Exploring the Sarandë Waterfront

A typically early start for me at 5:15am, and Sarah wasn't much later at 6:30am. We took the opportunity for an early morning, i.e.cooler, walk around the Sarandë waterfront. The main promenade runs along the Sarandë beach, which is very close to the Sarandë Port where the ferries arrive and depart.

At 7:30am there were quite a few people already enjoying the beach. It's a pebbly beach, but it looks much better cared for than Vlorë. We didn’t notice any rubbish or plastic here. The water looks lovely and clear, and it gets deep quickly, which should be good for a swim later.

The beach runs east to west, and the further west you go, the nicer it looks—or maybe it just gets closer to the more expensive hotels at that end. There are also many boats along the waterfront offering excursions to various places. Some were advertised at €20 per person, which doesn’t sound too expensive.

We walked until the promenade ended and then a little bit further along the street, but it wasn’t so pleasant—lots of restaurants jutting out over the water but nothing else to see. There are plenty of restaurants along the promenade too. We looped back via the street behind the promenade to see what it was like. Stinky! Exhaust fumes from the cars were very strong. Yuck! 🤮 

We passed where we started walking to catch the bus yesterday and then took a slightly different route to check out another supermarket. Eventually, we ended up back on the same road as yesterday that passes the ferry terminal. We continued past our local Spar supermarket to find our nearby public beach—Sunset Beach.

The small road leading there is quite nice with hardly any traffic. Finding the access way to the beach was relatively easy, even though it wasn’t signposted.

The beach here is filled with sun loungers and rental umbrellas. So although it's a public beach that you don’t need to pay to swim at, there aren’t many places to lay a towel. The beach and water, though, are stunning—lovely clean pebbles and clear turquoise water. We'll either drop our towels somewhere or rent a chair (or both) when we come back for a swim. It’s much closer to our apartment than the main Sarandë beach.

On the way back, we stopped to buy a small watermelon—45 Lek per kg. Ours weighed 5 kg, so less than $5 NZD.

We made our way back up to our street and then past the apartment to a local butcher’s shop—a family-run business with really lovely people serving us. There was a very friendly customer there too. An older chap with no shirt on. He was very keen to chat to us but he didn't speak any English and we didn't know any Albanian. With some hand signals I think he was telling us proudly he was from Sarandë and I assumed he wanted to know where we were from. I pulled out my phone and Google maps to show him. He seemed impressed and happy with that info and wanted to shake my hand and give me a pat on the back. 

We purchased two pork steaks but will try their beef steaks another day. Today’s beef didn’t look that great, or maybe we were just put off by the wasps flying around and landing on it. Emma and Kate would not work in this shop! Any wasps is too many for them! 😂 The two pork steaks cost 400 Lek (about $8). The young girl in the shop spoke very good English and was giving her Mum instructions on what we wanted. Sarah asked her if she learned English at school but she said no, she learned it from watching TV. 

We continued further along the street to the bakery and purchased a cob loaf, a donut, a shortbread type biscuit, and an orange-flavoured biscuit—trying them all to see which is best for a repeat purchase! Altogether they cost 160 Lek (around $3.20), which seemed very cheap. The people in the bakery were also very friendly.  In fact maybe our street is friendly here. Yesterday walking down the street a young guy about 10 to 12 years old says hello and gave me a high five! 

We also grabbed some Happy Cow cheese segments from a nearby dairy for 140 Lek. The lady there was also nice. Nice friendly shop people in Albania have been few and far between. In fact on the whole trip I would venture to say that anyone working on the checkout in a supermarket would be guaranteed to be not friendly. There may have been one exception in Zagreb. 

After lunch we had a typical afternoon for us, staying inside to avoid the worst of the heat. Sarah was listening to music in the bedroom, I thought she was sleeping!, and I read my book. We did venture out later to get vegetables for dinner, though. No beach swim today—that’ll likely be tomorrow morning’s activity.

Dinner was pork steaks, new potatoes, and capsicums. It turned out better than we thought it might, but it wasn’t worthy of a photo. 😉 I know a poor workman blames his tools, but it is a struggle cooking without basic ingredients and utensils. No spices is a pain! We haven’t been able to find anything in Albania or North Macedonia that resembles the small mixed spice packets we picked up in Hungary and Croatia.