Just north of the Albanian oil fields and the Ardenica Monastery is a national park, at least in the mid-1990s unknown to any tourist guide books, and quite unusual in Albania. The park surrounds the Karavasta Lagoon, near the village – and the natural gas fields – of Divjake.
Always adept at combining business with pleasure, I visited the gas fields with a few Albanian colleagues on a Saturday morning, followed by a great picnic on the shores of the lagoon, which is best known for its pelicans. The contrast couldn’t be bigger, a rickety drilling rig and gas production installation inside the beautiful, pristine nature of the park.