Hi all,
My wife and I are heading to Albania from the UK in June for an 11 night holiday. We are very excited as it’s our first visit and it looks like a beautiful country. We will spend a few days in the capital and then rent a car to drive to other locations.
Has anyone visited before? Any tips? I noticed on TH I don’t think there are any HO in the country.
Thanks, Emma
Hi Emma (@UKSitter) - Albania has been on our list for some time… we were going to drive the van there had the pandemic not been so prolonged, so this adventure is yet to materialize, and I’ll be watching this thread with interest.
Bloggers, Goats on the Road and Chasing the Donkey have some good blogs while we wait for our members to hopefully share their travel stories!
Thanks very much Vanessa, very useful links! I hope you can make it there soon
Hello @UKSitter I spent some time in Albania 10 years ago. Loved it. Here are some of my impressions : https://www.myfeetaremeanttoroam.com/category/albania/
I really enjoyed albania. beautiful country and friendly people relative to the part of the world. it helps that they LOVE people from the US. if they are still doing the free historical walking tour in tirana, i definitely recommend it. i learned a ton and the guide was great. learning about history that happened while I was alive is always interesting.
Thanks very much everyone! Really useful links. I will keep you posted on our trip 
have you watched the promo videos that jim belushi did? he’s of albanian descent and narrated some videos highlighting the beauty and diversity of the country. they’re worth a google if you’ve not already watched.
Ooo no I haven’t, I will take a look!
Never been to Albania, it’s high on my list of places I hope to visit someday. Not sure what parts of the country you’ll be exploring with the car but this restaurant Mrizi i Zanave is supposed to be incredible if you are close!
It was a few months ago now but I thought I’d update you all on our holiday.
In short we absolutely loved Albania! Absolutely stunning scenery - city, mountains, gorgeous beaches and countryside, it really does have a bit of everything! The people were very helpful and excited that we were tourists in their country. The food was delicious and we found everything very very reasonable in terms of price - around 1/3 of what you’d pay in the UK. We ate in local restaurants and some quite fancy places at times but still found it affordable. We stayed mainly in Air BnBs and whilst there wasn’t a huge choice, we stayed in some lovely apartments.
We flew to Tirana and spent a few nights there before driving south via the Llogara Pass to Sarande where we visited Ksamil and Gjirokaster too. Due to the 37c temperatures in early June we didn’t visit as many places as we would have liked but the good air con inside and in the hire car saved us!
A note on driving, I don’t drive so my wife did all the driving which she found pretty terrifying at times. Out of the main cities/towns it was quieter on the roads but generally people didn’t seem to observe road rules so I’d recommend being a confident driver when driving in Albania. After a few days we got into the rhythm of it though and loved being able to see the diversity of the country and enjoyed coming across chickens, cows, goats, sheep, horses and even a tortoise on our road trip!
From Sarande you can visit the Greek island of Corfu which was beautiful so we were happy we managed to get 2 countries into 1 trip.
We would definitely return to Albania and I hope more UK cities begin to fly there as I think at the moment it is limited to London and perhaps Liverpool.
