On the weekend of 10-11 August, a merry group of young people from Tirana organised a camping trip to Dhermi, a small village on the beach, five hours south of the Albanian capital. We departed very early in the morning, just after 6am, and after driving through the towns of Fier and Vlora, stopped for leisurely lunch at the scenic mountain reserve of Llogara. The views of the forests and the coast from these high mountains can be breathtaking, the altitude is such that the temperature is more than five degrees lower than at sea level.

We arrived at Dhermi at around 2pm, where we were planning to camp the night, and headed straight for the beach. The Ionian Sea in this part of Albania is a magnificent deep blue colour and very clear, however the actual beaches are rather rocky and very hard under foot, a very strange and foreign experience for me and quite different from the perfect soft yellow sands of Australian beaches. Getting in and out of the sea can be quite a chore, as even the smallest waves from the Mediterranean can knock you over and pound you against the medium-sized rocks on the steep shore.

The meals that the group prepared was fairly basic yet adequate, with a huge pot of spaghetti and salad for dinner, and fried eggs, sausages, feta cheese and bread for breakfast.

Two tents were erected on a sandy part of the beach for the boys and girls to sleep in, however since they looked suspiciously like the refugee tents used during the Kosovo crisis with no floors, I elected to sleep outside underneath the stars. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until it began to rain at 6am the following morning!

All in all, it was a good trip, and I had a lot of fun despite feeling unwell and not sleeping much.