We spent about half our time in Albania, and really enjoyed it. It's still under-touristed relative to other countries in the Balkans. It's best to rent a car to get around; the distances aren't that great (we spent on average two hours driving between cities), and outside of Tirana, the driving is pretty calm. If you can, Dubrovnik and Kotor are best visited when there are no cruise ships in port. There's sites such as this one where you can see the schedules.
After we were trying to figure out our favourite thing we saw; we had lots of favourites but there wasn't one site that I would say if you could only see one thing, see this. You could choose from any of a number of the places we saw and not go wrong. Here's our list of highlights:
- Walking about the streets of Gjirokastër *
- Gjirokastër Castle & Museums
- Ruins at Butrint National Park *
- The drive from Gjirokastër to Butrint
- Seafood in Sarandë
- Walking about the streets of Berat *
- Ruins at Stari Bar
- Walking about the alleys of Kotor *
- Tasting menu at Galion in Kotor
- Hiking up the Ladder of Kotor
- Driving around the Bay of Kotor
- Walking the walls of Dubrovnik *
- Restaurants in the staircase alleys of Dubrovnik
* UNESCO World Heritage site
We were very lucky with the weather. In December / January, it's supposed to rain about 50% of the days. After we got through the rain in Gjirokastër, we had sunny weather pretty much the rest of the trip.
There was a fair amount of variety on the trip too. When I was planning I thought it might be too much of 'UNESCO old towns', (for example, the Baltic capitals blurred for me after a while), but they are all very different. We liked the food everywhere; we also tried & liked the local wines. The coffee was excellent, it seems like every small restaurant has a serious espresso machine. Maybe because of the variety, overall, the trip seemed like much longer than two weeks!
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