We move from Tirana to Gjirokaster with a four hour door to door taxi ride. There are buses, but they go from an out of town bus station in Tirana and arrives in one that’s down the hill in Gjirokaster. And, as you’ll discover later in this post, this place has a hill or two.

Our hotel is mixed. The room and terrace are good, the breakfast is not bad (apart from the worst coffee this side of Kyoto – seriously bad) and the location is very handy for sites. They however do mash up Laundry and we’ll come onto the “taxi” they ordered for us to our next destination.

Gjirokaster, like Kruje, is a castle town. We see it from our terrace, we see it from quick explore around town and we see it at breakfast. It’s just there. Chloe agrees to walk up to the castle, and, in a special birthday present for Allan, says that she won’t complain whatsoever on the journey up to the top. She is true to her words. The scenery is stunning with wide views across the valley to the mountains. An immense lamb dinner (paid for by the Hardy brother & sisters – many thanks!) completes a lovely birthday.

Gjirokaster is a beautiful town, although a five minute walk is often way more once you’ve been up and down a couple of hills. It has good restaurants, bakeries and a street bazaar that is just screaming to us to buy lots of brightly coloured bowls – we don’t as backpacks are already absolutely full.

It does however have a dark past. It is the birthplace of Enver Hoxha – the dictator who ran Albania for 41 years until his death in 1985. He ruled with an iron fist where enemies of the state were murdered, land taken, a policy of total isolation to the outside world and even banning beards.

We see some of this with a visit to his original house (it was huge), we see secret tunnels (which were not very secret to the local population) that would hold the great and the good in case of invasion or attack. These tunnels had a special room just for him in case he was in Gjirokaster. We see a video in one of the tunnels is pure North Korea leader adulation of their glorious leader. We also see an old traditional house that a family lost and regained ownership of that happened to be right opposite our hotel. A dark past that we haven’t really found anyone wanting to talk about.

We leave Gjirokaster to go to Sarande by taxi that the hotel organises for us. We soon realise this is not an official taxi and a driver who, after around 30 minutes of driving, proceeds to pass us a pre-prepared written note of “if police stop us, say that we are friends”. There’s not much we can do apart from google translating back to him to say that we will not lie to the police. We contact the hotel to say WTF and helpfully, they deny even organising the taxi for us.

There’s a police checkpoint around 15 minutes before Sarande, he stops before the checkpoint and says we must stay in the layby until the police leave. We finally persuade him to go through the checkpoint, the police don’t stop us and we’re the final run to our hotel in Sarande. Our “Taxi” driver however has other ideas and decides to ignore one-way streets and going a very long way around as we suspect that he spotted another police car.

Finally we get to our hotel. Our guy parked on the pavement – well, we were going down the wrong way on a one-way street, so he needed to park somewhere. Quite ironically, he parked on the pavement right next to Sarande port police station.

Quite appropriately since we’re a little shaken, not stirred, we seek out a bar that does cocktails. And we seem to have hit happy hour as they charged us nearly half price. They were excellent and went back there again the next night. All is okay with the world again.

Not much to report on our three days in Sarande apart from eating good seafood, seeing the sea again for the first time since Hoi An in Vietnam and of course, those cocktails. And, of course, time to see another Albanian homage to an American politician – this time it was Hillary Clinton.

Sarande was chosen is our entry point to Greece as it’s just a half hour ferry to Corfu, but is a pleasant enough place to spend three days. Just don’t inadvertently take an unofficial taxi there.