I’m back with more travel content. This time I am writing a month after returning, so here’s hoping my post-2-babies brain remembers a few things. The photos help a lot! My friend’s and my shared Google album had 1,142 pictures in it!
Anyway, we left off my last post in Dubrovnik, where we had a jam-packed day in the old city. The next day was our final day in Dubrovnik, but again, we booked a tour to leave the city, actually the country! This meant yet another border crossing, and we were in for a surprise when we discovered that in the last 2 days since our previous border crossing, the entire EU had changed their rules and now required fingerprints or facial recognition. This slowed us down a bit, but we still made it to our destination: Bosnia!
Bosnia was not a place I ever considered visiting, but I am glad we went. We started the day in Mostar, where a local guide took us on a quick 1-hour tour. He was young (20) and told us that in 1995 when he was born, he was the only baby born in that hospital the entire year because the war had just finished. How insane that this was during my lifetime? It was so interesting to hear about his childhood while the country was being rebuilt. He told us that his school was across a river, but there were no bridges left standing after the war so for a few years until they were rebuilt, they had to swim across to school.
He took us to see two of the most popular sights in Mostar, the Stari Most bridge, and Kriva Cuprija, or the crooked bridge, which is a mini version of Stari Most that they made as a practice. Unfortunately, Stari Most was destroyed in the war, so although it is again complete, it is not original. Stari Most is known for its professional bridge divers. They collect money from tourists, and when they get enough, they jump. This is not for tourists to do, it is 90 feet high!! Unfortunately, we didn’t see anyone jump, but we saw someone gathering money for an eventual jump!
We ate a delicious lunch at a restaurant where our servers wore classic Bosnian clothing, and did some souvenir shopping, then headed to our next stop, the Kravica waterfalls in Herzegovina. While most people did not get in the water, my friend and I braved the 55-degree temps for a few minutes. YOLO! When else would we swim in a natural waterfall in former Yugoslavia? We dried off then headed back to the bus for our journey (and border crossing) back.
The next day was our biggest travel day: we were moving from Croatia to Albania, via Montenegro. We looked into all sorts of options to get from Point A to Point B, but the only one that made sense by time or money was to book a driver. We used a website called DayTrip that my friend found, it was so easy and went seamlessly. Our driver was nice, spoke perfect English and acted like a private tour guide!
We started the day by taking a surprise car ferry, where we were able to get out and enjoy the views on our 7-minute journey across the Bay of Kotor. Our driver took a great photo of us on the ferry deck. On the DayTrip website, we picked to add a stop in Montenegro, but in a different place than we had been a few days prior. My friend had seen a TikTok about an “alpine coaster,” a roller coaster that you control your own speed, on the side of a mountain. To get there, we took the longest cable car I had ever seen, and we got our own car. We literally ascended past the clouds.
The Dubrovnik Cable Car holds about 40 people, whereas the Kotor one is more like a ski lift where it is in constant motion (except once on the way down when it paused for 20 seconds and I nearly had a heart attack) and each car holds up to 6 people. We were alone in both directions and the views were breathtaking, at least before we were above the cloud cover.
At the top of the mountain, we discovered the best playground. It had 6 trampolines, a rope swing, and two multi-level slides. Of course, my friend and I had to jump on the trampolines and do the slides multiple times. It was SO fun and unexpected (and free). I wasn’t sure if I’d be strong enough to go up the jungle gym, or small enough to fit down the slide, but I was, and I did! After the playground, we went on the coaster, and it was thrilling… and scary. I definitely did NOT go as fast as I could have made it go. My friend, on the other hand, was obsessed with going the max speed, and even decided to go for a second run!
After our playground and coaster adventures, we worked up an appetite, so our tour guide/driver took us to one of his favorite restaurants in Montenegro. The serving size was HUGE. We had enough for breakfast and lunch the next day. We finished our journey in Shkoder, Albania, and said farewell to our driver.
Unfortunately, that’s when the drama began. A few hours prior, I had received a WhatsApp that our day trip the next day had been cancelled, but the message was so strange that I had ignored it, assuming it was fake. I had reason to think it could be fake, because my friend had a fake WhatsApp earlier in the trip where somehow, the texter had her information from Viator but wasn’t the official trip operator. However, after more investigating, I realized it was true, and our trip for the next day was in fact cancelled. We were supposed to do a river cruise on the Shala River, but due to the dam, the water levels in the river were too low for the journey.
The next 3 hours were a frenzy of us trying to rearrange our next 3 days, because we had no reason to be in Shkoder if not for that trip. After a lot of stress and MANY WhatsApp messages and calls to different tour guides, we decided on a plan: we would leave our Airbnb 1 night early in Shkoder (it was only $40/night/person), and we would change our transportation for our next part of the trip and go up to Theth, Albania early.
We went to sleep thankful for a slow next morning instead of our originally planned 6 am wakeup and leisurely got ready to sightsee in Shkoder. The first must-see attraction was Rozafa Castle. It’s 4000 years old and has gorgeous views. We walked around for an hour and took lots of photos and then went back to the city to walk on Rruga Kole Idromeno, (the pedestrian street) to get souvenirs, coffee, and snacks for our afternoon journey to the Albanian Alps.
We grabbed our bags and found our bus. Everywhere we traveled within Albania was an adventure. There was a language barrier, and it always seemed there were additional unplanned stops. On our way up to Theth, we first stopped at a hostel to get 4 cases of olive oil, and then we switched vans halfway up. Somehow, we figured out what was going on but it was not easy.
Eventually, we arrived at one of the most beautiful places my eyes had ever seen, Hotel Thethi. Everywhere I turned, it looked like a fairy tale. I don’t know how else to explain it besides that it seemed fake. We learned that the road we were on was only finished in 2021! Before that, it was rugged gravel, requiring a 4×4 vehicle. Our hotel was in the middle of NOWHERE and yet, it was 5-star luxury. The beds felt like clouds. The rain shower looked like something I’d seen on TikTok and never experienced IRL. It was unbelievable. I should mention… it looked like something I’d seen on TikTok because I did. I actually found this hotel through a TikTok when I was searching for people who had been to the north of Albania. When I saw how inexpensive it was, I knew we had to go. The rooms were under $100/night and included breakfast. As a nice surprise, we booked single rooms, but they gave us each huge king rooms because they had them available. I was so glad we decided to go for an extra night!
We relaxed in our rooms, took long showers, read books, scrolled our phones in bed, almost fell asleep, and then just when I didn’t think it could get better, it was dinner time.
Since we arrived by bus and we were in the isolated mountains, we didn’t really have options for dinner. Our options were: eat at the hotel restaurant or not eat. We decided to go to the hotel restaurant. We were not disappointed. The hotel is known for “Albanian hospitality,” and we didn’t really know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t a 7-course meal where each course was more delicious than the last. We tried so many traditional Albanian foods and loved them all.
We went back to our rooms to luxuriate in our comfortable beds and enter a food coma. Thankfully, we had a very late start the next morning. As we found out in our mad dash to reconfigure our itinerary, although there are amazing hikes in Theth, all of the trips originate in Shkoder. Our accommodation had said they could get someone to drop us at the trail head, but we wanted a hiking guide, and I’m glad we got one! Through some WhatsApp stalking, we were able to contact a guide whose tour began in Shkoder, and he swung by to pick us up from our hotel in Theth. While the bus started pickups at 7 am, we were leisurely picked up at 10 am after another fabulous breakfast compliments of our hotel.
I could not have wished for a better day. We made friends with our bus mates from Germany, France, Ireland and the US, and we saw the most spectacular scenery. Also, we got in a few great hikes. We started with a hike to the Blue Eye, which again, I heard about from TikTok. When we got out of the car and saw a bridge that looked like it was falling down, we joked that it was the way to the Blue Eye. HAHAHA. Except… it was. It was the scariest part of the hike, but the rest was pretty simple (with the help of our guide).
It took about 2 hours round trip, plus of course our break to swim. Once again, not a single person from our group got into the water except my friend and me. If we thought 58 degrees was cold, this was 44!! Everyone thought we were insane, but again, YOLO!
After a change out of wet clothes, we went back to the car and headed to hike #2, the Grunas waterfall. This hike was more strenuous, but much shorter. It was beautiful, yet again. We stopped as a group for some lunch, and since we were all friends by then, we shared dishes for the table so we could try all the Albanian cuisine. Before being dropped at the hotel, we finished at another must-see destination in Theth, the church of Theth, built in 1892.
We headed back to the hotel to take another amazing shower and relax before another meal! We couldn’t fathom skipping the fabulous hotel dinner since it was our last chance to have it, so even though we had a late lunch, we still managed a big dinner. We were sad to pack and get ready to leave the next morning to Tirana, the capital of Albania, where our flights home were leaving from the following day.
As with the rest of our Albanian travel, the trip from Theth to Tirana was… unexpected. The bus didn’t have room for us despite our reservation, so one guy stood up until we ran into another bus he transferred to, and another guy had to sit between seats on a crate to accommodate us. Then when we got to Shkoder, we had to transfer (which we were not originally told) and then we changed buses two more times. One of those times, we transported a woman with 4 buckets of olives 4 blocks. You can’t make this sh*t up.
Eventually, we arrived in Tirana at our airport hotel, which was literally across from the airport. This came in handy, because the next morning for our flight, it was raining and we just had to run across the street with our bags! But first, we went to dinner at the one place we had made a reservation the whole trip, Tartuf, a restaurant specializing in truffles that again, I found from TikTok. The day prior, we realized one of our hiking buddies from Theth had a similar itinerary and would also be in Tirana for the night before her flight, so we decided to share a taxi into town and explore then dine together. It was so fun to sightsee and eat with our new friend! I found some classic Albanian clothes for gifts, which I had been searching for all trip. We bought a few more last-minute souvenirs and then headed back to our hotel for our final sleep before the trip home.
Overall, the trip was AMAZING. I saw everything I wanted to see and more. I had time to feel like myself again. I didn’t change a diaper for nearly two weeks. I had uninterrupted sleep. I saw new places. I bonded with a friend. I created new memories. I ate amazing food. AND, I missed my family and my bed. I would absolutely recommend the trip to anyone, but for me, I think it was a little too long! I was happy I went, and I was happy to be home. I did get some sort of horrible illness (food poisoning?) that caused me to not be able to eat anything solid for 10 days upon return, but it was worth it! I’m not sure when my next travel blog will be, but maybe I will have gone somewhere else by the time you finish reading this novel.
