Authenticity: Vermosh, Albania

Albania’s northern highlands are known as the Albanian Alps, and this is where some of the most traditional village life and untouched scenery can be found. Over the weekend, my two OA co-workers and I traveled to the northernmost village of Vermosh, just short of the Montenegran border, to help put this remote region on the map.

For centuries, traditional village homes have been in the hospitality business by custom, receiving travelers who were moving through the Balkan region by caravan. Now, this tradition of hospitality means a little economic opportunity for these families to host today’s travelers who appreciate the local culture and unspoiled nature of the area more and more.

I’ve developed a major crush on World Hotel Link, an online booking system whose mission is to provide the IT platform necessary for locally-owned and smaller-scale accommodations to market themselves on the web. It focuses on parts of the world such as Albania where technological resources are lacking and whose local economies have the most to gain. Outdoor Albania has partnered with WHL to help these northern Albanian village guesthouses get online. Our job was to gather all the information necessary to make these truly authentic accommodations their own WHL-powered websites.

The first highlight of the trip was the village homestay in Vermosh where Flamur and his family received us in their guesthouse. We shared a home-cooked dinner with them and they told us how the guest home was vacant because six of Flamur’s siblings had immigrated to the United States. They poured us shots of Raki, the local brew, which serves as an extra blanket on cold alpine nights.

The second highlight was the Nature Hostel, where an Albanian carpenter has his guesthouse ready and has even built a tree-house bar where mountain spring water was pumped up into a bucket to keep the drinks cold. Brilliant! Now he’s just waiting for tourists to come and enjoy it. I’ll do everything I can to bring these people some business.

serious hay











mountains, even by my Colorado standards