My Travel Adventures

After a few minutes’ worth of calculations, we managed to spend all our remaining Pula buying snacks at the airport in Maun. Hoping to see a bit of the Okavango Delta from above during our flight, we asked to be seated on the right side of the plane, but instead of lush green forests parcelled out by dark blue waterways, all we saw were dry riverbeds in a sea of greyish brown.

I began the day with an Uber ride to the Coptic part of Cairo. As much of this area is pedestrianised, my driver could not take me all the way to the Hanging Church, but he explained that all I needed to do was to walk straight once I had made it past the entrance to the quarter. He seemed quite bemused when I gave him a fifty-pound note for his helpfulness and almost looked as though he hesitated to take the money.

Only two weeks after my return from Indonesia, I am on the road again. I never planned to travel as far and as often as I am right now, but the circumstances have aligned to make it both possible and desirable. Firstly, Thailand is holding a holiday for yet another royal anniversary: this time, it is the Queen Mother’s birthday. Secondly, most of Southeast Asia is quickly heading into wet season, threatening to make travel more unpleasant in the coming months. Thus, it is imperative, as the Romans say, to carpere as many dies as possible.

It is a strange time to be in the Baltics, as the normality of everyday life belies the concerning headlines in international relations. Just yesterday, for example, I read that Russia has been stirring up trouble at the border with Estonia by removing demarcation buoys from the Narva River. What complicates matters even further is that due to the USSR’s Russification policies, about a fifth of Estonia’s current population is ethnically Russian. This makes it difficult to gauge how much of the Russian I hear around here is being spoken by Russian emigres, refugees from Eastern Ukraine, or locals.

Despite the practically incessant stream of light outside my window on this warm summer night, I managed to sleep until around seven. Rather than the sun, what woke me up was a persistent mechanical noise. My hotel here is on a boat, but I do not think that the sound was of a nautical origin – unlike the squeaking of wood, metal, and rubber that followed the movement of the waves.