Montenegro & Albania

Two small countries on one stretch of coast

Montenegro and Albania share a stretch of the Adriatic that most people drive straight past on their way to Croatia. Kotor sits at the back of a bay so long and steep-sided that everyone calls it a fjord, with a fortress wall zigzagging 1,350 steps up the mountain behind the old town. A few hours south, over the border, the Albanian Riviera runs from Vlorë down to Ksamil: white pebble beaches, olive groves, and a coastline that's still a couple of decades behind Croatia.

You can do a lot in a day there. Climb the fortress before it gets hot, swim off a boat by late morning, and eat grilled fish at a table on the beach for about a third of what the same dinner costs on the Italian side of the water. Albania was sealed off from the rest of the world until 1991, and the countryside still has something like 170,000 concrete bunkers left over from that era. A few of them are bars now.

We're thinking early September: the sea is as warm as it gets, the August crowds have gone home, and it's cool enough to walk in the hills again. Probably half the week around Kotor and half on the Albanian coast south of Vlorë, though we haven't settled which side of the border gets more nights.