Eight days in Montenegro and Albania: down the Adriatic and across a border almost nobody crosses

Come in through the main gate from the waterfront and let the town happen for an hour before visiting anything. It is small enough that wandering is efficient: lanes two metres wide, worn stone underfoot, washing overhead, and every so often a square with a church in it and four restaurant terraces around it.

The cathedral is the oldest and best. St Tryphon was consecrated in 1166 on the site of an earlier church built for the saint's relics, which local merchants bought from Venetian traders in the ninth century, and it has been shaken about by earthquakes ever since, most recently in 1979. Its two bell towers are different heights and designs because the money ran out after the quake of 1667.

Two minutes away, the maritime museum occupies a baroque palace and explains what this town actually was: not a resort but a serious seafaring republic, with a sailors' guild founded in the ninth century and captains who served in the Venetian and Russian fleets.

Finish at the Orthodox church on the next square, built in 1909 and smelling of beeswax, which is a useful reminder that this coast has been Catholic and Orthodox in roughly equal measure for a very long time.

Eat late, once the last ship has sailed.

Be at the gate when the ticket booth opens, or before it. The path up to the fortress is roughly 1,350 steps of uneven stone switchbacking up the cliff behind the town, an hour and a half up and an hour down, with no shade at all on the upper sections. In July it is genuinely dangerous by mid morning; at six or seven it is cool, empty and one of the great walks on this coast.

Halfway up, at the point where you have stopped enjoying it, there is a small church of 1518 on a terrace looking straight down onto the roofs. Sit there. Above it the wall climbs to the fortress at 260 metres, which is roofless and unfenced, with the whole inner bay below.

Spend the afternoon high. The road out of Kotor to Cetinje climbs the same mountain by twenty five numbered hairpins, each one opening the bay a little further beneath you. At the top is the national park, and at its highest accessible point, up 461 steps, a black granite mausoleum holding Petar II Petrovic-Njegos: prince-bishop of Montenegro, poet, and the man this country still quotes. He died in 1851, the tomb was designed by Ivan Mestrovic and finished in 1974, and the terrace behind it looks over most of Montenegro.

If you are not driving, taxis and small tours run up from Kotor for a fixed price. Coming down at sunset is the best part of it.

Take an early boat or the local bus twelve kilometres up the bay. Perast is a single row of baroque palaces along the water with no room to build behind them, and it was rich enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to run its own naval academy with a population of about a thousand.

There are two islands offshore. The wooded one is natural, with a Benedictine abbey you cannot land on. The other is not natural at all: sailors began dropping rocks onto a reef in the fifteenth century after an icon of the Virgin was found there, kept doing it for two hundred years, sank captured ships on the spot to hold it together, and built a church on the result. It has a blue dome, a ceiling of paintings, silver votive plaques left by sailors, and a piece of embroidery a local woman worked on for twenty five years using her own hair as it greyed.

In the afternoon, go the other way. Budva is half an hour south and has a walled old town of its own, smaller and busier than Kotor's, with a good archaeological collection showing what the Greeks and Romans left in the ground under it, plus the beaches and the nightlife that make it the loudest place on this coast.

Swim, then head back for a last dinner on the bay.

The bus south takes about three hours: down the Montenegrin coast past Budva, Bar and Ulcinj, over the Bojana river, and across a border where the language, the alphabet, the currency and the price of everything change at once.

Shkodra is flat, low and full of bicycles. Drop the bag and go up to the fortress in the late afternoon, because the light on the water from up there is the reason to be here at all.

Rozafa stands on a rock at the point where three rivers meet, with the lake on one side and the mountains behind. The Illyrians built here, the Venetians rebuilt, and in 1478 an Ottoman army under Mehmed the Conqueror besieged it for months. The legend attached to the walls is grimmer than the history: three brothers building the fortress found their work collapsing every night, and were told it would only stand if one of their wives was walled into it, so the youngest was, having asked that one breast be left exposed so she could still feed her son.

Come down for dinner on the pedestrian street, which is a run of restored Venetian-style facades, and then join the evening walk, which involves most of the town and lasts until about eleven.

Shkodra has one museum of international standing and it is not obvious from the outside. The Marubi archive holds around half a million negatives taken by one family, over three generations, from 1858 onwards, starting with an Italian exile who set up a studio here and photographed everything: pashas, mountain men with rifles, weddings, the first Albanian parliament, women in the costume of a dozen different clans. The prints on the walls are the visual record of a country before anybody outside it was looking.

Then the other side of the same century. The Museum of Witness and Memory occupies a building that was used by the Sigurimi, the secret police, and it deals with what happened to a Catholic city in a state that declared itself atheist in 1967: the prisons, the labour camps, the executed priests, the internal exile. It is small, plainly presented and hard to shake off.

In the afternoon go out to the lake, which is the largest in southern Europe and shared with Montenegro. There are beaches on the southern shore twenty minutes from town, water warm enough to swim in from May, pelicans if you are lucky, and a string of small restaurants doing fish and grilled meat under vines.

Come back for a last long dinner and a raki you did not order.

Two hours south on a good road, and you arrive in a capital that has been rebuilding itself continuously for twenty five years.

Skanderbeg Square was a roundabout until 2017 and is now a vast paved plaza laid with stone from every region of the country, with the statue of the fifteenth century warlord who held the Ottomans off for twenty five years, and behind him the ochre ministries the Italians built in the 1930s.

On the northeast corner is the oldest building in the middle of the city. The mosque was finished in 1821, closed in 1967 when religion was abolished outright, and reopened in 1991 when ten thousand people walked in without waiting for permission. Its frescoes are painted with trees, waterfalls and bridges, which is close to unique in an Ottoman mosque.

Beside it stands the clock tower of the 1820s, thirty five metres up a spiral stair, with a view over a skyline that changes between visits.

Then walk south into Blloku, four streets that were sealed and guarded until 1991 so the party leadership could live undisturbed. Enver Hoxha's villa is still there, closed and unremarkable, and everything around it is bars and kitchens.

The House of Leaves is a 1930s villa a minute from the square that opened as Albania's first maternity hospital and was converted within a few years into the headquarters of the secret police's surveillance division. It is a museum now, largely as it was found: bugging equipment, microphones sewn into furniture, files, photographs of informers, and figures that are hard to absorb, because in a country of under three million the Sigurimi ran roughly one informer for every dozen adults.

In the afternoon go east to the bunker. Hoxha had a five storey shelter dug into a hillside for himself and the leadership, over a hundred rooms of it, sealed behind blast doors and never used. It opened as a museum in 2014, and you walk in through the tunnel and out through his private suite, past rooms on the Italian occupation, the partisans and the decades of paranoia that followed.

The cable car station is a short hop from the bunker, so finish on the mountain. Fifteen minutes lifts you out of the heat to a pine plateau near the top of Dajti, with a long view over the plain to the sea and a row of restaurants doing spit-roast lamb. It is ten degrees cooler up there.

Come down for a last dinner, late, as everybody here does.

Walk down the Italian boulevard to the pyramid. It was built in 1987 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, designed by his daughter and her husband, and it is the strangest building in the Balkans: a low concrete star that children slid down through the 1990s while the country argued about demolishing it. In 2023 it reopened, with staircases up the outside and studios inside, as a technology centre for young people. Climb it.

Back at the square, the national museum sits behind an enormous socialist realist mosaic of Albanians marching forward through history with rifles. Inside, the collection runs from Illyrian bronzes and Roman mosaics through the Middle Ages to a hall on the communist period and the persecution of the churches, which reads differently now that you have seen Shkodra.

Then coffee at a pavement table, slowly, before the airport. You will have got the hang of that by now.