Balkan Experience - Greece & Albania - Onwards to Tirana - 2 Sep 2026

The flight to Tirana from Athens international airport was scheduled at 8.40 am. I am habituated to being early to check-in. With this in mind, I left the apartment by 4 am for the bus station. Since the lift was not working it was some task to lug the suitcase and backpack down four flights of winding stairs.

It took me about 20 minutes to get to the Syntagma bus station by foot. Traffic was sparse, but a few cafes were open and some of them were already doing decent business. I passed the Arch of Hadrian and the National Garden and reached the ticket booth for the X95 bus service. I paid 6€ for a one-way ticket and settled into one of the seats. Unfortunately, the bus didn't have any separate enclosure for baggage; surprising for an airport service.

The fully crowded bus left for the airport at 4.35 am. The bus stopped at multiple stops en route and got to the airport in about 50 minutes. I was early and decided to have a cup of coffee before getting through the entrance gate. While waiting for the coffee I casually examined my web check-in document. My eyeballs popped. My flight to Tirana was the following day and I had my accommodation reservation in Tirana from today. I had to summon all my reserves of calm to think through the next steps.

If I decide to fly as scheduled, the next day, I will have to go back to the city, find a suitable place to stay and forgo the accommodation reservation for the day in Tirana. The alternative was to find out if my flight schedule could be rearranged to this day. I had booked my flight through Trip.com. The carrier was Aegean Air.

I went to their airport counter and explained my predicament. While they said they could do nothing about the refund of the already booked ticket, I was offered a ticket for this morning's flight for 91€! A costly mistake, indeed. But that was the only solution to put the schedule back on track.

I paid for the ticket and was asked to go to the check-in counter for my boarding pass. While my luggage was accepted, the affable counter clerk told me that he would not be able to give me a seat number as the flight is overbooked! I would have to be allocated one at the gate. I went through immigration, where they asked me the document on which I was traveling to Albania. I showed the lady my Schengen visa. Greece is the first country I have been to on the visa where the passport was not stamped during either entry or exit.

I passed a couple of tense hours at the gate before boarding was announced. I was finally given a confirmed seat at the gate. The flight was full and it landed in Tirana airport on time. It was sheer chaos in the queues at immigration. Three flights had landed almost the same time and the queues snakes as far as it could right up to the entrance of the immigration hall. There were limited counters and I watched the behaviour of a few queues before I found one that moved quicker than the rest.

The immigration officers were doing a good job. Here too, there was no immigration stamping in the passport. As soon as I came to the baggage carrousel, I spotted my suitcase and claimed it. Soon I exited the airport, sought directions to the bus stand and reached the bus a few minutes before the scheduled departure. If I had missed that one I would have had to wait for another hour. Fortunately, the bus had a separate luggage hold.

The bus left on time, but it took more than 30 minutes to get to the highway. Traffic was extremely dense. The one-hour ride took 15 minutes more. From the bus stand I walked to the accommodation I had booked. The owner had sent me a video of how I could reach the apartment. I got somewhere near it but couldn't locate it.

Finally, the owner sent her mother to where I was. I felt so embarrassed that I profusely apologised to the owner and her mother. After all the tension and unnecessary extra payment for the flight the cosy two-bedroom home was a place to rest a while before venturing out for the scheduled sightseeing.

I took some time to get a snapshot of the country. Albania is a mountainous country in Southeast Europe located on the Balkan Peninsula along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. 51 per cent of the country's 2.4 million people observe Islam as their main religion. But they have over 30 percent of atheists and people professing no religion at all. The official language is Albanian, and the currency is Albanian Lek; an Albanian Lek is about 1.2 INR. The Albanian Riviera is a huge attraction for tourism and so are some of the over 70 per cent mountainous area of the country.

The GDP per capita on PPP basis is over $25,000, which is double that of India. Albania has a developing upper-middle-income mixed economy that is currently among the fastest-growing in Europe. Services make up over 54% of the economy. A massive post-pandemic tourism boom has driven recent growth, with tourism revenue exceeding billions of Euros and accounting for over a quarter of the GDP. Agriculture contributes about 20 percent to GDP.

Tirana is the vibrant capital and largest city of Albania, known for its colourful buildings, lively cafe culture, and rich history. The city was founded in 1614 by Sulejman Bargjini Pasha. Tirana was proclaimed the capital of the country in 1920.

Post WWII, Albania was a tightly controlled communist state between 1944 and 1990. Following the collapse of communism in 1990, Albania became a parliamentary democracy. Mother Teresa, who was born in Skopje, was of Albanian descent.

What ensued was a five-hour walking tour that made me appreciate the city thoroughly. I didn't realise how much I would cover in the walking tour, because most of what I had planned to do, and more, were so proximate to each other and within easy reach. I started with the most talked about place in Tirana, the Skanderbeg Square, less than 15 minutes by foot from my accommodation.