We arrived back in Sarawak yesterday. Before that, over the course of this month, we spent time in Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Greece, and Turkiye (start here, and work forwards).


What a journey it has been...

True, we over-estimated our stomach for long bus journeys. There was that one really awful one back at the beginning, and there were another couple that we were pretty glad to see the end of.

But we adapted, one way or another. And some of the bus journeys that we were really dreading turned out to be absolutely fine.

So it's unpredictable, this whole bus business, which makes it difficult to learn from. I'd be more careful with my itinerary design in the future, for sure. But sometimes you need to bite the bullet of potential discomfort, or you miss out on too much. And I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on any of this.







Starting from the beginning of the London-Istanbul odyssey, we used:

-- 7 trains (plus 2 trains for side-trips)
-- 8 buses (plus 1 bus for a side-trip)
-- 2 private transfers
-- And an 8-day car rental (which covered 1 leg of the journey, and also enabled us to do 4 side-trips)

Throughout, we encountered wonderful landscapes, cartloads of history, amazing food, and kind people -- lots of kind people.





The weather went from very cold in Skopje to mild in Thessaloniki, and back to really surprisingly cold (the coldest we've had) in Alexandroupoli, down on the Mediterranean coast. We flirted with snow a couple of times, but never closely enough to be hindered by it.


Nigel nearly lost his phone in Istanbul, but didn't.

And we stayed well throughout the whole 66-day adventure.

So there are really an awful lot of blessings to count. We have been extraordinarily fortunate.

I hope we'll be able to do this again, before we run out of health, resources, or peace (or such peace as we currently have, anyway).

Travel has kept me busy this month, so there are just six books to note, all (coincidentally) by women. Two were journey-related: A History of Yugoslavia by Marie-Janine Calic (a thought-provoking and -- I think -- fair account of a troubled polity), and Border by Kapka Kassabova (a moving and evocative look at the area where Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkiye intersect). One Across, Two Down by Ruth Rendell and We Play Games by Sarah A. Denzil both offered good stories to listen to on long bus journeys. Also very easy to listen to, while offering plenty of food for thought on the world of publishing, social media, and literary responsibility, was Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang. And Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg, was a splendid example of how to write an intimate family portrait that's still rooted and grounded in the broader sweep of history.






I'll close with a poem, by Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Fresh from a journey that's technically completed, but still not completed because it's still being digested, and looking ahead to a year that's full of things that need to be completed, and may or may not be, I find these thoughts both comforting and inspiring:

Nothing unfinished is completed
but a new beginning is made
and a new unfinished left behind.
They are now so many you cannot
finish counting them.

But look upon this unfinished life
filled with the incomplete
as a completed whole,
not one that you cannot
live abundantly.

In this abundant life,
in the moment before death,
a new poem could begin,
like the one begun years ago,
like the first poem you wrote.

No new unfinished should be seen as the last.