520 km, five of us, and a country being visibly built while we drove through it. The whole route, what it cost, and where I’d actually spend the time.

Albania isn’t an obvious place to go on holiday. When we told people where we were going, most of them said “oh, right” in the tone people use when they can’t quite picture somewhere.

That was part of the appeal. Mum and Dad have a theory that places which haven’t been fully worked out by tourism are more interesting, because the people you meet deal with you naturally rather than professionally. We wanted beaches, history, things to actually do, and somewhere that wasn’t expensive.

We got all of that. What I didn’t expect was which half of it I’d end up liking most.

If you’d asked me before we went, I’d have said the week was building towards the beaches. It wasn’t. The bit I’d go back for is the inland bit — the mountains, the river, the towns. The beaches were nice. Seeing the country was better.

I’ve been on holidays with better hotels. I don’t think I’ve been on one where every single day was so different from the one before it — a castle town, a river, a Cold War bunker, a Roman city, four separate beaches and a capital city, inside a week, without ever feeling rushed.

The other thing I hadn’t expected was to spend the whole time watching a country being built. Not in an abstract way — literally, out of the car window. New tarmac almost everywhere. A tunnel five kilometres long cut straight through a mountain. A car park at the Blue Eye that had clearly been scraped out of a field a few weeks earlier and was already full. A resort going up in the cliffs above a beach that otherwise had about thirty people on it. Dad kept saying it was the fastest-developing place he’d ever been to. I’ve got less to compare it with, but it was impossible to miss.

So what follows is a route that works right now, through a country I don’t think will look like this for very long.

Day 1 — Tirana Airport to Berat

We landed around midday and then spent a long time waiting for a hire car, because the rental company appeared to have taken more bookings than it had cars. We eventually got a VW Jetta instead of the Golf we’d booked, which counts as winning. Seven days cost £111 including the premium insurance.

We skipped Tirana at this end and drove straight to Berat, about two and a half hours away. That was deliberate — we’d looked at starting with two days in the capital and decided it wasn’t enough to hold us. That turned out to be the one thing we got a bit wrong, but more on that at the end of the week.

Berat was the right way to start. The old town climbs a hill in white Ottoman houses with rows of windows stacked above one another, which is why people call it the city of a thousand windows. From across the river it genuinely looks like that — a whole hillside watching you. We walked up to the castle in the late afternoon, came back down through the Mangalem quarter, and sat with drinks above the Gorica Bridge while it got dark and the lights came on in all of them.

Dinner was at Restaurant Klea, on a terrace, about £54 for five of us. We had a local speciality of lamb cooked in soured milk and egg, which sounds wrong and isn’t. The owner ran the place like a performance — properly funny, obviously enjoying himself — and it set the tone for the whole week. Almost everywhere we ate was somebody’s family business, and you could tell.

We stayed at Guest House Iljesa.

Day 2 — Rafting the Vjosa River

Out by 08:30 for Përmet. There’s a shorter route through Çorovodë that we avoided, partly because the road is rough and partly because our hire agreement didn’t love the idea, so we took the SH4/SH75 instead. We arrived at 12:45, just enough time to leave the bags in the car and get straight onto the rafting minibus.

The Vjosa is one of the last wild rivers in Europe — undammed along its length, which is unusual enough that in 2023 Albania made it Europe’s first Wild River National Park. What made rafting it good probably isn’t what you’d guess.

It wasn’t a queue of yellow boats going down a river in convoy. It was us. One raft, one guide, one driver, and nobody else on the water all afternoon. You could tell, too — it was very calm and very quiet, in a way rafting probably isn’t supposed to be.

The actual rafting was all instructions: when to paddle, how fast, harder, softer, paddles in — and mountains on both sides the entire way. Doing something active in the middle of scenery like that is pretty sick. It’s the best couple of hours of the holiday and it isn’t close.

Rafting cost €35 each, booked through Funky Guest House, down from €40 because there were five of us, and that included the kit, the transport and the photos. It’s graded II–III, which means proper moving water and several sections where you get comprehensively soaked, but nothing frightening. Fergus is ten and loved every second.

Afterwards we drove to the thermal pools at Bënjë, next to the Ottoman Kadiut Bridge. Worth saying clearly: they are not hot. They’re lukewarm — a very good outdoor bath rather than a hot spring. But you’re lying in a river valley under an arched stone bridge that’s been there for centuries, in the late afternoon, and nobody minds how long you stay.

From the bridge you can see up into Langarica Canyon, and we decided we were too tired to walk it. Dad has mentioned this several times since. From the photos it looks spectacular, with more pools further up that almost nobody reaches. If you get there with any energy left, go.

We stayed in a private two-bedroom apartment attached to Funky Guest House, £51 booked direct. Dinner at Restaurant Antigonea in town, about £58, with the mountains in view. Dad had boar, which he reported as gamey but less so than venison.

The weather inland, incidentally, was better than anything we got on the coast. Hot, clear and still, every day.

Day 3 — A Cold War bunker and Gjirokastër

Left at 09:00, in Gjirokastër just before 11:00 with a coffee stop at an iron bridge on the way.

We went straight to the Cold War bunker, which you can only see on a guided tour. Most of the rooms are empty — it was stripped during the collapse of communism — so if you’re expecting a museum you’ll be disappointed. What gets you is the scale. Somebody decided this country needed an underground command centre for a war that never came, and then actually built it, room after room after room.

There were about eight of us and one guide, and she was completely into it. I didn’t realise until later in the week how much that mattered.

Then Kale Guesthouse, £56 — a two-bedroom rooftop suite with a balcony looking straight at the castle and out over the valley. It’s the sort of view you’d pay a great deal for anywhere else and we kept going back out onto the balcony to look at it. Our host Adela was brilliant on WhatsApp, including when we got lost finding the place.

Lunch at Taverna Panorama Zhuli, about £30 — a family place with a terrace over the castle, home cooking, homemade baklava and white wine they grow themselves. We got fond of it partly because the husband came out and personally walked us towards our guesthouse after we took a wrong turn. That sort of thing — people really going out of their way to help — happened more than once, and it never stopped being surprising.

Gjirokastër Castle is mostly about the view, with a corridor of cannons and artillery on the way in. Round the back is the stage for the national folk festival, held every five years; empty it’s just a stage, but the photographs of it packed at night, high above the town, made me want to come back in the right year.

We then did Skenduli House and the Ethnographic Museum, next door to each other. Honest verdict: Skenduli is worth it for the building — the height, the jutting balcony, the stained glass — but it isn’t furnished as a home or set up as a museum, so it can feel bare. The Ethnographic Museum is the better visit, especially with younger kids: properly filled, with videos, regional costume and explanations of why the houses are built the way they are. Do both, in that order, and know what each one is.

The Bazaar is lovely and busy and is no longer a local market — it’s a well-kept street of shops, bars and restaurants for visitors. That’s fine if you’re not expecting otherwise. Kalimera Patisserie on Topulli Square just outside it was full of locals and does everything from milkshakes to beer.

Dinner at Bon Appetit — Albanian, French and pasta, which was a relief after several days of very good but very similar food. Carbonara was 450 lek. About £3.85.

Three towns in, the thing I kept noticing was how little any of them had in common with each other. Berat is white and vertical and Ottoman. Përmet is a mountain town on a river. Gjirokastër is grey stone and castles and Cold War concrete. It’s a small country and it keeps changing character.

Day 4 — The Blue Eye, Ksamil and a booking that fell through

Checked out at 10:00 and drove to the Blue Eye Spring.

This was where the speed of the change became impossible to ignore. The roads in felt days old. The car park was raw earth and already filling. There were wooden coffee huts along the walk, a motorised tourist train at 300 lek a head, a new restaurant at the spring, a few rooms in varnished pine trying to blend into the trees, and another hotel going up beyond it, all clearly aimed at a summer that hadn’t started yet.

The spring is worth all of it. Water comes up from underground into a round pool that genuinely looks like an eye, and the blues and greens are ridiculous — the sort of colour you assume has been done to the photograph afterwards.

You can’t swim in it, and nobody was trying. The water comes out of the ground cold enough that the idea seems strange when there’s warm sea an hour away in almost any direction.

We’d have happily paid over the odds to eat somewhere like that, but nobody came near us when we sat down, so we left rather than have a very slow lunch.

Our Ksamil hotel then fell through. We ate at Bar Restaurant Luna while it got sorted out — fine, not a recommendation — and the collapse turned out to be lucky. The original room was £81 a night. A late search found Villa Abedina: two rooms, five beds, a kitchenette and breakfast, £74 for two nights, walking distance from the front, run by a friendly family. Off-season pricing on the coast in May is still doing things like that.

Then Paradise Beach — quiet, loungers for hire, room to put a towel down. Ksamil is a string of small coves rather than one beach, so you can pick, and the water really is turquoise, with islands and Corfu out on the horizon. We walked round to Lori Beach later, smaller and just as good.

It’s also cold in May, and it was windy. That doesn’t ruin it. It lowers it a bit.

Dinner at the family-run Fisherman’s Grill. Dad had a whole octopus for 650 lek and Mum had a whole sea bass. Excellent, and absurdly cheap.

One honest warning about Ksamil. The forecast for our second day was cloud and wind, and it made us realise how completely the town depends on the weather. If you’re an adult happy in a bar, fine. With a grey sky and nothing else to do, less so. Two nights was right. I wouldn’t book four.

The town itself is the least impressive part of it. The coves are beautiful and the water is the reason to come, but Ksamil was a small place until fairly recently and it’s now carrying far more visitors than it was built for. Some of the streets near the water are effectively one lane with traffic going both ways, and getting through when we arrived took a while.

If I’m honest, this was the bit of the week I’d cut. Not because it’s bad — the beaches are genuinely lovely — but because it was the least like the rest of the country.

Day 5 — Butrint

We got to Butrint National Park near opening.

We live in St Albans, which was Roman Verulamium, so I’ve been walking past bits of Roman wall my whole life. Having seen the photos, people have asked me since whether Butrint was better. I don’t think you can really say that. It’s a different thing — different place, different culture — and comparing them doesn’t work.

What I can say is that it’s far more complete. It sits on a headland with water round three sides. The amphitheatre is close to intact and you can walk down into it and sit where people sat, and there’s a church still substantially standing. It’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992, which you believe immediately.

The museum is small and I nearly skipped it, which would have been a mistake. Some of the sculptures in there are in better condition than ones I’ve seen behind glass in much more famous places.

Lunch at The Mussel House, on the water looking over the mussel farm the mussels come from. More expensive than most of our meals and completely worth it. This was the other thing about Albania that caught me off guard — how often we ate genuinely brilliant food, in a spectacular spot, for about half the price of a fairly ordinary dinner out at home.

The wind dropped in the afternoon and the beach was almost empty. My brothers found another boy and played two-a-side football for an hour, which was possibly Fergus’s favourite part of the entire holiday. Dinner at Grill House & Gyros, more Greek than Albanian and very good value — doner 450 lek, souvlaki 350 lek.

Day 6 — Porto Palermo, Jalë and a sunset in Dhërmi

North up the coast, breaking the drive at Porto Palermo Castle — a triangular fortress on a rock, not much inside, but a good half-hour and a great place to stop.

We got drinks, asked the people there which beach we should actually go to, and were told Jalë. Good advice. It’s a curve of beach held between hills so you’re looking straight out to sea, the water goes clear to turquoise as it deepens, and although there were plenty of loungers it wasn’t remotely busy.

One thing surprised me. Having a beach that good nearly to ourselves was great, and also slightly weird. There was a huge amount of building going on behind us, and then a beach with hardly anyone on it. A few more people and a bit more noise would have been better. Not full — just not this empty.

Above Jalë there’s an enormous, expensive-looking resort being cut into the cliffs, nowhere near finished. It’ll probably be very good. It could also be almost anywhere on the Mediterranean, which is the thing I keep coming back to.

What we liked about Albania was that people treated us like people — the man at Zhuli walking us towards our guesthouse, the guide on the river, Adela on WhatsApp, Andreas sending us to a better restaurant than the one where he worked. It’s hard to picture a coast of resorts, which is what seems to be emerging, keeping much of that character. Somewhere in there, guests stop being guests.

So if you go to the coast, my advice is skip the stretches that are just hotels, hotels, hotels, and find the quieter parts near the cliffs. That’s where it’s still worth it.

The coast isn’t one place either. Ksamil feels like an accessible Greek or Spanish resort town, lots of small hotels owned by individual families. Jalë feels like it’s becoming premium. Dhërmi feels higher-end again but spread across several hotels rather than one big development. Three towns within an hour of each other, all heading somewhere different.

Lunch at Mr Chicken on the way down — a small open-air place doing chicken about six different ways, essentially a locally run Nando’s. We arrived hungry and between mealtimes, so we were the only people in there. I’ve eaten in some very good restaurants in Albania and I still specifically remember that chicken burger, which probably says something about me.

Dhërmi beach is small pebbles rather than sand, perfectly comfortable underfoot, with the clearest water of the trip. We stayed as it filled up, which it never quite did.

We slept at Xheko Rooms up the hill, two triples for £54, with a very welcoming host called Andreas and a view down the coast. It’s five minutes by car from the beach and about twenty minutes walking back up, steeply enough that we drove after dinner.

Andreas sent us to Luciano, which was the best meal of the week and felt like eating at a smart hotel — big menu, proper design, open plan and no windows, the coast laid out in front of us and the sky going pink over the sea while we ate. Dad had filet mignon for 2,000 lek, which is £17. All five of us had soufflé at 600 lek. It was the sort of dinner that would be a special occasion at home, and it was just Friday.

Day 7 — Durrës, Tirana, and the day we should have given longer

Out at 10:00, north on the SH8, and onto the Vlorë bypass — the single best illustration of everything I’ve said about the country being built. It climbs into the mountains on brand-new tarmac, across new bridges, through a tunnel that must be five kilometres long, with the whole coast dropping away below you. We stopped at a couple of gravel lay-bys purely to look at it. (We also stopped at a roadside café that charged us more for a few soft drinks than almost anywhere else in Albania. It happens.)

Durrës at about 12:45. The Roman amphitheatre first — around 300 lek for adults, 150 for 12–18s, so roughly 900 lek for the five of us. Lunch at Il Maestro’s Pizzeria, so new they had photographers in shooting the pizzas, thin Naples-style and £5–7. Then ice cream and a wander past the Venetian Tower and the old city wall down to the seafront.

Durrës is much more of a proper city than I expected, full of cafés and bars, and I can imagine it becoming a cheap weekend-break destination. The waterfront is halfway through being rebuilt — new pier, shops, basketball courts — but only halfway: the beach itself was scruffy and full of washed-up debris. The archaeological museum was shut for refurbishment.

Then Tirana, which is where we found out we’d made a mistake at the start of the week.

We’d skipped it on day one because we didn’t think a capital city would hold us for two days. We had about six hours there and it wasn’t enough. It’s a genuinely interesting city — bright painted apartment blocks, strange and brilliant modern buildings including one deliberately shaped like a head looking across at Skanderbeg Square, mosques, markets, and a real sense of a place doing well.

That last part was the surprise. There’s obvious money in Tirana now — smart shopping, new restaurant and bar arcades, places that would not be out of place in any Western European capital. What struck me was who was in them. Albanians. Not tour groups. This is a country that spent decades cut off and poor, and the good bits of its capital appear to be being enjoyed by the people who live there. After a week of watching things get built for visitors, that felt like the most encouraging thing we saw.

We spent an hour at Bunk’Art 2, beneath Skanderbeg Square, which is far more of a museum than the Gjirokastër bunker — full, artful, headsets, and extremely well done. The material itself is hard going. What stuck with my brothers was the number of people killed trying to leave the country, and the scale of surveillance on foreigners: three hotels with a listening device in every room.

Both are worth doing, and the comparison surprised me. Bunk’Art has more in it and is much busier. Gjirokastër has almost nothing in it and a person talking to eight of you in a quiet corridor. The quiet one is the one I felt more. It turns out a guide who cares beats a headset, even when the headset has better material.

After that, Skanderbeg Square, a look inside Et’hem Bey Mosque, and the Pazari i Ri market, where we bought a fridge magnet, as is traditional. Dinner at Shtëpia e Birrës King Pils just off the market: skewers, tzatziki, fresh bread and chips, very cheap and very good.

We finished around the Tirana Castle lane, which is smart and busy and full of bars and nice shops, and which reminded me of an outdoor food court at Westfield. I was ready to be a bit sniffy about it, and then noticed that everyone in it was Albanian. It hadn’t been built for us at all.

Car back at the airport by 21:00.

Practical things worth knowing

• Get lek out early, and in big amounts. Inland, plenty of places don’t take euros or cards. ATM charges are a flat fee per withdrawal, not a percentage — somewhere between 500 and 1,000 lek depending on the machine — so taking out more, less often, saves real money.
• Download the maps before you go. Offline Google Maps for Vlorë County and Gjirokastër County. Signal disappears in the mountains.
• Off-peak, book coastal accommodation late if you can bear it. Our best-value room of the trip came from a booking falling through the same afternoon. In high summer I wouldn’t risk it.
• Don’t build the trip around one beach town. Ksamil is beautiful and completely weather-dependent. Pack cards and a book.
• The driving is easier than you’d think. The roads are better than we expected and getting better by the month. Check what your hire agreement says about unsurfaced routes before planning anything clever.

Anything I’d change?

Give Tirana proper time. Maybe two days at the start, as we originally considered and then talked ourselves out of.

Walk up Langarica Canyon. We were tired, we skipped it, and everything we’ve seen since says it was the mistake of the week.

Two nights in Ksamil, not more. Maybe even one, and put the spare night further north up the coast, somewhere quieter.

Beyond that, I’d keep the shape: inland first, coast second, city last. If I had to give one piece of advice it’s to do both halves — get up into the mountains and the towns as well as down to the sea. The country is the interesting part. The beaches are a bonus.

Go now, or wait?

Go now, I think. But it depends what you want.

If what you want is a really premium, guaranteed-experience beach resort, wait — because in five years the coast will have far more of them, and they’ll be better at being resorts than anything there today. Bigger hotels, fewer locally run places, probably a franchise McDonald’s or two.

If what you want is what we got, go now, because that’s the bit that’s disappearing.

The building itself is obviously good for Albania. It brings money into the places that need it, and the coast is the right place for it to happen. What I’d hate is that same thing arriving inland — Berat, or that village in the mountains. Those are better as they are, with a couple of B&Bs and not much else.

Would I go straight back? Probably not, but not because there’s anything wrong with it. There’s a lot of the world I haven’t seen, and I’d rather see somewhere new than return to the same place twice. Albania is somewhere everyone should go once.

Just go while it’s still like this.

One last thing

Dad put about a hundred photos from the week into a reel, which does a better job of the colours than anything I’ve written.

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