The Great Steppe

Of all the travels I dream of one day doing, Central Asia remains high on my list. From Samarkand to hikes in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, adventures beckon. As such, I was thrilled to read – yes, in the same Vagabond – about two young Swedes travelling overland on trains from Sweden to Bangkok (well, almost: they had to take a short flight from Georgia to Uzbekistan). In discussing what they would like to have done differently, they say that perhaps they should have waited for international relations to calm down so that they could have travelled across Russia or Iran.

Reading this somehow made me both sad and hopeful at the same time. After all, this is a generation that has grown up with international relations deteriorating and conflicts intensifying everywhere from the Middle East to Ukraine, and for whom the formative events of my own generation, like 9/11, must appear just as distant as the Vietnam War did for me. Indeed, looking through the list of students starting their studies now in September, the majority were born in 2006 or 2007. And yet, there was something profoundly hopeful in the casual assumption that the world might calm down again, that closed borders might reopen, and that the Great Steppe could once more be crossed rather than flown over.