Here’s a tortoise I found crossing the Albanian border. It should be that easy for all of us

‘During Albania’s 45 years of communist rule, any citizen caught imitating the actions of this tortoise would have been shot.’ Photograph: Lea Ypi

This undocumented tortoise was spotted crossing the land border between Albania and Greece one early morning in August, shortly after we had emerged from a long queue to have our passports stamped.

“Here,” I had been telling my children, “where you see the red flag with the eagle, is Albania. And over there,” I added, pointing at the other flag, blue with white stripes, a few hundred metres in the distance, “is Greece.”