Ten days in Albania: Tirana, Berat and a coast that is not only Ksamil

What to take away

• A rental car is not optional. The best bays are 20 minutes off the bus route.
• Ksamil is beautiful and small. Go at 08:00 or go somewhere else that day.
• Berat and Gjirokaster deserve a night each, not a photo stop on the drive south.
• Bring cash in lek. Outside Tirana and Saranda the card reader is decorative.
• Butrint at opening is empty. By eleven it is a car park with a ruin attached.

The Ksamil problem

Almost every clip in our shared folder was one of about five coves near Ksamil, filmed from a drone at eye-watering saturation with no name attached. When we mapped them, four of the five turned out to be the same three hundred metres of sand, and the fifth was in Greece.

Ksamil is genuinely beautiful. It is also a village at the end of a peninsula with a handful of small beaches, and in July it receives more people than those beaches can hold. Every sunbed is rented, the water in front of them is a wall of shoulders, and parking is a contact sport.

The fix is not to skip it. Go at eight in the morning, swim for two hours, leave before the coaches arrive, and put your actual beach days somewhere with more coast per person. Borsh, Dhermi, Gjipe and Porto Palermo all qualify, and only one of them needs a hike.

• Ksamil before 09:00 or after 18:00. It is a different place at both.
• Borsh is the longest beach on the Riviera and nobody films it.
• Gjipe is a 25 minute walk down a canyon, which filters out most people.
• Porto Palermo has a castle on a causeway and water like a swimming pool.

Getting around: furgons, the Llogara Pass and one flat tyre

Albania has no useful train network for a trip like this. Intercity travel means furgons, minibuses that leave a yard when they are full rather than a station at a time, plus coaches on the main corridors. They are cheap and they work. They will not get you to the bay you saved.

We rented in Tirana and returned to Tirana, which costs less than a one-way drop in Saranda. The road that matters is the SH8 over the Llogara Pass: it climbs through pine forest to just over a thousand metres and then drops onto the coast in a series of switchbacks that is the best twenty minutes of driving on the trip.

Two practical notes. Surface quality falls off a cliff the moment you leave a main road, and the descent to several good beaches is a steep unsealed track. We picked up a puncture on the way to Gjipe, an outcome so routine that the man who fixed it in Dhermi did not ask what happened. Check the car has a real spare before you leave the lot.

Berat and Gjirokaster are not photo stops

Both are UNESCO listed, both are Ottoman-era stone towns stacked up a hillside, and both get treated as a two-hour break on the drive to the sea. That is a mistake, and it is mostly about light: the stacked windows of the Mangalem quarter in Berat only look like the photograph late in the afternoon and after dark.

Berat rewards a night because its castle is inhabited. It is not a monument you tour. There are houses, churches, two restaurants and washing lines inside the walls, and if you walk up in the evening after the day trips have gone you get the ramparts more or less to yourself.

Gjirokaster is steeper, greyer and in some ways more interesting. The castle holds a Cold War museum and an American reconnaissance aircraft that has been parked there since the 1950s with several competing explanations. One night is enough here. Two is right in Berat.

Butrint, and the case for the 08:00 rule

Butrint is a Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Venetian site stacked on one wooded peninsula in a lagoon, and it is the best single sight in southern Albania. Entry was 1,000 lek. It opens early, and the coaches from Saranda and the Corfu day boats start arriving around ten.

We were at the gate at opening with a coffee from the kiosk, walked the loop in the cool with perhaps fifteen other people in the entire park, and were leaving as the first tour groups queued. It is the same trick as the Dubrovnik walls or Sigiriya, and it works everywhere: the site is not crowded, the middle of the day is.

The Blue Eye, half an hour inland, is the other place this matters. It is a karst spring the colour of antifreeze, it is small, and it is a five-minute walk from a car park that fills by mid morning. Take it on the way to somewhere rather than as a destination.

Money, and why the split got complicated

Albania is cheap by western European standards and less cheap than it was five years ago. Dinner with wine on the coast ran 1,800 to 2,500 lek a head, two loungers and an umbrella about 1,000 lek, a strong coffee 100 to 150 lek.

The catch is cash. Restaurants in Tirana and Saranda take cards. A konoba in Borsh, a lounger rental, the parking attendant above Gjipe and the man who fixed our tyre all want lek in notes, and the nearest machine can be twenty kilometres away. Withdraw at bank machines; the standalone ones on seafronts charge fees that are hard to believe.

For five people this created the usual mess. One person pays cash for eleven small things, another puts fuel and two apartments on a card, and by day four nobody can reconstruct any of it. We logged each one as it happened, photographed the two big receipts, and settled once at the airport with three transfers instead of eleven.

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