Eastern Europe - Days 65 & 66 - Saranda, Albania

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This morning we left Gjirokastra and headed off in a private transport to the Adriatic Coast (well it is practically the Ionian Coast now) and the town of Saranda. The Saranda that we are staying in apparently mostly dates from the 1930s when people began to settle here during the communist times. Hence the large amount of ugly concrete buildings. The drive here from Gjirokastra was just lovely. It was a short drive only being 50kms, however the drive was over some pretty intense hills and they don't have 3 lane highways here. Instead you have very windy, narrow roads with suicidal drivers on them. However the scenery was just amazing. On the way to Saranda we stopped at a place called the Blue Eyed Spring. And this was just stunning (check out the photos). Apparently the water comes out of the earth here at the rates of 8 cubic metres a second. I am not 100% sure of the reason for the water being so blue but I think it is something to do with the types of rocks that are present here (probably something about ground up minerals suspended in the water. Anyway it was the most amazingly beautiful place. But the water was freezing!

After we had finished drooling over the spring we hopped back into our death transport and sped over to Saranda. The hotel that we are staying in here is quite a way out of town, which was a bit annoying at first, but in hindsight is actually quite a blessing as we are away from all the noise and traffic and we are also close to quite a lovely beach. So of course after we arrived the next thing we did was head to the beach. The Mango Beach to be precise. Where we spent the next few hours swimming and lying in the sun. I managed to finish my book by 4pm and then got promptly bored so I decided to go for a walk into town. Although the hotel is quite a way from town the walk in only took 20 minutes. So town was also where we headed for dinner tonight. Tomorrow we are heading off to the Butrint ruins.

This morning we caught a local bus and headed off to the ruins at Butrint. I am a little ashamed to admit that until yesterday I had never actually heard of Butrint, but they are the most lovely set of ruins. They are also incredibly old dating back to at least 8th century BC. Butrint is actually located in quite a key strategic area for defense and was therefore subsequently conquered and reconquered by a number of different people. The romans, byzantines, normans, venetians, turks were all there are various points in time. We arrived at Butrint nice and early and this meant that we had the place pretty much to ourselves. I wandered off by myself and spent a very pleasant hour and a half walking through the ruins. I particulalry enjoyed the baptistry and cathedral as well as the ruins of the Triconch palace. The nicest thing about the ruins was that it was lovely and shady. There were many trees established on the peninsular and this made walking around the ruins a pleasure.

After I had finished my wandering in the ruins I headed off to the cafe to meet up with the rest of the group and we spent about 2 hours in pleasant conversation until the next bus back to Saranda was ready to leave at 12:30pm. When we arrived back in town I took a few moments to dash up to the room to pop my bikini on and then headed off on a bit of an exploratory walk to find a path to the castle. Saranda has a ruin of a castle (with a name that begins with L) at the top of one of its hills, and I decided that it would be a great idea to try and walk up to it. Of course I was planning on doing this at the hottest time of the day (2pm). Barbara thought I was slightly mad and warned me against the heat of the day, to which I replied that I was actually finding the weather a little cool compared to Dubai and then she said that the heat wasn't the worst thing and that the dust was going to be more of a problem on the walk, to which I again replied that I came from Dubai and quite frankly if you don't end up eating half the desert on a walk around the arabian ranches then you are doing really well. And I have to report that the walk was really rather easy and quite frankly wasn't a problem to achieve during the heat of the day. However if you haven't spent the last two years in Dubai you may have different thoughts on the matter and I therefore probably wouldn't advise doing it at that time of day either.

Of course being a bit dim I had managed to walk out of the hotel without my camera, which meant that I couldn't take any photos of the absolutley glorious view that I was presented with when I got to the top of the hill. Sorry. I stayed up at the top of the hill for a little while, admiring the view that I can't share with anyone, and then tootled back into town on that same path. After treating myself to a wee ice cream I headed off to Mango Beach again to see if anyone else of the group was there and to have a swim. When I arrived I couldn't immediately see anyone else from the tour and it wasn't until Andrew waved at me that I recognised him and Stuart. The reason that I didn't recognise them is because they were sitting with 3 gorgeous Albanian boys. These guys turned out to have just graduated from military school and were about to become officers in the army. Well Stuie and Andrew were in heaven. Apparently Stuie had been talking to them ever since he arrived at the beach at 1:30pm. And I only got there at 4pm. I have to say that the guys were lovely. They were very friendly and 2 of them spoke good english. And bless them they even told me that I was very pretty. Stuie told me while we were swimming that when they saw that he was by himself they asked if he would like to join them. Isn't that just lovely! We left the beach a little while later but Stuie managed to find out where they were planning on going to tonight so I would not be at all surprised if Stu doesn't 'bump' into them later on at the night club down by the beach.

And thus pretty much ends our Albanian adventure as tomorrow we are off to Corfu, Greece.

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