Today was the day for the commute to Albania so it was an early start for us. Out the door by 7am, we walked 2km with all our backpacks to the cruise office. Bought our tickets and walked another 1km to the port where we went through passport control before boarding the hydrofoil. It only took 30 minutes and by 9.30am we were in Sarande.
We dropped our bags off at the hotel which had an amazing view of the sea and Corfu right across it, then went in search of lunch.
Along the way we passed by the local markets and bought some cherries and bread from the bakery. A woman tried to convince Ryan to buy a huge bottle of natural honey, luckily I stepped in and shut that shit down.
Numerous restaurants line the public beach and after looking at a few menus we settled on one. Unfortunately it was a bad choice as the food was horrible and we ordered cappuccinos which came out and were just made from instant coffee. Pretty sad for Ryan as he's been hunting for a good cup of coffee for as long as I've been craving pork.
After walking around for a bit we returned to the hotel. We were going to swim as the hotel is on a beach but it was cold and the water looked like it was freezing. So I took a nap while Ryan slowly got bored, which he duly told me, so I woke up and we headed to town to enquire about buses, then caught a taxi to Lekursi Castle which overlooks the whole village of Sarande. It was a breathtaking view and really impressed us, especially because we had this idea of a bleak and gloomy type of country before we'd come. But it is simply stunning.
There's a cafe in the castle so we had a coffee (also nescafe!) before cabbing back to the town centre. I actually wanted the cab driver to take us back to the hotel, but the language barrier was too big, because he either didn't understand me or didn't want to drive us there. Despite this, we had a nice walk back and even found some 50 lek ice cream.
We'd been told earlier that the hotel had an Italian chef who'd just arrived, so we decided to have dinner there and it was the most delicious meal we'd had since the blue cruise! It was a 3 course meal with wine for $46 aud and we had mix seafood carpaccio, squid ink spaghetti, grilled chicken(this was average), and pannacotta with caramel sauce which literally was making us moan as we ate it because it was so mind blowing.
Can safely say we waddled back to our room holding our stomachs.
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