"It's all about the music!" Albania by salmayo

Living in Lecce in the heel of Italy and being able to see across the Straight of Otranto to Albania on a clear day, it seemed like a logical thing to spend a few days there this August as an alternative to all of the crowded and expensive seaside towns around our way.

An Albanian friend had told us about the ferry that has recently started between Otranto and Vlora. In only 3 hours from leaving Italy we could be in Albania! Of course that doesn't include the hours of delays before embarking and disembarking! The same friend told us that we could expect to find good hotels easily and at very cheap prices.

In the end, the ferry was rather expensive (including the cost of the car, two passengers and all the port taxes, etc), not that quick after all (fault of the above mentioned delays [almost 6 hours on the return journey!]), good accommodation was difficult to find and quite expensive and Albania left us cold.

It wasn't that there weren't nice things to see! The landscapes were quite stunning, the mountains impressive and the sea clean and crystal clear. The thing that left the lasting impression though, were the piles and piles of rubbish everywhere! On the beach (yes, even those that required considerable effort to get to and would otherwise have seemed completely untouched), by the sides of the roads, in the cities, and alas, even in the national park of Llagora.

It had been very difficult to find information on Albania, apart from the hear say of friends and fellow travellers on sites like "virtual tourist". In the end I found one English guide published by Bradts, although I had left it too late to order it online and wait for delivery. Lonely Planet also have a chapter on Albania in their Eastern Europe guide, I understand, but again I was too late to order online. I found nothing in Italian at all!

The first thing we did when we arrived was to try and track down a guide and a decent map of the country. We found a guide in the first hotel we stayed in (in Albanian and English language published by: www.albania-guide.com), which we then saw all over the place. It wasn't much better than carrying around the Albanian Yellow Pages, but at least it gave us some ideas about hotels. After five days of making enquiries, I still wasn't able to get a map which indicated any of the smaller towns and villages or other geographic features. We were told there was no need for a road map as there was only ever one road to take you to where you wanted to go!

The trip to Albania taught us an important lesson in life: where there's music, there's enjoyment!

In the end it was a good trip, but perhaps because we knew that it was only for 5 days and that if we didn't like the place we arrived in, we could always jump back into our comfortable, air conditioned car and head further down the road (or back to Rapo's Resort [see the section on Himara]).

We didn't go with high expectations as far as service standards and facilities were concerned, but I was certain that the fact of finding so little information on Albania wasn't representative of a void of historic and cultural sites to discover. Unfortunately, on this count I really was disappointed. Perhaps there were things to see, but without a decent guide it was impossible to find them (after an entire afternoon of searching for the monastery and church of St Triades near Vlora we seemed to be close, but had to give up for fear that we wouldn't get there and back before dark).

The real disappointment though was certainly all the rubbish!

• Pros:Stunning landscapes, clear and clean sea.
• Cons:Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish!
• In a nutshell:Hard work for limited results!