A splendid dark granite medieval and Ottoman fortress presides over everything else from a small hill, the slopes below crowded with nineteenth-century merchants' houses with heavy, pale grey slate roofs, the whole lot sitting like crumbs in a bowl of limestone mountains. It was a spectacular spot all right, but we did not feel safe in Gjirokastra and even the inscrutable Qazim militated for our early departure. The narrow streets up at the castle walls seemed particularly tense, as the Greek consulate was up there and an absurdly large visa-seeking crowd was eddying volubly round its walls. It helps, if you visit Albania, if you are familiar with Asia. It will help you deal with the open sewers, the children picking through piles of stinking rubbish, the cash economy, the absence of any workable infrastructure, the paper-thin cattle and the trains, which are very much like Indian trains.
Accommodation is reasonably easy to find in Albanian towns.
We stayed in simple hotels, and sometimes in private rooms. You can expect to pay about twenty five dollars a night for a double in a good place. But the food was good. South of Saranda the unpaved road ran parallel with the sea through miles of olive groves and petered out at Butrint, probably the best of Albania's many archaeological sites. The Romans were there, the settlement's strategic position on the east-west trade routes kept it going all through the Byzantine period, and by the fourteenth century it was part of the rich Venetian empire.