In 2021, we spent 2 months travelling through Albania with our motorhome. In this blog, I will share more about our experiences. Reading time: 3 minutes.
Our traveling adventures in Albania
Our experience of Albania has been very positive. It is an adventurous country, it has not yet been discovered by the big tourist crowd and therefore everything is still very authentic. This country is good if you are looking for a bit more adventure. In Albania, it sometimes feels like you are still back in time. Our first days in Albania took some getting used to. It is quite a different world from the Netherlands but this is also what we were looking for. After a few days, we also started to see the beauty of the country. The beautiful mountain area in Theth , you can hike for hours here and the coastal area in Ksamil and Sarandë where you have a beautiful blue sea.
Fun thing to do in Albania
The country has not yet been discovered by tourists. In winter, this sometimes makes it feel like you are alone in the world. You are alone on the beaches, alone in the most beautiful places. Sometimes you won’t meet anyone for a few days, as the people of Albania find it cold in winter so you won’t find them on the beach very often. In January, we had 16 degrees with full sun on the coast. For Dutch people, that’s fine weather in winter.
The people are very friendly. Because not many tourists come to their country yet, most people are enthusiastic when you travel to Albania with your campervan from the Netherlands. Even if people can’t speak English very well, they still try to have a chat with you. Google Translate also helps a lot here. We often got their home-made Raki from local people. And we also once got a bottle of wine from a gentleman we had only a brief chat with. We therefore felt safe in this country. We had heard some stories before leaving for Albania, but we did not have any unpleasant experiences.
You can camp with your motorhome anywhere in Albania. Whether you are on the beach or in the mountains, everywhere you can park your camper to spend the night. We also made many campfires in Albania. Since it can rain quite a bit in winter, it is no problem to make a campfire. You have very nice nature spots to stand. There are not many campsites in Albania. You do have some camper spots but they are not very luxurious. The price of camping is therefore a lot less than in, say, Spain but you can’t expect too much from a campsite. We stayed at 1 campsite in Tirana, here we paid around 10 euros per night.
Not so nice in Albania
There are many street dogs and cats walking the streets of Albania. Some are healthy and have a good life on the streets but there are also plenty of animals suffering and not having enough to eat. We came across lots of sweet dogs that Vi (our dog) was able to play with. We had a bag of food in our car to feed the street animals when we came across them. You can’t save every animal, unfortunately. By the way, you see these animals not only in Albania but also in other Balkan countries, Greece and Turkey, you have many animals living on the streets.
We also found our dog Vi on the street in Montenegro. Would you like to read her story?
There is a lot of waste in nature. In Albania, they do not yet have a proper rubbish system. For instance, in Theth high in the mountains, we saw people making their own pile of rubbish in the middle of nature. Here, people emptied their dustbins and rubbish containers. In fact, these people do not have a rubbish truck coming to empty their rubbish container every week. On the side of the street and on the beach, there was a lot of rubbish. We tried to clean the spots where we camped with our camper, but there was often too much lying around to really clean it properly.
You can see the poverty in Albania in some places. There is a strange contrast, there are also people driving very expensive cars but I think most of the people of Albania are poor. You also have slums in Albania. Most young people also want to leave the country to work in the Netherlands or Germany because there are not many jobs in their own country where they earn well.
We enjoyed being in Albania and enjoyed getting to know a completely different culture. I will tell more about this authentic country in another blog post.
Check this Instagram Reel about Albania.
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