I woke up at first light with a fisherman zooming past my tent on his motorbike, the beach around here is the road. Paddling the river Vjosë would be a great trip, but paddling against the current was very slow and I quickly gave up, heading out to sea instead.

It was a hard day. My left side – arm, shoulder, back – was painful, it felt like a trapped nerve, and a stiff headwind picked up. The coastline was dull, endless stretches of sandy beach leading to an expanse of featureless marshland. I questioned what I’m doing and muddled myself with thoughts of the future. It’s ok writing this now, but at the time I was feeling pretty miserable.

Lacking energy, I stopped at the Lani restaurant feeling defeated. A man in leather boots were running a horse around in circles on a rope, a crowd gathered around, and people were walking strong black horses in the shallow breaking waves. It was Saturday and there’d been a horse race which I’d sadly just missed.

A spread of grilled fish, salads, chips, bread and yogurty sauce sorted me out. How cheap is Albania? It’s easy to hand over wads of Lek thinking it’s nothing, but really having no idea howuch something costs. This lunch was £14, so not massively different to back home, but the average restaurant is definitely cheaper. A coffee is about £1 and byrek, those flaky triangles of pastry filled with spinach, cheese or lamb, are about 30p each! On the other hand some things are expensive, I paid £3 for a bunch of bananas this morning, maybe because of import rates, or perhaps just tourist tax.

White horses had whipped up over lunch but I’d only paddled 10kms and wanted to push on a bit.

In the last blog I wrote that Enver Hoxha seized power of the Communist government after WWII. So what did he do? Put simply for 40 years he ran one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes the world has known.

Paranoid of resistance, as many as 10,000 people were executed or died in the horrific isolation prisons and labour camps they were sent to for any thoughts, words or actions that contradicted the system. Many of these labour camps were in the mountains where people worked in mines, or on the marshlands I paddled past, where people were tasked to drain the land.

The sigurimi, the state police, were amongst your friends, and tapped phone calls, censored media, distributed propoganda. The sigurimi files have never been made public, and debate rages on today whether they should be. It could unearth truths about friends, family and colleagues that would cause major conflict. Justice has never been served to those that were abused by the regime and many of those in power today were in power under Hoxha, their descendants born with a massive head start even in modern day Albania.

Hoxha was paranoid that an invasion from Yugoslavia and NATO was imminent and spent resources on building 750,000 bunkers across the country (15 in every square mile), instead of helping people living in desperate poverty. Expensive to remove, these symbols of oppression still infect Albania like a rash.

Of course people could not travel abroad and Albania is the only country to have boycotted 4 Olympic games. Hoxha even managed to piss off both the Chinese and Soviet Union, alienating himself from both and completely isolating Albania.

Visit Albania with no knowledge of its past and you’d be forgiven for not suspecting it’s dark history. Bunkers are the only obvious reminders of this time, and in fact I think it’s amazing just how normal the country feels as a tourist after so little time to heal.

I came to a wind swept beach, actually just the same beach I’d been paddling along all day, and made camp by a deserted beach club for another night in my tent.