After our 3-month visa in Turkey ran out, we took a plane to Albania, one of the very few countries left in the whole world with no Covid entry requirements.

  We would say it’s one of Europe’s most unusual & interesting countries, as its history kept it somewhat isolated from the outside world for many years. As a result, it has retained strong traditions, individuality & a unique language that is one of the oldest in the world.

  Albania is a small country with a population of less than 3 million, where big supermarkets are the rare exception, shepherds with flocks of sheep are a common sight & where donkeys can still be seen carrying heavy loads through the mountains.

  We found when hitch hiking, that people were normally listening to traditional Albanian folk songs rather than Western music. And on many occasions, when we were hiking from one little stone village to another, we were invited in for lunch or coffee — a very entertaining experience as it involved talking in a mixture of broken German, some memorized Albanian phrases & a scattering of English, French & Spanish!

Another interesting sight in the villages was to come across backyard distilleries turning grapes into the powerful local drink known as ‘rakia’ (like brandy or vodka) — here too we would be invited for free samples. On one occasion we asked how often they fired up their homemade still to produce rakia: we were told ‘only one day in a year’. Fortunately, we happened to arrive on the right day!

   Another uniquely Albanian sight is the huge quantity of small, round, family-sized concrete bunkers that an eccentric dictator built from 1975 to 1983, supposedly to protect the whole population against invasion. Estimates vary but there could be as many as 450,000, representing 5.7 bunkers per square km! They were never put to to any practical use, except by bats seeking more modern accommodation.

  Albanians are some of the friendliest people we have ever met. In a way, their isolationist past has helped to keep them more ‘pure’, & so for off the beaten track travelers like ourselves, this provides the ideal combination of welcoming people, cheap prices, beautiful nature & no hordes of tourists whatsoever. Quite the contrary: we visited some great beaches & castles, as well as spectacular mountains & canyons in the Albanian Alps, & most days hardly met anyone else, apart from the occasional villager or shepherd.

  For anyone fed up with mass tourism, overcrowded beaches, high prices & crowds of sightseers, we would highly recommend Albania!

   Our long-standing hope & prayer is that we can return to our home in Fiji soon, but in the meantime we continue to live our lives by our new maxim: ‘If you can’t be where you want to be, at least enjoy where you are!’