louiseinlimbo

My Mum really is not well, mostly from long-term conditions (including Multiple Sclerosis, Ankylosing Spondylitis and Rheumatoid Arthritis), her 40+ years of anorexia, a gastric ulcer – and more recently with dementia.   She does not enjoy her life, but as we don’t have an ‘off switch’ she continues to wake up each morning to suffer yet another day of physical pain and mental distress.   She loves my visits but does not want me to stay at her place – far too stressful (I might put things back in the wrong place…), and my presence will lead to her using more electricity and gas which will increase her expenses.   So I booked myself into my usual hostel, with the understanding that I would take day trips out to my Mum’s house. Visiting her is stressful.   She doesn't stop talking but often starts sentences then can’t remember what she was trying to say.   She has frequent panics about where she put her purse/keys/some important piece of paper.   She struggl...

My organised tour ended with a flight to Delhi, and I knew it was the time to find a dentist, to look at one of my teeth from which a big chunk had fallen off on the flight into the country three weeks earlier – thankfully I hadn’t suffered any pain, even though the hole was large.  I went to a dentist in a chain that had been recommended to me by several people, and they dealt with me professionally, filling the hole.  However, they told me that the reason for the damage was that the tooth was next to an unfilled gap I’ve had for many years (decades?) – apparently the bone slowly recedes, which causes the neighbouring teeth to slowly move.  They told me that if I didn’t fill the gap, I would get more problems with these teeth, probably eventually losing them.  Apparently I needed a crown. I’ve never had a crown before so do not know whether this is the standard procedure, but I went back the next day for them to drill a hole in the gum and then screw in a titanium s...

  After the festival, we had a couple of days driving through the Zanskar Valley, from Leh to Padum and on from there to Kargil.  They were long drives, but very enjoyable ones as the scenery was absolutely stunning – harsh, rocky mountains, snowy peaks, and the occasional glacier.  We did also visit some more monasteries, including the Karsha Monastery where as well as the usual colourful paintings on all the walls, they have this icon in the photo, made partly from mummified human remains!  The hostile relationship with neighbouring Pakistan became more apparent here, from the Kargil War Memorial to the used Pakistani shell decorating our hotel.  & we started to see the army presence along the roads, with armed soldiers stationed every half mile or so.  It didn’t feel dangerous though – or at least not in that sense.  Natural disasters such as rock falls feel like a far greater threat, and it was quite shocking to see some houses near a recent la...

  Per the tour group literature, one of the high points of this trip was the Hemis Tsechu (festival), held annually for the last 300 years or so at Hemis Gompa (the largest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh) to honour the birth of Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism.   It didn’t figure particularly highly in my reasons for selecting this particular tour, but I have to admit that it was pretty impressive! Over the course of this the second (main) day of the festival, there are some ten different sets of masked performers doing their dances in the central courtyard, accompanied by musicians playing a few different musical instruments, particularly various trumpet/bugle-type things – some of them also masked.  I did buy a guidebook to the festival, which enabled me to label my photos, but really … this is a sample extract describing the first set of mask dancers: “The thirteen black hats’ or evil terminators’ dance represents the Nagpa tradition of Vajrayana practition...

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...