At the end of September, I took an overnight train called the Doğu Ekspresi – or Eastern Express – from the Turkish capital Ankara to the city of Kars in the northeast, close to the Armenian border.
I cannot say precisely how the journey came about, or what sort of neuronal firing must have transpired in my brain the previous month as I lay sweating in between the oscillating fans on either side of my bed on the Oaxacan coast of Mexico – the position in which I had undertaken to plan my first transatlantic trip since December 2019.
Prior to the onset of the pandemic, I had led a pathologically itinerant existence for nearly 20 years, flitting continuously between countries and continents and harbouring an existential aversion to settling down.
Coronavirus had put an abrupt end to the arrangement, converting what was meant to be a two-week stay in Oaxaca into a heretofore inconceivable year and a half. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.