My Travel Adventures

I arrived in Cyprus on Tuesday evening, picked up my rental car at Larnaca Airport, and drove to my hotel north of the city centre. Both the car and the location of my hotel came in handy the next day when I drove up to spend a day in Nicosia. Somewhat confusingly, locals and road signs refer to the Cypriot capital not as Nicosia but as Lefkosia, which is an older name likely derived from the words “leukós” (meaning white) and either “theós” or “theá” (meaning god and goddess, respectively). It is quite possible and fitting that the name recalled the sea goddess Leucothea.

On my last half-day in Malta, I woke up early and made a solo trip to Valletta. Brent and Joel, who had arrived in Malta a day earlier than I did, had visited and recommended the archaeological museum in town, so they did not join me for the first few hours. I took the number one bus from Senglea to main gate of Valletta, joining the ranks of the immigrant community who make this whole island run on their morning commute. After finishing my breakfast, I walked to the eastern end of the island to take in the views and to kill some time before the museum’s opening hours. Unexpectedly, it opened a little before nine o’clock, and I slipped in as the first visitor of the day.

We had rented our car for two days, and on the second day of our driving around the island, we returned to Mdina. The city of Mdina was the capital of Malta from its founding by the Phoenicians around the eight century BCE until the Middle Ages. Its name was originally Maleth – also the name applied to the whole island. Mdina is famous for its massive walls, which accentuate the city’s stark elevation above the countryside and protect its dramatic spires. It has a cathedral dedicated to Saint Paul, who was shipwrecked on Malta and was supposed to have met the Roman governor Publius on the site of the future cathedral.

We began our second full day in Malta with a ride to the airport, where we picked up our rental car. In my mind, I had budgeted at least half an hour for the journeys between each of our stops, but this was a wild overestimate of Malta’s size. We made it to the eastern end of the island in fifteen minutes. As we strayed farther and farther from civilisation, the roads became narrower, and around farms they began to be flanked by stone walls. Quite a few times, I had to slow down and slowly tango with a car coming in the opposite direction, which on one occasion resulted in my rearview mirror being folded back by that of the other car. On another occasion, I almost collided with a local turning into a road that could only fit one car at a time. The narrow roads were much better suited to horse carts, which we saw a few times in the more rural areas.

I flew into Malta from Zurich Airport on Friday evening. I had originally intended to go with my dad, but he had to pull out a few weeks before the trip, so I reached out to at least a dozen of my friends asking them if they would be willing to drop everything and join me. As luck would have it, my friends Brent and Joel had just made it to Greece on their yearlong trip around the world, and being American, they thought nothing of the distance. They arrived in Malta a day before I did and had properly settled into our apartment by the time I got there.

I spent this year’s Christmas in a cottage belonging to my mum’s partner. Close to Vsetín, the cottage promises to be a good base for trips around Moravia and Silesia, but of course since it was Christmas, I spent most of the week with my mum and my sisters. In the few days I was in Moravia, I only made one short excursion to Olomouc to hand over a few things that one of my friends from Kenya did not manage to fit in her luggage. I had been hoping to see the city’s Holy Trinity Column and its historical centre, but the Holy Trinity Column was undergoing extensive renovations and was entirely covered in tarp. We walked around only a little: it was the first clear day after weeks of cloudiness, so of course the temperature plummeted way below zero, which was a shock to my pampered system. The highlight of my quick visit was the city’s astronomical clock, refashioned in the style of socialist realism in the 1950s to depict working-class people instead of saints and kings. Its centrepiece ...

Some level of taking stock is inevitable upon closing a chapter of one’s life, and now, sitting on my bed on the night of my final departure from Nairobi, I have been overwhelmed by a desire to reflect – not so much on the impact of Nairobi on my life trajectory, but on the colourful details that have made up my day to day life, which will, from as early as tomorrow morning, begin to recede into ever darker recesses of my memory.

For one of my last weekends in Nairobi, I decided to visit Hell’s Gate. I booked a spot on a joint tour with a pick-up at seven in the morning, which I made with a delay of a minute or two because the guard at my compound had hidden the keys to the gate in a new spot. The drive from Nairobi to the park took about two hours. On the way, we made a quick stop at a lookout over the Great Rift Valley, which I had never seen with such good visibility: I could even recognise the ridges of Mount Longonot. We also managed to squeeze in a quick stop to place an order for our lunch and another to test out our bikes.