Check out the bash command 'shopt -s cdable_vars' From the man bash page: If set, an argument to the cd builtin command that is not a directory is assumed to be the name of a variable whose value is the directory to change to.

# in .bash_profile or other suitable location
shopt -s cdable_vars
export ne="/etc/network/"
 
# in the shell
source .bash_profile # (just this once, to reload the edited file)
cd ne
pwd  # /etc/network/