Spending a decent amount of time to come up with an itinerary for a trip, all by myself, and then striking out there to try and get that plan work properly is one of the most enjoyable parts of travel for me. I am in favour of planning one’s own trips, figuring out one’s own path, trying to get from one place to another using local means, and exploring any country that I visit at my own pace. This created a natural enmity of sorts between me and tour companies. Well, that and them being total shakedowns as I figured out quite soon thanks to my experience in organizing trips for groups of international students at university.
However, no matter how much I hate the idea of booking a tour to travel (even a daytrip to a nearby town) there is a type of tour that I adored all my life: BOAT TOURS! Unless you are rich, or have rich friends, travelling on the sea to nearby “places” is often quite hard to do on your own, if not impossible. You can always find a way to go to “that one cool mountain where no minibus goes” or to “the mysterious forest somewhere in the distance” but it is much harder to find a way to go to an island, especially if the said island is a restricted military zone like the Sazan Island. In these cases, an organized boat tour is your best bet to see them, and in this article, I will be going over some of the highlights of what I consider to be the best day of our trip in Albania, when we enjoyed a day-long tour of Sazan Island and Karaburun Peninsula with the Teuta Boat Tours in Vlorë.
Tips & Tricks
Before we dive deeper into what we see as part of the tour itself, I think it makes sense to talk briefly about the tour in general, and how to get ready for it. These would be useful to anyone who attempts to enjoy such a tour for the first time, and even boat tour veterans coming from different countries. After all, compared to Turkey there were some differences in this boat tour compared to its Turkish counterparts along the Aegean and Mediterranean Sea for sure.
- Bring food and drinks with you, as much as you can and want. We had some byreks and soft drinks, but it is common to see people bringing in some beers and raki along for the ride as well. The former would get undrinkable in a hot summer day quite soon, but raki does sound nice! It was not “that” sort of a day for us, so we skipped the booze. However, some snacks and a byrek-centric lunch would go a long way for all.
- Teuta Boat Tours, in June of 2022, stopped at ALDA Karaburun for lunch and to enjoy their pristine beach. It was, by far, one of the best beaches I have ever been to, mostly based on how clean it was, and how nicely coloured the water was. Mostly smaller tour operators came to this restaurant/beach, so it was not that crowded as well. We skipped lunch in favour of a lot of byreks that we had with a view in the boat so I cannot comment on the food itself.
- Teuta Boat Tours are not the only company that serve this route, and in fact, they are the most expensive ones to my knowledge. However, booking with them means that you can get inside the Haxhi Ali Cave that the bigger boats can merely gaze at from afar. That is well worth the price difference. It depends on one’s own personality but being able to cruise around with a smaller ship and thus fewer people also means that there is less partying and noise going on, zero, to be precise.
- Bring a ton of sunscreen with you, like a lot. It is almost always sunny in Vlorë, and on the sea the sun is even more present. Sazan Island too is hardly forested, and at ALDA Karaburun you must pay for the umbrellas at the beach, which almost no one did, none from our boat for sure. The boat itself is covered but the best part of the whole trip was to be able to dangle one’s feet from the bow of the ship, so you will be sitting outside and right in the way of the sun if you want to have the best time!
- Make sure to make friends with the other travellers in your group, especially those that can speak Italian. Italian tourists are super common in the south, and most Albanians seem to speak Italian quite fluently. That meant that in our tour almost all announcements were made in Albanian and Italian, leaving us few English-speaking tourists to the mercy of their newly made friends.
- Teuta Boat Tours is also the first tour to arrive at Sazan Island, giving you almost an entire hour to explore the island as quietly as possible while the other bigger boats slowly follow its footsteps. This too is a great reason to pick them over the others. I do sound like I got a sponsorship from Teuta Boat Tours to write these, but the truth of the matter is that they were just a decent boat tour company, and that is all. Despite the hard circumstances of the day (our boat’s engine broke down once), they made sure to keep their end of the bargain by finding alternatives for their guests to complete the offered itinerary no matter what, and not many companies are that honest these days.
Sazan Island and Karaburun Peninsula
Greek, Ottoman, Italian, Soviet, Albanian, and like twenty other different powers took control of Sazan Island at one point or the other, but the one that attracts me the most, for a good reason, was the Soviet one. During the era-defining and extremely stretched out rivalry between the USSR and the USA, the former built a submarine base on the island as well as a chemical weapons research facility.
Remains of both complexes can be seen today and being able to get into the abandoned housing units that were built for the Soviet scientists and their families that were assigned to this island was once in a lifetime experience. It was urbex alright, albeit being a bit more “touristic” since quite a lot of people can actually visit it daily, slowly turning it into less of a ghost town and more of a landmark.
You can also enjoy a rather pristine beach on this island when your boat reaches it, so if you are not into exploring the plethora of derelict buildings the island offers thanks to its extremely interesting and complex history, then you can simply enjoy the more natural beauties that it offers.
Moving on from the island, we made our way to Karaburun Peninsula. After failing to start the engine of our boat a couple of times, it was decided that we would take a much smaller speedboat to visit the Haxhi Ali Cave, one of the finest natural wonders I have seen. Then we went back to ALDA Karaburun from where the speedboat left off. Our main boat was still under maintenance, but that was alright as the rest of the tour would be spent on this establishment no matter what.
When the time came to depart the island, the old but spirited engine caused no trouble, and singed its song as we made our ways back to Vlorë. After seeing a mysterious island with a rather dark history, sailing on two seas at the confluence of the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, and then enjoying the mind-bogglingly wonderful insides of the Haxhi Ali Cave and resting on the squeaky-clean beach of ALDA Karaburun, it most certainly was time to go back home!
Let me now leave you to your own thoughts after sharing a few photos from Sazan Island so that we all can appreciate what it has to offer better. Of course, the real “photo-worthy” part of the trip was when we took the speedboat to Haxhi Ali Cave, however, that part is best left to your own imagination as I forgot to bring my phone to that part of the journey…
View of the Sazan Island from the short jetty on which the boat disembarked us. Rusty metal, nature trying to slowly creep back into the “manmade” world, and a rather mysterious apartment complex on the top of the hill are some of the most interest sights that greeted us.
Sazan Island is quite a unique Albanian island in the sense that it was not directly ruled by Albanians for the majority of the 20th century. This, however, does not mean that it lacks what makes an Albanian soil Albanian, a healthy number of bunkers scattered all around it.
Though I could not find any information on this school right here, it certainly does not look like it was a left over from the Soviet period of the island. I wish I could write more about it but there was very little to look at both outside and inside it to come a clear conclusion. It certainly is not Russian or Italian that is written on it, and I am certain that it is in fact Albanian. The whole thing does not look as old as some of the other buildings found there. Do let me know if you know the history of that school!
Just a room found in one of the many Soviet apartment complexes. I would not go ahead and say that what you see is a Soviet trouser, or a Soviet bed, but what I would say is that it makes one wonder just how many people lived here, what sort of lives they had, what was their hobbies, or the nature of their work…
