Crave Online: Rare Visit through Albania Reveals Sandy Surprises
Shedding stereotypes of gun-toting arms smugglers, Albania emerges as Europe’s last undiscovered beach.
“We sit on the border of East and West, but we’re always looking west,” says Dritan Xhengo, who established Past and Present Journeys 10 years ago, to introduce tourists to his native Albania. For decades, this small country, on the western side of the Balkan Peninsula, surrounded, on one side by sea, and the other by Slavic dictatorships, was shut off completely to the outside world.