After an hour or two in a quiet Albania cove on the Karaburun Peninsula, swimming in the clear turquoise water and reading in the shade of scraggly trees, Will and I made our way back to the boat. As we turned the corner, we were met with a relentless thumping of subwoofer bass.
“Oh no.”
There was our boat, a re-appropriated Turkish gulet, blasting out club jams at 1pm. On the roof deck, we saw a stream of white foam shooting out over the scrum of dancing bodies.
We wanted to go to an old Albanian military island. We ended up on a day-long party boat.
Will was the one who read about Sazan Island, a long-abandoned military base that had only recently opened to the public. Maybe. Finding information about HOW to get there proved tricky; we figured that we could probably hire a boat or something from the coastal city of Vlore, but beyond that we were flying blind. The lure of crumbling Communist concrete was too great for me to pass up, though, and off to Vlore we went.
We drove into an unobtrusive town before sunset and made our way directly to the port to suss out our options. “Come at 9:30am tomorrow,” we were reassured, “there’s a boat that goes to Sazan.” Satisfied, we spent the rest of the fading day drinking cheap beer on Vlore’s scrubby beach.
We arrived early the next morning at the pier, greeted by a giant plastic pirate statue— the first sign that this was going to be a weird day. We boarded our mostly-empty boat (called “The Black Pearl”— sign number 2) and settled into beanbag cushions on the upper deck.
More and more people boarded the boat; some families, but many 20-somethings looking far too chipper. And then, the music started.
Horror of horrors, as our boat pulled away from Vlore and the DJ music raged and the kids started swilling plastic cups of 10am beer, we realized what we’d done.
Oh well, there was no turning back now.
Eventually we pulled into Karaburun, our first stop before we continued to Sazan Island. We had a couple hours of free time here and Will and I bolted from the boat, weaving around the periphery of the peninsula until we found our sweet shaded cove. I don’t know how the water in Albania can be so clean and clear, it’s some kind of Balkan magic.
When we returned to the boat— now in full-on foam party mode— we tucked ourselves into the lower deck, where (it quickly became obvious) the saner and more family-centric boat people were hanging out. Foam dribbled off the upper deck. Eventually the bass-heavy jams gave way to some sort of Albanian music, and suddenly the ceiling above our heads was thumping with the percussive shudder of feet.
“I think they’re doing folk dances.”
The weird can always get weirder.
At last, the boat spat us out on Sazan Island, where we realized we would not be allowed to roam freely among the bunkers and bureaucratic buildings; instead, we had to follow a “tour,” probably as a way to prevent the mostly-drunk boat people from accidentally triggering some overlooked Hoxha-era missile system or something. Will and I hung back, so as to better pretend we still had autonomy. We wandered through various gloriously drab buildings, snapping photos with everyone else, jumping up on the concrete mushroom bunkers that dotted the island (along with the entire country, because paranoid dictators gonna paranoid dictate).
Sazan was cool, but by the time we got there, we were both overheated, weary of hours on a boat, and a little tipsy ourselves. That, combined with the clipped pace of our informal tour, meant that Sazan Island went by in a blur— before long, we were back on the dreaded party boat, with everyone looking quite frazzled, cruising back to the port of Vlore. Even the party people seemed a bit deflated. We’d been on the journey for nearly seven hours.
I’ve never been so happy to see a second-rate Albanian seaside city as I was when we finally docked in Vlore and could finally leave behind The Black Pearl. With the dirty bass of contemporary DJ tunes still throbbing in my ears, I had to laugh. Only in Albania would a party boat go to a decrepit military island.
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