Month: August 2018

The Sunday Times Travel, Britain's most popular travel magazine, has published Tristan Rutherford's Albania tourism story: ‘Protected’ from tourism by its Communist rulers, Albania is the untouched Balkan beauty that time forgot. Tristan Rutherford has heaven to himself. Photography: Jon Attenborough I’m the only tourist on the beach. Two beaches actually. The first section of Krorez beach is a white-sand idyll, lapped by the same Ionian blue found 15 km south in Corfu. The second section is a long banana swoosh perfumed by rosemary and pine, with sand as soft as in Puglia, the Italian region across the water on a clear day. It’s the same gorgeous waters, perfect sand- at the 50=odd other beaches that stud Albania’s 360 km coast, each of which knocks the socks off those in northern neighbour Croatia. I do a little jig. As there’s no one in sight I secrete my trunks in a tree, then swim a naked kilometre through limpid sea. Well, it’s what Robinson Crusoe would have done. At sunset, I find my swimmers again. Then pad virgin footsteps to Krorez’s sole beach bar. It’s run by snaggle-toothed Albanian hippy, Evangelis, who sports a crucifix made of driftwood. As it took me an hour to hike this secret sandy stretch, I slip him 5 pounds to sail me to the jetty further south, where I parked my hire car. We shove his battered speedboat into the sunset surf. Evangelis guns the outboard engine, which is fuelled by a plastic Coke bottle half-filled with petrol, and we slap-slap-slap across a warm inky sea. I’d come to Albania on my tod. Regular holiday pals didn’t believe me when I talked up blissful beaches and Unesco sights. Well, they could stick to pricey niceties of the Greek Islands, and the 10-a-day cruise ships of