by I’m writing this from Lupeni. Or more accurately, a couple of miles up a narrow track and a bit of a hill from Lupeni. Which is just down the road from Petroșani, a sizeable town. At the start of the drive I felt so crappy that I wondered if I’d make it. I was even crawling along the motorway at one point. When I was at my lowest ebb my phone rang. It was New Zealand, obviously. Luckily I could pull into a petrol station. Mum and Dad are both pretty worried about me. Mum even mentioned flying over. Yikes. Very good of her, but what would that even achieve? I did get here in the end. The drive took in some mountain views as well as a lot of post-industrial towns that were coming apart at the seams. I stopped in one of them called Baru, which means “new” in Indonesian but there was nothing remotely new about it. Before that I had lunch in a place called Sacu. I ate in a park full of signs telling you not to stand under trees when there’s lightning. There’s lightning now, here, as I write this. It’s properly chilly – I’m wearing jeans and a jumper which I almost didn’t pack. Packing was utterly exhausting. Even something as simple as that is almost beyond me.
My room is very basic. Right next door, for some reason, is an infrared sauna which would cost me 70 lei to use. I’d dread to think what that might do to me. It’s the opposite of ultraviolet, and UV rays are bad for you, so in theory… The internet is sporadic in my room, but luckily there’s a common room nearby, with an excellent connection, that nobody else is using. I’ve managed to give an online lesson (in which I had to explain the meaning of “bollocks”); I have another one in the morning. I doubt I’ll be doing much in the way of hiking this time.
I’ve just heard that Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, in Nashville. What a life she had. What an amazing singer. And what a thoroughly good person she was. Very sad.
