Day 19, 21st April

This is where we stopped at Vlore

Spent night here

From Vlore we made for Gjirokastor and the road rose through some beautiful countryside. Stopped for a coffee at a layby where a cow was wandering about in the road. The valley below was covered in olive groves and vineyards.

Road from Vlore to Gjirokastor
Cow in road

Distant peaks were covered in snow. We drove through coniferous forests and, when we got to the top of the hill, nothing could have prepared us for the sight below. The road wound down for a vertical distance of several thousand feet, almost to the Adriatic Sea, in 60-70 hairpin bends with terrifying drops and frequent roadside shrines with pictures of young men covered in flowers. The spinechilling thought of how they died made me drive more carefully than usual. From Dzhermi at the bottom of the hill we drove a tortuous route up and down and round and round through south-west Albania and finally arrived at Butrint, a Grecian/Roman/Byzantine/Venetian site opposite Corfu. I had never heard of it but apparently Julius Caesar, Edward Lear, Lord Byron and Gerald Durrell have all been there. We could have gone to see Ali Pasha’s castle but not enough time.

Butrint palace
Butrint amphitheatre

We then drove over another high pass through beautiful oak forests with lilac trees and came down to a wide plain with Gjirokastor at the end of it. Hoping to find a restaurant with free wifi because the mifi doesn’t seem to work in Albania, we came to Hotel Gerald where a lovely family cooked a most delicious Albanian-type meal for us.

Hotel Gerald
Church in Gjirokastor

We found a free car park with two coaches, a car full of young people playing a mixture of Albanian folk music and Albanian gangsta rap on a very load radio, and a French motorhome, and bedded down for the night.

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