louiseinlimbo

So I moved back up from dorms-in-cheap-hostels mode to the luxury of a group tour, with private ensuite rooms, buffet breakfasts, private vehicles and guides – not to mention the mental relaxation of not needing to think where I would stay, how I would get there, etc. We met for lunch, then were taken to see a few sights of Delhi (the Humayun’s Tomb complex and the Parliament buildings), out to dinner, then an early night before our flight the next morning to the city of Lah – capital of Ladakh.   The first place I’ve ever flown into where we all had to close our window blinds some time prior to landing, so as not to see (and record?) what was going on at the airport, part of which is for the armed forces!   Once in Leh, however, everything felt fine, with no obvious security tensions. Surrounded by mountains and overlooked by a fort built in the 17th century, it is a stunning city.  There are two mosques on the main street of the bazaar, a Sunni one you can see in the ...

My many visits to India over the years had still left me with some gaps to fill, so I’d booked myself onto a guided tour of Kashmir & Ladakh.  When the Pahalgam incident ratcheted up the tensions between India and Pakistan in June the company briefly threatened to cancel the tour – and then tensions in the Middle East led to a closure of Iran’s airspace threatening my Helsinki-Istanbul-Delhi flight (finally re-routed around the coast and so requiring a refuelling stop in Doha)- so I was thankful when I arrived back in India that all seemed to be back on track. ]I’d come a few days early so that I could fit in a quick visit to Amritsar before heading to the mountains, as a very messy conflict there back in 1984 (Operation Blue Star), when I’d travelled overland across Asia and planned to visit the Golden Temple, had led to its closure.  So finally, 41 years later than planned, I arrived by bus in Amritsar, grabbed a night’s sleep in my £2.50 a night hostel, took my scarf fr...

The fact that it's taken me so long to get around to making this post on Helsinki says a lot about my views on the place … not a city to really impress me.   Not helped by the fact that so much of it seems to be currently under restoration or redevelopment, from the main city cathedral (above) to many of the city tram lines and therefore the streets and squares, but that aside, there really didn’t seem to be all that much to see, at least compared to the very impressive cities of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. The highlight was a visit to the UNESCO-listed fortifications on the island of Suomenlinna, which were impressive.   Built in the 18th century by Sweden, partly financed by France for some reason that escapes me now, they apparently played a significant role in Swedish, Russian, and Finnish history.   Lots of old walls and bunkers remain, and old cannons, as well as a few of the interior passages inside the walls.   But my enjoyment of it was really helped by the b...