Starting to observe things more closely. Happened across this beautiful creature yesterday morning, basking in the sunshine and it banished my pandemic broodings for a good few minutes, until it took flight again and found somewhere else to pause. The amazing thing about London right now with no planes in the sky and so few cars on the street is that you really can almost hear the wing-beat of a Peacock butterfly.

I left the farm quite broken-hearted and continued my trip in Egypt, which was a rather spontaneous idea. I returned to the Israeli desert where I went hiking on my own, then travelled onto Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Tel Aviv for me was a perfect city - the sea, beach, markets and street life. As I was exploring, , I was already thinking “this could be my new home”. 

You might already know about the communist regime that was established in Romania by the USSR, but their history also includes Roman colonists, medieval wars with the Ottoman empire, World Wars and union movements.

A force as strong as two Swedish girls out to get their New Year's kisses is a sight to behold. It had just stopped raining and we hailed a cab and told the driver to take us to Rothschild Boulevard.  The traffic was awful so I gave the driver a pep talk - after all, we were on a mission.  I informed him that we we were entirely in his hands and here I must add that one should never tell an Israeli cab driver this unless you are REALLY in a hurry.  You have been warned!

"There are huge ceremonies before the burnings too - thousands of people attend, there's dancing and music.  And when they burn the effigies, you can feel the power of nature..  It's so atmospheric, you feel it's almost holy.  A power that's above you..."  

I’m not sure exactly what made me do it - perhaps it felt like a unique opportunity to jump over such extraordinary landscape, or maybe the other recent activities and experiences gave me the courage, or it could have been the support and encouragement from Phil.  In the seconds before jumping, I was truly afraid, with sweating skin and pounding heart, and once out of the plane, I was calmer but had trouble breathing due to the thin air racing past me so quickly. ..

We’d arrived at the airport of a small town named Tromso, in the far north of Norway.  And because we were north of the Arctic Circle, the sun was above the horizon even in the middle of the night.  But we couldn’t see the sun, because of the thick fog surrounding us.  We were taken by coach to the base of a cable-car, which took us up to the top of a mountain.  At the summit the sun was shining brightly, because the fog at the bottom had actually been a layer of low cloud  - which we could now see covering all of the land below us...