Last September really sucked. This one -- despite the sobering pandemic milestone we passed yesterday, and BIG covid trouble brewing in Sabah -- has been much better.

Of course, one of last year's depressing problems has not gone away. I still have no health insurance, and that still worries me a lot. But we seem to have been spared the ghastly air pollution we experienced last September, and low-carbing -- with the occasional (hopefully judicious) breakout -- is now a way of life rather than the huge burden it seemed back then.

And in some ways it has been a red-letter month. Any month that has double orangutans and a tidal bore in it has got to be pretty special.








We are incredibly lucky that -- at least for the moment -- we can travel within Sarawak. It's big, it's fascinating, and it's largely still new for us. Our goal -- assuming we avoid further lockdowns, which is by no means a foregone conclusion -- is to have a little block of away-days every month. This time we did a day trip and a three-day road trip (which started with the bore and ended on a beach).





Nevertheless, most of the time, we're in Kuching. And most of that "most of the time", we're at home.

Which of course wasn't the plan. This was supposed to be a base, not the be-all-and-end-all of Tern travel.






I touch on this theme at the end of pretty much every month, I realize, because it's something I continue to wrestle with. Ultimately, we're all struggling to make the most of a second-best at the moment. No-one wants the world to be like this. We're all just trying to figure out how to make do.


I found this piece by Samantha Brown quite resonant. A traveller by trade, she asked a brace of other professional travellers for their insight on how to cope. Edited highlights:

Cory Lee: "I’m grateful for the opportunity now to discover unique things in my own 'backyard'. "Caz and Craig Makepeace: "[Starting a new website has motivated us to] put on the travel glasses and explore more of our home region so we can share the magic of it." Heather Greenwood Davis: "We’re learning new things about places close to home and that in itself is a silver lining."

All true. Developing the capacity to travel-joyfully-where-we-are is absolutely indispensable.

But I empathize too with Johnny Jet. Asked about the trip he dreams of taking after covid, he replied: "I dream of giving my dad a hug in Florida [and] my mother-in-law a hug in Toronto." Me too... I would LOVE to see our family again.

Meanwhile, my "shadow journeys" continue. I was supposed to be out of Turkey by now, and a transition of sorts (to the Caucasus) has begun. But Turkey has just been so damn interesting... (There's another Turkey-related Velvet Cushion post here.)

Language-learning also works for me as a temporary travel substitute. Few things that can be experienced on your couch offer quite such a sense of "depaysement" as seeing the world through someone else's language. And few things, when you're out and about in the current constrained fashion, offer such satisfaction as a successful exchange -- however limited -- in a language you're trying to learn.

Anyway, here is the now-customary 1 Second Everyday video for this month.

In these extraordinarily unpredictable times, who can tell what next month will bring? All the more reason to treasure what we have been granted up to now.