Travels on a shaky continent

The war in Ukraine has cast a pall over Europe. But it was still worth travelling there, Aucklander SARAH BECK found on a recent visit.

An anxious wind is blowing over Europe. More than two million Europeans have died from Covid in the past two years. However, it is not Covid that worries them these days, it's war. Europeans have long memories.

The war in Ukraine has brought refugees to their cities, caused food prices to rise and fuel to become expensive. They fear this coming winter. Will there be starvation and death as happened in the past? People thought the war in Ukraine would last no more than a month. Now, there is no end in sight.

My husband and I spent the European summer in Scotland, Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Kraków and Berlin. At the Polish-German border, I am mistaken for a Ukrainian refugee. In Berlin, I fear we may never get home. They are extraordinary months.

Before we leave for Europe, friends are surprised we are planning to visit Poland, as they think it is too close to the war. I reassure them, and myself, that the medieval city of Kraków is about the same distance from the Ukraine border as Christchurch is from Auckland. It is surely out of reach of a long-range Russian missile.

Nevertheless, we cancel our plans to go to Lublin, further north of Kraków. Described by Lonely Planet as a beautifully preserved old town with a blend of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, Lublin is a town I had long wanted to visit.

I go online to find accommodation in hotels, pensions and inns to suit our budget-$90 to $130 a night. My only requirement is a lift. No more lugging suitcases up steep stairs.

Our neighbour, Roger, farewells us and assures us the Russians are advancing slowly. When others ask why we are travelling, given Covid and the war, I tell them I have always been a traveller. "When it is time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived," the philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said.