Too Close for Comfort

Travel broadens your mind and opens yourself to new experiences.  As a whole this is very positive, but it also exposes you to risks and more than that, makes real of the news stories you hear of distant lands.

This photo was taken in New York on 10th September 2001. Yup. You can just make out the towers.  Less than 24 hours later and the world was a very different place.  Several days later, as I sat teary eyed on Eurostar, returning to good old Blighty, I listen to a family discussing the incident that had happened in a far off land.

My travels in India make news of events there seem so much more real to me than, say Malaysia, a country and a region that I haven't been to.  However, nothing brings that home more than when something happens in places I have been, or places my loved ones had been.  The coordinated attacks in Mumbai, November 2008 were too close for comfort.  The Taj Mahal hotel was under siege for days.  This is the same hotel where I had sent my parents for a few days on their own to experience Mumbai before flying home just a few months earlier. A place where I thought they would be safe.

I vividly remember standing in the kitchen at one of my Rangers house's looking at the photos in the paper. I had taken my Rangers to India the year before and as well as landing in Mumbai, we spent a night there and did a bit of sight seeing including the Taj Mahal hotel.  I turned the page to see an image of bodies lying on the ground inside Victoria Terminus station.  I looked at my Ranger and said "that was the station we arrived at". It was a station I had used several times myself.

Its not just terrorist attacks though - do you remember the hot air balloon that crashed in Egypt last year? Probably not, unless like me you had taken that flight.

And its not just international travel that has these risks.  I remember one Christmas in the 80s, my mum agonising over whether we should go to London to see the lights with all the IRA threats. My GCSE geography trip to Canary Wharf had to be altered as the IRA had detonated a bomb there just weeks before. As it was, a bomb was found in Trafalgar Square on the day we went.

More recently, the 7/7 bombings happened a year after I stopped working in London. One of the victims had been the head of my department.  A real person that I knew.

The news these past weeks have been full of flight MH17 that was shot down over the Ukraine.  First reports were full of this being another Malaysian Airways flight disappearing, but soon that changed as it was realised that that was just an unfortunate coincidence.

The real issue is why was that airline flying over a warzone? Apparently because that's what they do. They feel safe 6 miles up.  Malaysia Airways weren't the only airline to be taking that flight path, there were others Lufthansa amongst them. Lufthansa who I flew to Pune with in January.

Little Owl and I flew over Ukraine.

In January.

It could have been our plane.

It wasn't, and for that I am very grateful.

But it does mean when I look at the images, and listen to the news, it makes it real to me. More real than I would like.

Travel broadens your mind and opens yourself to new experiences.  As a whole this is very positive, but it also exposes you to risks and more than that, makes real of the news stories you hear of distant lands.