Back in late 2021, I attended an online university interview and was interviewed by four academics. One of these academics I was particularly excited to meet because I had discovered that he was an activist for a cause I admired. Meeting him online did not disappoint. Not only was he very charismatic, but he said some words on our subject which made a very strong impression. Fast forward to July 2022: I am on a cycling holiday in France and finally decided to email him, just to tell him how fantastic I thought he was both for his activism and his comments in the interview. He responds within days (with some very kind words) and that appears to be that.
Fast forward another week: I am in Madrid with my sister (we are interrailing), and we are queuing outside a cinema in the evening. A man approaches with his family and joins the queue directly behind us. I stare.
“No…it can’t be…surely not…“
I lean over to my sister. “He is the absolute spitting image…”
This splendid academic was interrailing with his family at the same time as us, with our schedules converging in the same country, queuing up outside the same tiny cinema, on the same evening we were there, in time to stand directly behind me and my sister…mere days after replying to my spontaneous email.
It’s fair to say that one learns lots of things when travelling. One thing I learned was the true significance of the phrase “small world”!
I was to learn my second memorable lesson in Switzerland, a stop en route from Lyon to Milan. Fast forward again two weeks later: we are at the Franco-Swiss border, upon which stands a very beautiful mountain called Mont Salève. It’s 1230m high (for context, Snowdon is roughly 1000) and it is oft recommended for the gorgeous views of Geneva afforded at the summit. My sister and I spent the morning climbing it and it was very worth it: the views were indeed stunning.
We then got the cable car down the mountain and caught our train to Lucerne. Or rather, we intended to get the cable car down and catch the train to Lucerne, only to discover the cable car disassembled and covered in scaffolding, and us standing outside the gate to the building site wondering what to do next. The creaking of the builders’ crane serenaded us as we trudged away.
In short, here are the lessons one learns atop that mountain:
If you rely on a mode of paid transport, double check the vehicle will be in one piece.
Most attempts to hitchhike on a mountain summit will fail. They will be the emptiest looking roads you’ve ever seen in your life (beyond perhaps the occasional kindly traveller who is going the opposite way but “will pick you up once I’ve finished my tour”!)
Your heart will no doubt sink at the prospect of retracing all 2 and a half hours’ worth of steps back down the mountain, but don’t worry! Google Maps will guide you to the 30-minute walking route: the steeper, rockier cliff-face path down the other side. The strange thing was that it turned out to be superb fun. When you’re scrambling bum-and-feet down a steep surface with no water, following some hilariously tragic hitchhiking attempts, the adrenaline kicks in and you genuinely have more fun than you had going up. Swiss mountain hikers that day would have heard our A Capella rendition of Mamma Mia’s “Lay All Your Love On Me” through the trees (anything to keep the spirits up).
Of course, any summer – whether spent travelling abroad or lying in bed at home (very underrated!) – is incomplete without some guilty-pleasure reading. (Side note: I often remember an away-from-home trip by the book I was reading. To this day I strongly associate a 2019 travel-sick ferry ride with a reread of Stephen King’s IT.) My travel reading has ranged from H. Rider Haggard’s She (possibly the only adventure book where the characters would have done better to stay at home), to T.M. Logan’s thriller 29 Seconds which I cannot recommend enough. Logan is a natural storyteller, succeeding in creating the ultimate page-turner. The story follows protagonist Sarah, a victim of her boss’s misogynistic tyranny, who suffers to breaking point and eventually does something quite terrible. The themes are highly feminist (Logan clearly exposes endemic injustice exploited by those in positions of power) and yet the book never becomes a two-dimensional diatribe. Rather, Logan effortlessly wins our sympathy for Sarah through fine, evocative writing. It surpassed all expectations and is possibly one of the few books honestly deserving of the praise “you won’t be able to put it down”.
