Intro [Music] hello and welcome to the foothills of the accursed mountains in Kosovo my name is Thomas and I produce travel content mainly around Europe compared to other regions of the continent this range is definitely rather under visited by International Travelers currently I'm in the city of Paya which is the gateway to this very range and I'm very excited to document a lot of the sites I'm going to be seeing today so without further ado let the adventure begin as I set off from this Mountain City I take a short three kilometer hike to the Tibetan Bridge marking the start of my via ferrata Roots I spend the rest of my time over waterfalls through forests along Mountain Lakes barely seeing anyone for literally hours on end [Music] thank you Rugiver Valley I'm now in the rugiver valley here it's considered to be one of the longest and deepest in Europe it measures anything from 650 to a thousand meters and as you can see uh the river below me here it hosts a gamut of surprises from caves and of course the Via ferrata which is what I'm doing today this outdoor sport is not for the faint-hearted or for those with acrophobia and certainly not for anyone wishing to wear high heels essential equipment includes two climbing Clips also known as crabs energy absorbing lanyards a helmet harness and a good pair of hiking boots [Music] Mountain Lakes this is one of the beautiful Mountain Lakes in the rugiver valley it's about 30 kilometers from where I started out earlier and as you can see it's absolutely gorgeous the pristineness of the water the tranquility and of course void of any hikers apart from myself and my guide I came with today approaching the middle of summer time and you can still see patches of snow up on the ridge there this is my friend Boran and we're heading now to the second Lake on our Journey Through The Rook of the valley boron's a very experienced Mountaineer he's done all sorts in fact he even cycled up here didn't you Boran yeah it's incredible and you also do a bit of rock climbing yeah and how long have you done these for uh three years three or three something like that you're very lucky to be in such a Scenic part of the world yes this is the second Lake in the rugiver valley it's in fact a glacial Lake and of course earlier in the year it would have been somewhat larger in surface area it's extremely cold to swim in one of the things I particularly like about this part of the number of wildflowers punctuating the Mountain slopes quite a lot of loose Rock [Music] The Ridges are somewhat steep but anyone with a moderate level of fitness you can easily manage these without too much trouble [Music] Pay now one of the things I noted after coming here was that payer experienced a pretty severe flood one of the worst in fact that some people had experienced it's caused a huge mudslide water ended up flowing with fridges down the Main High streets and it took a long time to clear so of course my thoughts and prayers go out to the people that suffered this it ended up I believe killing two people apart from the mountains pay was the city worth visiting like with a lot of towns and cities in the south of Kosovo it has the Charming Parts in the center with a number of shops and cafes to econoita worth spending a day at least after spending a bit of time around town befriending locals breathing in the Mountain Air and getting up close to a number of small waterfalls I took advantage of a rainy day by checking into the five-star hotel ducagini like with the mountain slopes I had most of the Leisure Center to myself staff here were amazing and my Mountain facing room was a perfect place to unwind and reflect on time to old and new details about the hotel and operator I used for the Via ferata can be found in Links at the description at the bottom of this video [Music] that concludes my journey through the rugiver valley I definitely consider this to be one of the more memorable experiences I've had through Eastern Europe of late lastly if YouTube don't give you any notifications about new content I produce please dip into my channel every so often I am hoping to produce videos more frequently than I have done in the meantime enjoy the rest of the summer and you'll see me very soon goodbye [Music]