I am leaving Albania after an intensive week full of new impressions. It is a wonderful sunny afternoon and our Dash 8-300 propeller aeroplane is heading north towards the Albanian-Montenegrin border and then further on to the Austrian capital Vienna. Albania looks amazing from the air, we follow the coastline and from my window I can see all the new infrastructure, the new streets on which the cars look like little ants crawling along. The ongoing construction of buildings is even more impressive from above than from the ground.

However, during this flight something else attracts my attention even more: the view of the Ada island on the border between Albania and Montenegro, where I spent the summer of 1987. The green Bojana (Buna) river is winding its way from the mountains to the sea and just before it flows into the Adriatic it splits in two and forms a triangular island - Ada. This triangular island has a beautiful sand beach and from above one can see the camping settlement on the right (northern) side and the white sand front, where I camped in 1987 with my friends Andi Jovanovic (U 1990), René Wanninger and Michael Jetly.

Somewhere in the left third of the island ran the demarcation line between Yugoslavia and Albania - two enemy states. This is where no living being was supposed to go! We were teenagers then, and such mysterious restrictions only attracted us. After all, the actual international border was the Bojana river and not the island, even though there was a fence across the beach. Andi and I were looking carefully around the place and eventually we found a loophole in the fence. We sneaked through and went right till the end of the beach to what we then jokingly called "the cape of no return". I remember the silence, the pristine nature and the turquoise green water of the Bojana river flowing into the deep blue Adriatic sea. My friend Andi and I were all excited about setting foot on the soil of what was then the most isolated and closed country in the world - Albania. In the manner of the Yugoslav "country beautification" of than time, we collected some shells and assembled the inscription "TITO" into the sand. What an appropriate political provocation for the brutal Stalinist regime of the late Albanian party secretary Enver Hoxha, we thought. Everything was quiet, there was a light breeze and the waves were rolling in a regular rhythm from the sea over the beach. Not a soul was to be seen. We crawled back clandestinely through the hole in the fence and felt like James Bond heroes upon our return to the campsite.

Our joy did not last for too long though, when our Austrian campsite neighbour, a regular visitor of Ada, told us about a very similar incident from the previous year. He said, that two similarly crazy teenage adventurers undertook the same exploratory expedition into the Albanian border zone, but unlike us they did not return for three weeks. Caught by the Albanian border patrols, they were imprisoned in a Stalinist prison camp in Tirana and later deported to a slightly better detention facility in Belgrade. Eventually they were escorted back to the island of Ada by regular Yugoslav military and ordered to pick up their belongings and leave Yugoslavia within 24 hours. So, we were lucky, we thought, but desperately needed a drink.

Seeing the location of our adventures from the air after 15 years still gives me chills. Ada looks as beautiful as ever and it is a reassuring thought, that this emerald green river is no more guarded by fierce border troops ready to fire their sharp ammunition on every moving object. Hopefully these borders will be once peaceful and open I thought, as we were flying on across the rugged mountains of Bosnia...

Pavel Cernoch