Once we escaped the labyrinthine backstreets of Sarandë, it only took us about an hour to get to Ksamil, where we couldn't resist the lure of the beautiful water nor that of hot coffee and omelets.
This is not to be a view to be ignored. It went perfectly with breakfast, the only downside (upside?) being the proliferation of hairy middle-aged European men in Speedos.
Finally, finally, FINALLY, we arrived at Butrint. (In Greek: Βουθρωτόν, or Buthrotum) This was a place Jo and I had found early on in our research into things we wanted to see in Albania. Initially we ruled it out when we started reading about just how long it takes to get yourself around Albania by bus. But it stuck with us, and eventually we started throwing around the car rental idea in large part so that we could get ourselves down to this island.
What's the big deal with it? I suppose it was the fact that this place is a ruin-filled archaeological record of most of the major empires that passed through the Adriatic, from the Greeks up to the Ottomans. It passed hands from Corinthians to Attics to Romans to Macedonians, survived a devastating earthquake, saw the Ostrogoths pass through then was taken over by the Byzantines, Angevins/Venetians, Bulgarians, the Napoleonic empire, and finally the Ottomans before falling into ruin and becoming nothing more of a fishing village with a few hundred citizens before finally finding the nationality it still has today, Albanian. This is a place that has seen some motherfucking shit. This is not a place to be ignored.
Map of the island and pictures showing its progressive development through the ages.
Tree-lined lane leading into the main Roman settlement.
Remains of the Roman marketplace/theater/town center. The theater is believed, because of certain architectural details, to have been converted from a Greek religious altar.
Former walls of the town.
Remains of a grand medieval Venetian home.
Tree. (If these trees could talk, though....)
Remains of medieval protective walls that run along the outer edges of the settlement from those times.
Byzantine church remains.
Mr. Cool Kid Sunglasses.
I mean, look at that view. I probably would've tried to invade the island as well.
Remains of the Medieval (I think) cathedral.
Most of the tile in this and the Baptistery was kept covered by silt to preserve it, but they left one corner exposed so that visitors could see just how intricate and beautiful the mosaic work on the floor of these places is.
Jo, being an artsy hipster.
Remains of the Roman development out into the harbor, which I think was used for religious and business purposes? But fell into disuse after the island was passed onto the Venetians.
The Lion Gate, that was supposedly referenced in Virgil's Aeneid. In case you can't read what it says on the plaque, I'll copy it here:
I saw before me Troy in miniature
A slender copy of our massive tower
A dry booklet named Xanthus... and I pressed
My body against a Scaean Gate. Those with me
Feasted their eyes on this, our kinsmen's town.
In spacious colonnades the king received them,
And offering mid-court their cups of wine
They made libation, while on plates of gold
A feast was brought before them.
The steps behind the gate.
I mean, what more can I say? Even just as speculation, how many times in your life will you be able to visit a place that may or may not have been founded by fleeing Trojans?
Some more information about the gate.
The other very famous fate, the pig gate (not sure but I don't think that's the official name). I think the theory was that this was the entrance to a marketplace.
Alcove inside the pig gate.
More pig gate-adjacent remains.
Stairs.
Castle built by the Venetians (That's SO Venetian, right? Europeans and their castles, I swear.)
Bust of Livia.
View from the Triangle (Venetian) Castle.
Tourists (it was surprisingly crowded, especially in the Roman theater area, but not detrimentally so).
Museum with some artifacts which we tried to enter only to find the lights turned off, the surly guards grabbing peoples' phones and cameras who they saw taking photos, and who finally shooed everyone out after about 10 minutes. I still don't fully understand what happened in there but I suspect it may have been their lunchtime.
Re-emerging from our immersion into a couple thousand years of history, slowly easing ourselves back into modern-day Albania.
And then it was time to get back on the road. We had a campsite to find. See, we knew we wanted to spend our last night as close to the beach as possible. Jo had read about a place called Sea Turtle Campground but information online had been inordinately difficult to find and even armed with my very capable Hungarian cell phone, we hadn't been able to find a working phone number for the place. So we were heading back out and up along the coast, to Dhërmi, with nothing more than a speculative address we'd found while rifling through what we believed to be Sea Turtle's facebook page and Jo's GPS.
But first we had about 4 hours of coastline driving, of which I can only say this: Joanna B. is a goddamn champion and if you ever see her, buy her a beer for the driving she did that day. Not only were we constantly honked at, aggressively tailed, and dangerously passed by countless Albanian drivers, but our Opel Corsa almost gave up the ghost on several of these hairpin switchbacks that headed down, down, down and then just as steeply up, up, up, hugging the relentlessly sharp mountains of the waterside Balkans all the way up to Dhërmi.
This van not only passed us, it then slowed to a crawl and drove for about 500 meters with its door open. What was it doing? If we ever figured it out, I don't remember. Maybe someone inside was having a series of vomit false-alarms. Maybe they were threatening to evict a passenger. Maybe the door was broken. Maybe they were just messing with us. Maybe Jo remembers.
Finally we approached Dhërmi and passed it, heading out onto several access roads where we fruitlessly searched for our hallowed campground. On one of those desolate lanes we saw this, one of Hoxha's many, many bunkers that litter the country.
One of the inclines I wasn't entirely sure we'd be able to climb. Seriously, Jo is a saint. Not only did she deal with all of these driving elements, she also dealt with the stress of not being able to find this place and my never-ending distrust and contempt for our rental car.
Finally, we stopped to get some coffee and cool off in a restaurant. It was abandoned, as most restaurants in post-Soviet countries are during the day, except for what looked to be a birthday party where the parents gathered at one end smoking and gossiping and the children ran circles around the dining room. Some things are universal. We asked them there about Sea Turtle, and they looked at us a little strangely then pointed in the direction we'd just come from, where we'd turned back after losing heart that we'd ever find it. We decided to try one more time, go just a little bit further than we had before, and sure enough, down the hill and round the corner, there emerged from nothing The Sea Turtle. I will say this: for how hard the place is to find, it is worth it. For $10, we got a spacious tent, sleeping pads and pillows with sheets, towels, free dinner and breakfast, bathroom and shower facilities, a pretty reasonably priced bar/lounge patio area, and free WiFi. Not to mention the best part: a 5-minute walk to the (stony, but still) beach.
This is her "started from the bottom now we're here" face.
The chairs, umbrellas, and cabanas were free for all to use. There was also a very convenient plywood path so we didn't have to be like the scene in The NeverEnding Story where Atreyu and Artax are trudging through the Swamps of Sadness. Also, nobody succumbed to sadness and let themselves die. Caution: that link will lead to palpable heartbreak and, if you are a 6-year-old named Emily who takes movies waaaaay too literally, psychological scarring.
Then Jo took my camera for a stroll while I laid back and did nothing but soak up the late-summer sunset and read John Steinbeck's A Russian Journal and this stuff happened:
Possibly my favorite picture from the entire vacation. I want this movie to happen: road-trip film starring a crotchety, aging Albanian man in a Speedo and his companion, a mischievous white street dog. Why? Why is this not a movie we already have?
This dog can be in the movie also.
Back at the camp, where you can see just how many tents there are. Warning: this place is a bit disorganized. First of all, bit of a tangent, when we were looking for it we found another place that would not directly say whether or not they were Sea Turtle but seemed so totally disinterested in us that finally I vetoed them just on principle. So if you find other camping places in Dhërmi and you're good with that, more power to you, but Sea Turtle is clearly marked so if you're some place that's not, you're in the wrong place. After we found the joint, we headed to the bar which was the only place we saw any identifiable employees. We told them we wanted a tent and they told us to sit down and wait for the owners. After about 30 minutes Jo went up to inquire and another guy who may or may not have been the owner seemed surprised to hear that we wanted a tent, and took us to one immediately.
It really was impressive though. I would guess there were probably a couple hundred tents, neatly set up in aisles with outdoor electrical plugs, trashcans, and outdoor showers/hoses every hundred meters or so. It was pretty great. The free dinner and breakfast, not so much. Dinner was a plate of overcooked noodles with cut up hot dogs coated in what, even on my most generous day, I would hesitate to call tomato sauce. Ketchup would be more accurate. Oh, and bread. We sampled some of that and then decided to go find ourselves some fresh seafood. We wandered down to a somewhat hopping (lights on, some generic Eurobeats pumping, young people roaming aimlessly, mostly empty bars) street right off the beach and settled on a place that advertised their specialty in seafood. I can't honestly say what Jo had but I had what was probably one of my best meals during our vacation: fish of the day. I have no idea what kind of fish it was. It was white. It came with the skin still on, eyes staring up at me from its roasted face. But its flesh pulled away from the spine perfectly and it was probably the saltiest, most delicious fish I've ever eaten. So good job on that, Dhërmi/Albania.
It had been an exhaustingly, excitingly long day. It was probably the most stressful and also the best day I had in Albania. And the next day we had to head to Tiranë to make our early evening flight back to Milan. But not before we braved some more perilous, coastline mountain driving and an almost vacation-ruining stop in Krujë, home of one of Albanian hero Skanderbeg's militaristic victories against the Ottomans and site of our near-calamity with our rental car.
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