Remember what it was like to travel to distant lands?

The pandemic has brought many changes, and some of us have found positive, as well and less desirable, impacts to working from home and meeting our colleagues only online. I, for one, find video conferencing a very thin and miserable substitute for in-person face-to-face interaction, where so many more channels of communication are open and operating than available online, even with decent bandwidth and good video, let alone when technical difficulties intervene to make a videoconference more like a séance than an in-person meeting… “Is there anybody there? Can you hear me? I think you’re muted…” I find this communication gap particularly damaging when creating new relationships, rather than trading on existing trust and working practice with someone I already know how to work with. This is especially true when reaching out across cultural differences, to people from very different countries. I have always greatly enjoyed visiting and learning about different cultures, and so I have felt particularly hemmed in by the travel restrictions that have necessarily been imposed to combat the pandemic. So it was with great relish that I recently embarked on exploring options for being able to visit Malaysia, as part of preparations for an expedition to the Chagos Archipelago, about which more later.