The Friday following our camping trip at Dhermi, several of my colleagues decided to take their partners to Saranda, a beautiful coastal resort town in the far south of Albania. Since there was room available in one of the vehicles, I was able to tag along with them.

There are two roads that one can take to get to Saranda from Tirana, a winding scenic coastal road which is narrow and in places falling apart, and a slightly better (and quicker) inland road that cuts a path through the valleys and plateaus and is the main road to Greece. We left Tirana early in the morning again and decided to take the coastal road to Saranda, passing through Dhermi and stopping for lunch in the lovely little town of Himara. Along the way we visited an old coastal fortress that was surprisingly intact and open to the public, and also stopped at numerous cafes along the roadside. After much delay, we arrived in Saranda, tired an exhausted, at about 9pm.

The next morning we visited the ancient ruins of Butrint, 18 kilometres south of Saranda and very close to the Greek border. This site was apparently settled and inhabited by Greeks from nearby Corfu in early 6th century BC, and became a fortified trading city with an acropolis that prospered right through the Roman and Byzantine eras. Wandering through the surprisingly extensive and interesting ruins, we were rewarded with an amazing panoramic view from the top of the fortified acropolis. After spending several hours at Butrint in the head, we were all ready to swim and headed for the beach.

Although Albanians rave about Saranda and its beautiful beaches, in reality most of the shoreline is rocky, so unless you enjoy lying in the sun on either hard rock or dirty pebbles, you'd probably be sorely disappointed. These so-called "beaches" in this region are extremely crowded in August, and the only uninhabited place we could find to swim was behind a derelict, abandoned hotel that had been looted and destroyed in the riots of 1997 (which was the result of a collapsed pyramid investment scheme). The beach consisted of a sheer, flat rock that jutted precariously out of the water at a relatively steep angle, and the first day we were there, the waves were so large that it was dangerous to even attempt to get into the water.

The next morning when we returned to the same location, the sea was a lot calmer and we managed to swim in the clear blue, extremely salty water.

We made our retreat back to Tirana on Sunday afternoon along the inland road, stopping briefly at Blue Eye Spring, a beautiful natural water source where cold, iridescent blue water gushes from the depths of the earth and feeds the Bistrica River. Apparently this spring is very deep, French divers have descended to a depth of 70 metres but did not find the source. We had a late lunch at an isolated restaurant located in a magnificent valley surrounded by towering mountains near the village of Kelcyra.