Thursday 2 April 2020

Remembering....

I got back from Jordan to France a week before the lockdown. That will be my last travel for a while.

For a while, we'll all be travelling only in our minds and in our memories.

And it's odd how the places I remember aren't always the ones that came with five stars in the guidebook, or that I thought at the time I'd remember.

I'm sitting at my desk, thinking of the Burana Tower, an hour or so on the bus from Bishkek in the Kyrgyz Republic. I'm thinking of the friendly taxi driver who took me there, and on the way back, stopped so that I could go into the fields and see the strawberry farmers, and eat handfuls of freshly picked strawberries.

I'm thinking of the broad and open plains of the Chuy valley, and the shivering poplars, and the oddity of a fighter plane parked on a roundabout.

I'm thinking of the Uzgen minaret, way south of Bishkek, and the view down to the valley, over a tumbled mass of slope scattered with the black-painting iron railings of graves. The little fairground next door, with the lady who reached over to take a little boy's arm and help him 'fish' the rubber duck out of the pond which entitled him to a prize, after many fruitless and frustrating endeavours - her gentle smile and his great wide grin.

I'm thinking of the lovely gentleman who sold me a book on melons and sang to me in the park in Bukhara. And a family building a house in a village near Wadi Rum, who filled my water bottle and poured me sweet tea and showed me the way to the canyon I wanted to find.

And I'm thinking, too, of my favourite salon de thé in Paris. Which, for the time being, is just as inaccessible and loaded with just as much nostalgia.

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