and around the beautiful country of Albania

When I finally left Tirana, my first stop was Berat – also known as the ‘city of a thousand windows’.  Not sure that this is a very meaningful description if other windows are like two of the three on my hostel dorm: window frames and panes set onto the front of a brick wall (with no gap in the bricks for windows)!!  But it truly is a beautiful city, dominated by a large castle overlooking it from a hilltop.  Started by the Romans and largely re-built by the Byzantines in the thirteenth century, it contains within its walls a number of Orthodox churches, two Ottoman-era mosques, a museum and of course a number of cafes.

From there I moved on to Gjirokaster, another inland city built around an old hilltop fortress, this one even larger as it includes a residential quarter within its walls as well as a former prison and a museum.  Again, there were cultural events in the city – this picture being a group of polyphonic singers on stage in one of the city squares, and again, free of charge!

Then further south to Saranda, so as to visit the UNESCO-listed Roman ruins of Butrint – a very large site on a bit of land surrounded by a lagoon, with forest around the ruins, and lots of resident tortoises!  Well worth the trip.  Albania does not only have a lot of places to see, however, it also has an 'interesting' culture.  One example was my bus trip from Gjirokaster to Saranda.  I'd seen online that there was a bus departing at 11am, costing €6, but was just approaching the bus station when a man standing next to a car looked at me and asked "Saranda?".  I said yes, but that I didn't want to pay for a taxi, was on my way to the bus.  In broken English he tried to tell me there was a problem with the bus, and that I should speak to the German couple already beside his car; they explained that apparently the 11am bus often didn't run, as there were not enough passengers, and that this guy said he'd take them, for €4, to connect with his brother, who would take them the rest of the way.  Somehow it was believable, so I put my luggage in the boot and got in the car with them.  We set off, and a few kilometres beyond Gjirokaster he turned off the road, and parked behind a bus.  We had to get out and onto the bus, swapping with passengers going the other way.  I paid my €4 to the bus driver who was the brother of the man driving the car ... so he and his brother were effectively 'stealing' the passengers from the official bus company (which was why it had so few passengers)!

I could have stayed in Saranda for another week or so, just hanging out with the really interesting guests at my hostel (in some ways I do regret volunteering in Tirana – I’d had no idea how much I would enjoy my travels around this small country!), but I had to move on to Durres, and then to Vlore, and finally to Shkodra, from where I’d booked a place on a three day trip into the mountains.  After an early start and a three-hour drive, this involved a beautiful three-hour (30 kilometre) ferry ride along Komani Lake, which is a deep gorge that was damned at one end (electricity production?) and so now contains deep water between its dramatic, rocky, mountains.  From there another drive to the village of Valbona, where we stayed that night readying ourselves for the next day’s adventure – a 15km long trail through the Albanian Alps, rising over 1,000m to a pass (above the snowline) over the Alps and then down some 760m to our guesthouse on the other side.  I was nervous, especially when I saw how much younger most of the other hikers were … and it was tough (this photo has another hiker in to show the steepness of the path and the size of many of the rocks we had to negotiate on the path … but I made it.  & even had enough energy to take another walk in the late afternoon to a nearby waterfall, and a longer trip the next morning to a deep spring (one of the country’s two ‘Blue Eyes’, the other of which I saw near Saranda) before the bus trip back to Shkodra.  It was an amazing trip – even the villages where we started and ended the hike – this being the view from my guesthouse in Theth!