Albania has no working railway, and honestly, it doesn't need one. The whole country runs on furgons — minibuses that leave when they're full, stop where you wave, and cost a couple of euros for distances that would be a €40 train ticket anywhere else in Europe. Learn to ride them and you can loop the entire country — Ottoman towns, the Riviera, and the wildest mountains in the Balkans — in two weeks without ever touching a rental car.
The rules of the furgon
Nobody tells you this on arrival, so here it is up front:
- Timetables are a suggestion. A furgon leaves when it's full, which can be twenty minutes early. Show up early, pay cash on board.
- Your best information source is your host. Booking sites don't know half the routes exist. Every guesthouse owner knows exactly which corner the 8am furgon to the next town leaves from — ask the night before.
- If a route "doesn't exist," it does. There's almost always a local minibus or a change in a junction town like Tepelenë. Worst case, Albanians pick up hitchhikers with a friendliness that feels suspicious until you get used to it.
- Carry cash, always. Cards barely work outside Tirana, and in the mountains there are no ATMs at all.
Tirana → Berat
Buses to Berat go from Tirana's southern terminal roughly twice an hour from early morning, about two hours and a few hundred lek. Berat is the "city of a thousand windows" — white Ottoman houses stacked up a hillside on both banks of the Osum. Sleep in the Mangalem quarter, walk up to the castle in the evening when the tour buses have gone, and eat a full qofte-and-byrek dinner for under €10.
Berat → Gjirokastër
Second stone city, moodier and greyer than Berat, birthplace of both the dictator Hoxha and the writer Kadare. The bazaar is touristy; the fortress — with a captured American plane rusting on its ramparts — is not. This is also where you commit to the loop: south to the coast, or straight back. Go south.
Down to the Riviera: Himarë and Sarandë
The bus over the Llogara Pass is the most scenic public transport ride in the country — pine forest, then a two-thousand-foot drop straight into blue water. Himarë is the Riviera at its best: enough tavernas, no strip. Beaches like Gjipe (a 30-minute walk from the road) still feel half-wild. Sarandë is louder and uglier, but it's the base for Ksamil's islands and the ruins of Butrint, and it has the direct morning buses back to Tirana when it's time to head north.
The Komani Lake ferry
From Shkodër, everything about the north runs as one well-oiled backpacker machine: a minibus picks you up around 6:30am, drives you to the Komani dam, and you board a boat up a flooded river canyon that gets compared to Norwegian fjords — fair, except the fjords don't have minarets on the shoreline. Three hours later you land in Fierzë, where furgons wait to take everyone to Valbonë. Book the whole chain through your Shkodër hostel; it's one ticket.
Valbonë → Theth on foot
The reason everyone is here. The old mule trail over the Valbona Pass is 10-ish kilometres, 6–8 hours with breaks, up through beech forest to a 1,800-metre saddle in the Accursed Mountains and down into the Theth valley. It's genuinely doable in trainers if the weather is dry — you'll see locals doing it in loafers — but real shoes save your ankles on the scree. Mid-June to September only; the pass holds ice outside that window.
Stay in a homestay on both ends. Dinner is whatever the family cooked — usually everything the farm produced that day — and it's the best food in Albania. In Theth, give yourself an extra day for the Blue Eye pool and the Grunas waterfall before the bone-rattling (but now mostly paved) road back to Shkodër.
What it costs
Albania is still one of Europe's cheapest countries. Realistic 2026 numbers: €10–15 for a dorm, €20–35 for a guesthouse double, €2–5 for any furgon hop, around €30 for the full Komani-ferry-plus-transfers chain, and mountain homestays about €25–30 with dinner and breakfast included. Two weeks on €40 a day is comfortable, €30 is doable.
The loop at a glance
Tirana → Berat (2 nights) → Gjirokastër (2) → Himarë (2–3) → Sarandë (2) → bus back through Tirana to Shkodër (1) → Komani ferry → Valbonë (1) → hike → Theth (2) → Shkodër → out. Every leg of it is on the map above.
