Catch up and Silk Road holiday in Melbourne Diaries

Haven’t written for a while. The main reason is work. For the last three months I’ve been acting in a managerial role and the workload, combined in the 1.5 hour travel time, is killing me. I don’t think I’ve slept more than 6 hours on Sun to Thurs night, and even on the weekend I am waking with the bedsheets soaked in my own sweat.

The team I work for is fine, but what I’m expected to do is ludicrously out of touch with reality (the phone largely rings every ten minutes on average, forget a lunch break or any other break for that matter), and it is starting to spill over to the juniors - I had to order a junior lawyer, a mother of three with the flu, home at 7PM despite a client area harassing her for a response on a low significance request for advice. A lot of yelling, a lot of borderline bullying, and I am nearly done with it. A lot of the team drink heavily, and I can understand why. The key problem, as I see it, is that a team of 20 to 40 year old perfectionist lawyers are demand equivalent standards of perfection from clients who are, more often than not, blustering, buffoonish fifty-somethings utterly incapable of meeting those standards - the results are often disastrous.

The only things that I can hold onto are: 1) I guess I’m getting paid more; 2) the work is interesting in its subject matter; and 3) I take a five week holiday in 11 days’ time. The holiday itself is the last of my adventurous ones. It will start in China at Guangzhou (old Canton, now very much modern China), go to Xi An (Terracotta warriors), then head out to the Chinese desert at Dunhuang (start of the desert), Turpan (Muslim and very much in the desert) and then Kashgar - the last city, a Silk Road relic lodged between the Tian Shan Himalayas and that Taklamakan Desert, is what I am most looking forward to. I then fly to Kyrgyzstan and join a tour to cross into the mountainous Pamirs in Tajikistan, heading south and bordering Afghanistan for a few days (there are suggestions here and there of day trips into comparatively placid North Afghanistan - I know it’s possible, but it’s something of a taboo subject in travel sites). I go from desert to 4500m altitude in a week. Major culture shock (moderated by the fact that I have been to both the Himalayas and Central Asia (Uzbekistan) before) and hundreds of miles away from mobile phone towers - it is definitely what I need to be free of the work contracts. It will also likely be the last of my more adventurous trips, as the required fitness and preparation is getting too hard for me to maintain in middle age. In a way, it is a nostalgic journey to my younger, less stressed, slightly fitter, self. This morning I was rumbling through a closet and was surprised at the hiking/travel detritus I have accumulated over the years: every type of charger and electric adaptor, GPS, thermals, hiking shorts, spare batteries, shoelaces, etc. I don’t do the regular hikes that I used to and had largely forgotten about this previous hobby. A lot of the gear, while old, is very good quality, and I won’t need to buy much more for the trip.

In terms of Prosebox, the travel entries may be my last entries here. Unless work improves, I doubt that I’ll have the time to update anything online (my FB page is largely defunct). It is sad, as I enjoy the sites - but it may be time to move on.