Eastern Europe - Days 63 & 64 - Gijrokastra, Albania

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We left Berat this morning on a private transport and headed off towards a town called Gijrokastra. This was approximately 4 hours drive away from Berat, but was probably only 3kms down the road. No not really but the roads in Albania are certainly not 6 land super highways so the distance between the two towns probably isn't all that large. The drive itself was relatively uneventful, but that could be because I spent a large portion of time with my eyes closed, dozing away quietly. The biggest excitement of the day came when we arrived at Gijrokastra and tried to check into our hotel. I am still not 100% certain what actually happened but we certainly didn't have any rooms in the hotel at the start. It was only after we had sat down and waited for 15 minutes, and then loaded ourselves up with all our gear and walked back down the stairs and outside to the waiting van, and started loading our bags back into the van that suddenly everything was ok and we had been found rooms at the hotel. So although it took us about 40 minutes to check into the hotel we did finally managed to get rooms. Poor old Barbara looked a little bit frazzled at the end of the experience though.

After settling into our rooms we headed off in taxis to go up the hill to take a look at the old fortress. Yes that is right. There is another fortress in Gijrokastra, and I am sure that our next town will also have an old fortress just like every other city that I have been to in the last 5 weeks. However we did have a slight debacle with our taxis. We had to catch 3 separate taxis and apparently the taxi drivers had been told to take us to the castle gates. However the place where 2 of the taxis dropped us off didn't really look like city gates to us. And unfortunately Barbara wasn't in either of those taxis. So we waited around for a little while to see if Barbara Ann would turn up, and when she didn't we decided to head off and see if we could find the entrance to the castle by ourselves. Which we managed to do. And there waiting for us inside was Barbara, probably heartily wishing that today would just end so she could have some peace and quiet. The castle was acutally quite extensive and interesting and Barbs told me that it had been re-built by one of the Pashas, probably in the 1400s but that Gijrokastra actually reached its hey day in the 1300s. The castle was very ruined and had lots of little nooks and crannies that you could loose yourselve in as you explored through it. But probably the best part of the castle that was found was the bar. Most people decided that after a long day of travelling and not getting rooms and then getting lost in taxis that a well deserved beer was in order.

Tomorrow we have a free day in Gijrokastra to explore the rest of the town for ourselves.

Well it is now tomorrow, which is obviously the new today. This morning I woke up nice and early and met Leanne as she walked out of her door to go and get some breakfast. Somehow I managed to convince her to come on a walk with me. At this point in time I had the vague intention of walking up towards the castle and then perhaps heading off towards the old Ottoman house and then maybe to see if I could get to the top of the hill just behind the Ottoman house. So Leanne and I started walking, without realising that our walk was soon to become much greater than this. We started out without any major purpose and just headed off towards the castle. When we got to the castle walls we decided to go right and then each time we got towards the end of a street we decided to keep heading up. This soon lead us very up and before we knew it we were right at the end of the village up in the hills. And then we decided (well at least I convinced Leeane) to keep going and we ended up right in the hills behind Gjirokastra. It was a truely lovely walk and we ended up sitting on a rock under a tree just admiring the town. We had an amazing view of the Castle as we were so far above it. And yesterday the walk to the castle had looked rather long!

We spent about 3 hours walking up the hill and sitting at the top of it and then walking down again. Just enough time to pass most of the morning by quite successfully. We did have a small problem when we tried to come back down the hill as the horses that we had passed on the way up the hill had decided to stand right in the way of the rather narrow path that we needed to use to get back down the mountain. These weren't wild horses but they weren't the tamest things in the world either and we were a little nervoud about trying to get past them as they had been a bit skittish and kicking earlier on. However a little boy turned up and managed to herd the horses out of our way so we were free to descend the hill.

When we were halfway down the streets through the town we ran into Barbara and I decided that I wasn't quite ready to head back to the hotel and ended up having a wee drink with Babs. We went to a very local place that was full of men, who all stared at the two european women who were walking into their bar to get a drink. After our drink we headed off on a bit of an explore of the old town of Gjirokastra, particually to try and find the old hamman and 7 fountains ruins. When we actually found them they weren't the most exciting items in the world. However what would be really great is if they did them up a little bit and then started to offer the traditional hamman. I think the person that did that would make a killing in the future from tourists.

After all the exercise of the morning I decided to head back to the hotel to have a wee lie down and siesta during the hottest part of the day. This took me through to about 5:30pm when we walked up the hill to the old town again to go to meet the group for a group dinner at a lovely little local restaurant. The restaurant was actually owned and run by the Dumi family. And it was great. The food was wonderful and the prices were so reasonable.

Tomorrow we leave Gjirokastra and head off towards the coast to Saranda.

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