louiseinlimbo

I really like staying in hostels.  This is not just about saving money, but more for the social factor – even if I were to win the big prize on the Premium Bonds, I think I’d still stay in hostels, albeit with the occasional night or two in a private room (space to unpack, dry laundry and repack, less disturbances to my sleep, etc). But sometimes it can be a strange experience, at least if you always stay in the cheapest hostel in town, as I do.   I’m quite relaxed about the state of cleanliness, but was still surprised to get a bed twice in the last six weeks, once in Lithuania and once in Latvia, with unwashed bed linen.   In the first instance, there was only a weekly visit of a cleaner, who apparently (I didn’t see her) did a cursory sweep and restocked toilet paper and washing up liquid – but she didn’t do any laundry.   Most of the occupants were there for quite a while (immigrants either looking for work or already doing low-paid jobs) and so put their own b...

As the Belarus trip ended at the bus station in the Lithuanian capital, and I have never visited Lithuania (nor the other Baltic states), it seemed like a good idea to spend some time there.  My next firm time commitment involves meeting a group in New Delhi at the very end of June, leaving me some seven weeks to cover the Baltic states - which seemed like enough as these countries are small, but I still felt the pressure to keep moving on from one place to another. Which meant that I only spent a week in the capital, Vilnius, even though it was a really nice city and a comfortable hostel with nice fellow guests, before I caught the train to Kaunas.  Of course there's the usual point to remember that I don't just jump from one holiday (Belarus) to another (Lithuania), but need a few 'home' or 'down' days - to sleep, do laundry, edit, cull, label and back up my photos, catch up with emails, etc - so my week was by no means a full week.  But I walked many miles to...

After the (too) short trip to Kaliningrad, I continued with the same tour company, and some of the same group members, to Belarus.  An easy border crossing in this time, and the tour leader seemed to be trying to build bridges with those he’d previously offended, so I was hopeful that this trip – a full week – would go according to plan. & most of it did.  Okay, so we didn’t get to visit the workshop of Ozgur, “one of the most esteemed sculptors of the USSR, his workshop full to the brim of monuments to Lenin, Soviet War heroes, and statues of other important communist figures from Kim II Sung to Fidel Castro”, nor to meet “our friend who supplies local film directors with uniforms and weapons of the Second World War. He will provide you with the uniform of a Red Army General and be able to take some fairly epic photos in the surrounding area” (this latter would not have interested me anyway) – and most importantly for most of us, at the Stalin Line (a series of bunkers on...

I'd arranged to go to Belarus for a week with a tour group, and after booking it I saw that I could add on a pre-tour extension of a few days in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad at a pretty good price, so I did so.  I'm glad I did, as it was an interesting place to visit, although the trip was too short which was frustrating, as I'm sure I won't have the time or money to re-visit to see the forts, cathedrals, museums, etc that we missed. To be fair, we missed the first scheduled half-day, as we waited six hours at the Lithuania-Kaliningrad border crossing for some of our group to get through.  We had been warned that it could be a difficult crossing, and some (male) members of our group were held for many hours whilst the Russian border guards searched their phones and their social media accounts for anything incriminating, and in a few cases asked them to remove their tops and roll up their trousers so that their tattoos could be examined.  One (Portuguese) tour grou...

Another trip back ‘home’, and another opportunity to reflect on what it would be like if/when it really does become my home again.   I don’t need to repeat that it is cold and expensive … although in this four-week visit I only saw a few light drops of rain on my second-to-last day, and a market stall in the middle of the City of London was selling three ripe avocados for £1, so it could be worse!   & perhaps I don’t need to repeat how pretty it is, from the great buildings in the City to the beautiful villages and woodlands (full of wood anemones, primroses and bluebells at this time of year).   As an added benefit, on this visit I stayed for a couple of days with a new friend who lives near Heathrow … and also near to some great moorlands that I would not have expected in that part of England.   A keen birder (I met him on my birding trip to the Seychelles last year), he took me out for a couple of birding walks, where I not only got to enjoy the scenery but al...

The second part of my month in Sri Lanka turned out to be very different from the first, being based much more on the people I met than on any sights.  Yes I wandered around Colombo, seeing monuments, museums, mosques, temples, churches, lighthouses and old architecture, and I visited the fort and a couple of temples in Jaffna, but it was all about the people. This started when I checked into my hostel in Jaffna, after a night on the train.  One of my room-mates was a Sri Lankan lady who’d spent most of her life living in London, but who was currently visiting ‘home’ to help get over a few relationship problems.  She offered to guide me around the city for the day, but clearly did this so that we could continue the conversation we’d started in the dorm.  She went into considerable detail about her woes, and asked me some quite direct relevant questions – for example she wanted to know when I last had sex, as she hadn’t wanted to be celibate after her relationships en...

In Sri Lanka I was joining an old Australian friend of mine who does not ‘do’ hostels, or indeed backpacking-style travel.  So I’d agreed to up my expenditure for a couple of weeks and join her on an organised tour that covered much of the island – run by an Australian company that she was comfortable with.  & we agreed to arrive at the tour hotel a little early, so that we had a day to catch up with each other before meeting the other ten people we’d be travelling with.  It was a nice hotel, with all the comforts that I usually miss in my cheap hostels (private shower with hot water, TV, buffet breakfast – and in this case a swimming pool!!), although on the flip side there is no shared kitchen so you do have to spend more money on eating out.  It was great to see Rhonda again (and to use the swimming pool and wash a few clothes in our private bathroom). But I was in for a big surprise. On the evening of the second day there, we stepped out of the room to make o...