As a rusty passenger ferry chugs across the 3km stretch of Adriatic Sea dividing Corfu and Albania, a bizarre sight emerges from the morning haze: two men, mid-channel, paddling in a leisurely fashion towards Greece in truck-tyre inner tubes.
The men are Albanians trying to escape their homeland for the wealthy holiday island, where lavish seaside estates owned by the likes of Britain's Lord Rothschild on a stretch nicknamed Kensington-by-Sea stare across at the barren southern coast of Europe's poorest country. The paddlers, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by the Albanian flag flying on the back of the ferry, wave cheerily at the passengers while its captain phones the coast guard to advise them illegal immigrants in large rubber rings have just entered Greek coastal waters.
Once, they would have been shot dead by the Albanian gunboats that patrolled the coastline to keep its citizens from escaping. Today, they are arrested, taken to Corfu Town, fed and put on the next boat back to Albania.
Their attempt to flee a country that aspires to join the European Union is a depressing reminder that, 15 years after the collapse of the continent's most hermit-like and repressive regime, there are still considerably more people trying to get out of Albania than trying to get in. For tourists willing to swim against the tide and visit one of Europe's most unfashionable and mysterious destinations, however, the journey can be surprisingly easy and safe, and the experience unexpectedly rewarding.
Southern Albania is an hour's ferry journey from Corfu Town. Within easy reach are the Roman splendour of the Unesco World Heritage site at Butrint, the natural wonder of the Blue-Eyed Spring, some terrific and inexpensive seafood restaurants and a stretch of stunning Adriatic coastline that - anywhere other than Albania - would long ago have disappeared beneath a string of noisy resorts.
Albania is the land 20th-century Europe forgot. While its Balkan neighbours achieved comparative prosperity through their strategic positions in the Soviet Bloc, communist tyrant Enver Hoxha took his largely Muslim population down an increasingly lunatic and isolationist path. A dictator who declared Albania the world's first atheist state, banned beards and private cars, and who once reportedly drew a gun at a meeting and shot dead a Politburo colleague, Hoxha cut Albania off from its friends one by one. First he fell out with the Yugoslavs. Then he split with the Russians and his became the only European country to back Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Finally, after Mao's death, he argued with the Chinese and declared Albania a self-dependent state.