supported is two people, unless you want to go with a pre-organized group.
The booking functions take you to the Book Your Trail webpage that supports booking multiple hiking tours across Europe.
Although I haven’t followed through to actually book on this site, it does appear to a good one for linking to pre-organized hikes through select parts of the High Scardus Trail. There are a number of options that would appeal to people looking at hiking either in certain countries or considering bagging a few peaks.
Ultimately I am trying to decide whether I should go with a solo journey and take the risks associated with this independent travel, or if I should look at booking one of these deals or create my own customized travel plan. Likely if I do the individual approach—my preferred from previous travels—I may end up doing more hiking within a country, then finding a bus or train to travel across borders.
BorealHiker 