Final fragments

We've now been back in England nearly two weeks - and it's taken this long to get over the feeling of disorientation and to start sorting out the jumble of impressions and memories of the last three months. It really was the most incredible experience, and I can assure everyone who is asking that we did have a brilliant time. I don't want to call it the trip of a lifetime, because hopefully it is the first of many, although possibly this, my first proper travelling experience of any length of time, will always be a bit unique. It's a part of the world I definitely want to go back to. Turkey fascinated me, and I really want to go back to explore parts of it outside Istanbul, such as Ephesus, Ankara and Cappadocia. I'd love to go back on a retreat to the Rila monastery in Bulgaria - just stay there for a couple of nights completely removed from the rest of the world up in the mountains. Romania also is an intruiging country: it would be great to go hiking in Trannsylvania in the summer, but also to explore more of the northern part of the country - Marmures - which is still very untouched, as well as to visit the city of revolutions: Timisoara. Budapest, of course, I would go back to in a flash for more opera, baths, cake and Danube romance. Little Olomouc in the Czech Republic definitely warrants another visit in the perfect Poet's Hostel (best one we visited I think). And I just fell in love with Poland as a whole - such incredible spirit and rejuvenation. The trip also made us both want to visit slightly more far-flung places such as the Ukraine and Molodova. Belarus looks interesting too, but perhaps when it ceases to be run by a communist dicatator whose KGB is still bugging most of the country.

And we didn't quite make it to the country which has had the greatest influence on this region in the last hundred years - Russia. All through the trip, it has felt as if it is looming in the background like a rather sinister but fascinating shadow. We stopped just on the border with Estonia, tantalisingly close to St Petersburg, which many other travellers in Tallinn were going on to. Apparently the Estonian border isn't the best place to cross because of the strained relations between Russia and Estonia, and we heard a couple of horror stories from other travellers about being stopped at the border and questioned for hours by border guards before paying them substantial bribes. In the hostel in Tallinn, I found a book on the last of the Romanovs and got hooked - it seemed a very appropriate final book to read on the trip, in a city where the Tsars came on holiday in the summer. The armadillo and the tortoise will one day team up again to explore Russia - it's a promise!

Twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, what can I say about our impressions of post-communist Eastern Europe? Firstly, it's really no longer possible to group together this part of the world under one name. There is such an amazing variety between the countries, as well as huge diversity within the countries themselves. A tiny Bulgarian village in the middle of nowhere has nothing in common with the bustling beauty of Prague. The difference in language alone is extraordinary - to go from Turkish, to Cyrillic Bulgarian, to Frenchified Romanian to bizarre Magyarian Hungarian is quite an experience.

But as a summing up makes generalisation inevitable, I would say that the overwhelming common feeling is that of rejuvenation - an incredible bounce-back spirit of survival in so many beautiful countries which have spent much of their history under Imperial occupation of one sort or another, then underwent Nazi occupation with all the horrors of World War Two and the concentration camps, then Soviet occupation which lasted for nearly fifty years. Cities such as Warsaw and Dresden which were almost totally destroyed have been lovingly rebuilt, and in most places there is a feeling of buzzing new life and new opportunities. Of course it wasn't all rosy. The real poverty we experienced in Bulgaria and Romania was pretty shocking - especially when you consider that these countries are now in the EU. Hopefully the financial help resulting from membership will be a big help. The huge prejudice towards the Roma in these countries, along with Slovakia, was also unpleasant to encounter, as was of course the massive social problems within the Roma communities themselves. And perhaps nastiest of all for a region with such a troubled Jewish history were the remaining traces of anti-Semitism which we found. Don't get me wrong - it's only traces, and we were also struck by the thousands of people under the Nazis who did take in and protect their Jewish neighbours. But nevertheless the occasional bits of anti-Jewish graffiti with swastikas, the dubious monument at the Hill of Crosses and the stations of the cross in a cathedral in Olomouc and again in Tallinn with anti-Semitic caricatures, struck an undeniably uncomfortable note. Some old wounds haven't quite healed up - especially in the former Sudetenland, as we found when we were in Liberec where the story of the evicted German community still isn't acknowledged. As we went on, it struck us more and more just how recent this is. For our generation, who learnt what little we know about this area in history lessons, after the Tudors, it was a striking realisation. In the Baltics of course, 1989 wasn't the end of occupation - there were still Russian tanks killing Latvian citizens in Riga in 1991, which was when they finally regained their independence.

So much still to see and still to learn. We have come home with lists of books, films and artists we need to investigate. I'm going to start by reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to get an idea of the gulags to which so many people in Eastern Europe were sent. Wish me luck....

This will be my last post so goodbye and thank you for reading this blog. I hope it's been interesting to read and I'm sorry there were sometimes long gaps between postings - getting reliable internet access was sometimes rather difficult! We're both really glad we wrote it, as otherwise I think we'd have forgotten a lot of our adventures. To finish, I can only say again that this is not going to be the last of our adventures. Where to next? Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the former Yugoslavia, the Dalmatian coast, or maybe further afield to South America or India? But that, in the words of Kipling, will have to be another story.