Book's links to new walking holiday

I always enjoy the Sunday Times, particularly the Travel Section. So I was especially delighted today to see in an article headlined Life’s better off the beaten track, a company had launched a new walking holiday to Northern Albania.

The article said: “There aren’t many real adventures left in Europe. Here’s one of them. Up in the isolated Thethi Valley, in the Albanian Alps, farmsteads are still reached only by tracks, the nearest shop is a five-hour drive away and the tradition of hospitality to visitors is as strong as ever.  The scenery has been compared to the Himalayas.”

What also caught my attention is that the trip visits two places mentioned in my book God’s Secret Listener , published by Lion/Hudson/Monarch – Shkodra, which is Northern Albania’s oldest city, and the lovely historical, hilltop town of Kruja.

When the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha abolished religion, or so he thought, he decided the Roman Catholic cathedral in Shkodra (pictured below) should be converted into a much better use than a religious building – and so he ordered it to be turned into a volleyball court.

To ensure the residents did not become interested in religion again Hoxha also decided to build the world’s first Museum of Atheism in the city in 1972. After the fall of Communism the museum was closed.

When Berti’s friend, Sali Rahmani, was interrogated by the Yugoslav secret police they accused him of being involved in an imaginative scheme to get the Christian message into the closed country of Albania by filling 1,000 plastic bags with literature and dropping them into the 335-kilometre-long River Drin in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, to float downstream into Albania.

Sali knew about the plan but had not been involved in it. His interrogators didn’t believe his denial of innocence and had great delight telling him it had been a useless enterprise since the authorities had fished all the plastic bags out of the river.

But Sali had the last laugh when he later went to visit Christians in Kruja and one of them produced the plastic bag and literature which he had found in the river, and said he had read it all.

It is too late for my wife Jan and I to go on this walking holiday as it starts in September and we are already booked for those dates. But we have emailed the company to give us the times of their next trip to Northern Albania as we would love to see Shkodra and Kruja, plus the dramatic mountain scenery.

For more details contact KE Adventure (01768 773966) or log on to www.keadventure.com