The last few days in Saratok passed in a whirl of packing and ticking off jobs on lists, all the time my view of our little town shifting from the present to the past. On Sunday 22nd September Sue drove me to Sarikei to get the boat to Kuching. I looked out of the window at the jungle, the banana plants and the roadside shops and longhouses thinking this may well be the last time I see them. As the boat surged up to the pontoon I said my goodbyes to Sue and passed my luggage (a rucksack and my bicycle encased in a large cardboard box) up to some helping hands on the rear deck.
This was the start of three days of relentless travel by boat to Kuching, then a plane the next morning to Kuala Lumpur followed by a dash across the airport to catch my flight to Heathrow. At Heathrow I got a taxi to Sue's brother Mike's house in Uxbridge where I left the bike. After a pleasant night catching up with news from Mike, Tina, Adam and Tim, I got the bus on Tuesday to Stansted where I caught the plane to Bari. Feeling very old, tired and disorientated I staggered out of Bari Airport into the neon-lit night and was collected by a van which drove me to a nearby industrial estate to collect my cheap hire car. I drove the car out of the compound observed by two quizzical and soppy looking Alsatian gaurd dogs and made my way hesitantly to my hotel a few kilometres away on the other side of the city, everything feeling both strange and familiar at the same time, the streetlights flaring in the windscreen as I tried to focus my straining eyes.
Next morning I got the lift to the rooftop terrace where breakfast was served and "bam" - I was hit by the crystal-clear azure blue light of the Adriatic. It's just an ordinary business hotel but the beauty of it all nearly made me cry - there's an aesthetic sensibility in Italy that can transform even the most mundane of locations into something truly exquisite. I looked out from the balcony at a glassy sea disturbed only by the odd darting fishing boat, then turned to my left and saw the old town of Bari with its creamy stonework marking the division between the sea and an almost identically blue sky and my chest swelled with excitement as I thought to myself "benvenuto in Italia!"
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