No longer someone else's horizon

Travel for travel's sake within the EU seemed rather dull and somewhat pointless: the whole adventure is essentially safe and secure from door to door. Things tend not to be delayed by clouds or lack of traffic. On return from Tallinn there was little to endure other than an in-flight another-gin-and-tonic-please-luv South Walean with tourettes and being surrounded by a trolley-wobbly crowd of warming but ridiculous no-I'll-pay-for-the-tea pensioners while waiting for the bus.

Two months through the sealess stretches of Asia may only scrape the surface but we have seen enough to see why the world's broadcasters of bomb blasts and doom need editors: there's a vast expanse of banally impoverished but friendly, clean and ruggedly beautiful borderland to filter out.

Mike will finish with a line gleaned from Marco Polo - the Venician with a hole; Lowri may well sign hers with "y'know"; and I could, and Andy would say I should, end with:

I have not seen the half of what I've told.

I will, I think, recount some surreal eavesdropping from Stanstead, instead: Sat next to us in the airport's mock pub was an old Mediterranean man who looked and sounded as if he was rehearsing to cease a role from Al Pacino. Sat next to him was a wide-eyed, quiet African man in a loose-necked suit. They were discussing Kashmir. The Mafioso was expounding his wisdom on the matter:

Musharraf will do a deal with the Indians and he'll screw the Americans - he'll screw the British - and they won't realise.

...and with that they upped and left and my pint arrived.