Afaranwide

NEWSLETTER 56: DECEMBER 2020

Dear , thanks for your interest in the Afaranwide travel blog.

Andrea with her bodyguard in Afghanistan

Life Lesson in Afghanistan

We were very excited and honoured to feature a guest post by our chum Andrea Busfield last month, writing about a moment in Afghanistan which changed her life. Sent there as a tabloid reporter, she glimpsed a way of life which valued contentment above material wealth. Andrea, who is also a best-selling novelist, now lives in Cyprus surrounded by dogs and horses. Read her beautifully written story: In A World Gone Mad, See More of It.

Travelling in the Pandemic

For obvious reasons, not many of us are travelling during the pandemic, but we didn’t have any choice when our Hong Kong visas expired. We put ourselves at the mercy of British Airways to get us to our temporary stopover in Portugal and stayed at hotels in Hong Kong and Faro, in the Algarve, to top and tail the trip. Colin wrote Flying During Covid, and I followed up with Tale of Two Hotels During Covid. What a mixed bag of experiences it was, and how right some businesses are getting it – simply by remembering to put their customers first. – SB

Tangled Up in Red Tape

We’ve been sideswiped by the amount of admin we’ve had to deal with since arriving in Portugal. Of course, sorting out residency, registering for health care and the rest is never straightforward, particularly if you have to cope with a foreign language. But matters have been made more complicated than usual by the impact of Covid-19 – an office where we had to go to get an absolutely essential number was closed because of the pandemic. Also, as Brits, we’ve had to get everything done before the end of the Brexit transition period on Dec. 31. It was all much easier during our previous moves to new countries, as we were helped by the HR departments of the companies we were going to work for. This time we’re doing it all ourselves. There are plenty of advantages, pleasures and benefits from being an expat. But one thing you learn is that wherever you go, you’ll never escape bureaucracy.

A World Without Tourists

The town of Albufeira in the Algarve is as close as Portugal gets to all-out, cheap-and-cheerful mass tourism. We managed to get our head up from all that red tape and went there to have a look. The seafront, with its marvellous sandy beaches, was as spectacular as ever.

Yet it was a sad and sombre experience to wander through the town’s empty streets past endless shuttered bars and restaurants. Clearly December is not high season, yet a good number of Brits and people from other countries like to visit the Algarve to escape the Northern winter. Many have second homes there. But like everywhere else, Covid-19 has devastated tourism.

Networking for Newbies

When you move to a country it’s vital to get up to speed with the landscape of the industry you work in. In Hong Kong, I was very thankful to Telum Media for their information service. I met a few of the team behind this media and communications network and their enthusiasm made me realise they’ll be around for some time to come. They were good enough to report our recent departure from Hong Kong and if anyone reading this is planning to work in these fields in the Asia Pacific region, Telum Media is where to go. – SB

Farewell to Jan Morris

We were saddened to hear of the death of the British author Jan Morris at the age of 94. She had an extraordinarily eventful life, but we were pleased to see that many of the tributes focused on the outstanding quality of her work. She did not like to be described as a travel writer, preferring to be seen as someone who wrote about places. Her works on great cities such as Venice, New York and Sydney are classics. She had a remarkable ability to get to the heart of a place, to describe its essence. I’m rereading her Hong Kong book, and a few pages into it I was wishing I was back there. She also had a knack of homing in on a detail that seemed to sum up her subject. It’s years since I read Pax Britannica, her three-volume history of the British Empire. Yet I still recall a reference to a golf course in some far-flung colonial outpost in Africa. Apparently a club rule allowed a member to take a free drop in the event that his ball landed in a hippo footprint. – CS

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