In this article I’ll tell you about excursions around Albania. Excursions in Albania are colourful and picturesque — more on them a little later; but first, a few words about the receiving agency, Aler Travel. (I apologise in advance for the long text, but I’ve simply blown a fuse.)
After landing in Albania, we went through the checks, collected our suitcases, quickly found the guide and were soon on the bus. All pretty standard — it’s not my first time abroad, so I didn’t bother about it. But!
1) The bus guide, as always, scared the tourists that “your travel insurance doesn’t apply if you book an excursion with a company other than ours”. Honestly, aren’t you tired of fooling people? It’s complete nonsense — especially since the receiving agency doesn’t know which company issued the tourist’s insurance or what it covers. And the insurance says nothing of the kind; on the contrary, it says “Valid for the duration of the stay in the country, throughout the country”. All as usual… There’s a simple way to expose such deceivers. Ask 2 questions. 1. If I trip on the beach and break my leg, does the insurance cover it? They’ll answer yes. 2. What if I trip on someone else’s excursion and break my leg, but don’t tell you it happened on an excursion and say I was on the beach?
2) This is less about the company and more about the guide herself, Alina. At least that’s how she introduced herself, and she wrote down her number, +355682618779. All the way she kept saying that for any questions about excursions or car rental we should contact her on that number. But when we needed to rent a car, she wrote to us that we should go to reception or Waikiki and look for a car there. So what’s the point of her as a guide, and why did I waste time contacting her and waiting for her reply? I could have gone to reception without her instructions. She could have just said she doesn’t handle rentals and we should look for agencies ourselves — which is odd, since your official website offers this service.
3) And the third point is a huge plus: we went to the Aler Travel website and got in touch bypassing Alina — and thank you for at least giving us the phone number of the person who handles car rentals, rather than telling us to go to reception or somewhere else we’d already been.
4) I read the reviews on the Aler Travel Facebook page and realised it was a good thing we didn’t book excursions with you.
5) Aler Travel’s prices are inflated. We stayed in Vlorë. In other countries, a sightseeing tour of the town you’re staying in is either completely free or costs a token fee of up to 10–15 dollars. But Aler Travel went further: for a 3-hour sightseeing tour, where they promised to show 1 viewpoint, some museum in the town and a walk around the shops, they asked 30 or 35 euros per person. Other excursions are of course more expensive, so I didn’t pay attention to their prices, but the programme was always roughly the same: you’re picked up at 9 a.m. and returned to the hotel by 5 p.m., with prices from 40 euros and up. One excursion description surprised me: they said it was the longest excursion — you’re picked up at 9, drive somewhere for 4 hours, have the programme and lunch there, then 4 hours back, and you’ll be at the hotel by 5–6 p.m. Now let’s do the maths: picked up at 9 a.m. + 8 hours of travel there and back already makes 5 p.m. You haven’t managed to do anything or see anything except the road. But suppose they bring you back at 6 p.m., and on the way out they make a mistake and pick you up, say, at 7 a.m. That leaves you 3 hours for everything, including the lunch you’ve already paid for. For 3 hours of actual excursion you pay for the most expensive excursion — if I remember correctly, 65 euros or 75 dollars per person… For example, in Sri Lanka a two-day excursion with an overnight stay in a 4* hotel, breakfast, lunch and dinner, all entrance tickets paid, including a ride on the most scenic railway in the world, and a huge programme cost us 120 dollars per person — and that was with the hotel guide; you could find it cheaper.
Well, now let’s move on to the good stuff — or rather, to our topic: excursions in Albania.
We wanted to visit several places: the beautiful town of Gjirokastër, the Syri i Kaltër spring (which translates as “blue eye“) and Llogara National Park. We didn’t want to book excursions in Albania with the hotel guide — too expensive, too many bad reviews, and in any case they’re nothing special, with a constant rushed schedule. So we organised our excursions in Albania ourselves. We rented a car (Volkswagen Touran 2.0) for 2 days (90 euros + 5 euros for a wash + about 50 dollars of diesel + 6 dollars of parking). On the first day we drove to Gjirokastër. The road is calm, good and trouble-free. In fact, the roads were good everywhere we went; the only exception is the dirt track on the Blue Eye site itself. Gjirokastër is an extraordinarily beautiful town. We visited Gjirokastër Castle. A famous 12th-century castle housing a military museum, a clock tower and a church. We went into the Cold War Tunnel — a fairly extensive network of military tunnels that was actively used during the years of the Cold War in the Balkans. On the whole it’s in quite good condition. On a hot day it will please you with its constant, year-round cool temperature. You can feel the spirit of history. (Entry ticket with a guide: 200 lek per person.) We strolled through the old town and bought souvenirs to take home in one of the many little shops. We had lunch at Restaurant “The Park”, not far from the tunnels, and drove to the Blue Eye spring.
On the way to Syri i Kaltër, a serpentine road begins — very beautiful, but because the road is narrow, driving is a bit scary, especially on the bends. Entry to the site cost 200 lek, but if I understood correctly we were overcharged a little, and it should have cost 50 or 100 lek. But that’s not particularly important. We drove down almost to the very bottom and parked. A little further down there was a small restaurant and this miracle of nature. A little information about the place: The spring is at the foot of Mount Mužina. It feeds the Bistrica River and powers a local hydroelectric plant. Eighteen outlets of water are known in total. The pool has an unusual colour: in the centre the water is a deep dark blue, and at the edges a bright light blue. It’s thanks to the colour of the water and its round shape that this natural attraction got its name. The water temperature in the spring stays the same all year round — about +13 °C. After our visit we headed back to our hotel in Vlorë. In Vlorë itself we got stuck in a traffic jam, and where the satnav said we had 4 minutes left to the hotel, those 4 minutes took us about an hour.
On the second day we went to Llogara National Park. We walked through the forest, went into the park and bought deer food (dried corn) at 50 lek a bag — we bought 5 bags (they’re small). We fed the deer, took photos, flew the drone and drove to a beach just before Vlorë.
A small digression: we also wanted to drive to the Llogara Pass, but the guide on the bus told us horror stories about the road there being very bad, lots of accidents, and that it was better not to go at all — and if you want to go, book an excursion with us, our professional drivers can take you there. So we didn’t go because of that, and only at home did we find out it was complete nonsense: the road there is fine, and judging by photos online, the road to the Blue Eye is much scarier for me. Thanks again to the Aler Travel guide that because of you we didn’t go and see that beauty. Anyway, we went to the beach before reaching Vlorë, stopped at the restaurant “Tropical”, had lunch, took 2 sun loungers for 1,000 lek and went for a swim. The beach is rocky, the entry into the water isn’t comfortable, and there are nets with buoys not very far out, so you can’t really swim. We didn’t like it and drove back to our place — our beach is better, and we wasted 10 dollars on loungers I didn’t even touch.
Those were our excursions in Albania.
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