The following stories are highly commended in our 2025 New Travel Writer of the Year Competition. You can find the finalists here.
Cold War Camera – Daniel Wake
“I need to get some photos,” I told myself. “I need pictures of this disaster.”
It was the summer of 1977 and I was hitchhiking around Europe to the incongruous backdrop of the disco craze and the Cold War. After two months on the Continent, my final destination before returning home for college would be the sun and sand of a Greek island. Any Greek island would be fine. But before I could take a ferry into the Aegean, I’d have to successfully navigate a 36-hour train ride from Austria south through Yugoslavia to Athens.
I didn’t. When the train stopped in Belgrade at 2:00 in the afternoon, I stepped off to buy a cold beverage and a snack. I was still in line at a refreshment kiosk when the train left the station. My backpack was on that train.
I ran down the platform in a sudden sweat, but the train was too far gone. Except for my money belt and the camera around my neck, all my possessions were in that backpack—clothes, camping gear, medicines, addresses of people I’d met, my travel diary. Some were treasures, some were mere necessities, all were hurtling south without me. The next train to Athens wouldn’t come through for eight hours, leaving plenty of time to find a café near the station and start watching the clock. I didn’t know what to expect as a twenty-year-old in my first communist country, but it was nice to find their beer was as good as anyone else’s.
After a mug of hoppy local ale, my heartbeat slowed and my breathing calmed. Maybe this would all work out fine, I told myself. The station agent had said the guards at the border would pull off unattended luggage and it would be there waiting for me. It was stupid—so stupid—to get off the train and lose everything, but maybe in the end, it would just be a good story. Yes, an entertaining story…and that’s when I realized I needed photographs of where it happened.
I paid my bill and left the café. Back in the station, there were three trains parked on scattered platforms, facing the front. That would work nicely for one of the two photographs I wanted: a picture of parked trains like the one I’d foolishly deboarded, and a photo of the refreshment kiosk.
I wandered back and forth, checking out different angles of the trains parked at their platforms. Then I pulled out my camera, framed the scene through the viewfinder, and took a head-on photograph of the trains and the tracks. I started toward the refreshment kiosk, but decided to take a second picture of the trains. “A second photo just to be safe,” I told myself. I turned back around, lifted the camera and again looked through the viewfinder. The three trains were still there, but this time there was something new in the viewfinder—a soldier in a greenish brown uniform and a creased cap, rifle slung around his shoulder, waving his arms and shouting as he hurried toward me.
Something from my subconscious suddenly hit me, a story I’d seen somewhere that summer. During the Cold War, it was illegal in the communist countries of Eastern Europe to take photographs of any facility with strategic military value: facilities like an army base, an airport or a bridge. Like a train station. I’d read about a Western tourist jailed in Poland after naively taking a picture of the Warsaw train station.
My lungs froze. I dropped the camera to my chest as though it were radioactive, but it was too late. The soldier glared at me, his teeth clenched as he lurched forward. “What am I going to do in a Belgrade jail?” I screamed to myself. “Can I do anything right?”
He came within three or four steps and stopped, his chest heaving. He pointed to my camera, shouted something incomprehensible and violently shook his head. I nodded frantically and lifted my hands even further away from the camera, fingers splayed wide. He glanced around to see if any other soldiers were approaching, but there was none. It was just him and me.
I slowly took a step back and smiled. A very forced smile. Again, he looked around. Had anyone else seen me take a photo? Had his superior seen him see me? I took another step backwards…then another…then I wheeled around and sprinted out of the station. He let me go.
Back in the safety of my café, I ordered another half-liter and decided not to move until the next train came through.
How To Treat a Woman – Polly Groom
“Mrs Deacon? Is that Amber’s mum? … Hold on …”
Low-pitched beep. The rattle of coins falling into a payphone, the waiting pause-for-breath of international calls.
“Yeah. Please don’t worry, it’s all fine. Mostly. Um…she’s in hospital. But she’s ok.”
The relief of getting that phone call made! Duty discharged. I had a plane to catch.
We were somewhere in the outskirts of Cairo when my friend became ill. She’d been a bit queasy for a day or so – upset tummy; a little feverish – but an early morning found us waiting in the clinic, eventually seen by a brusque woman (a nurse? receptionist?). After communicating poorly, my Arabic almost non-existent, I had a prescription in one hand, a bill in the other. The bill was painfully large. As I scrabbled for my emergency cash another patient spoke.
“How much?”
When I showed him, he started haranguing clinic staff. We were now bystanders in our drama, uncomprehending, but aware he was on our side. He turned, smiling. The bill was halved.
Clutching long-distance bus tickets (to the Israeli border, pre-booked), we negotiated chaotic Egyptian traffic. My feelings were almost as chaotic – after 6 months travelling I was going home, my flight from Tel Aviv in 24 hours. Tight timing. Should make it.
Just a couple of teeny-tiny issues. One, we needed to fill Amber’s prescription, she was really ill. Now barely walking. Two, it was Friday, everything closing for afternoon prayers. And three, I had very little cash, spent out in anticipation of leaving. Poring over the tattered guidebook we located a cashpoint. Near a pharmacy. Perfect. I manhandled her up a narrow alleyway, saw a reassuring “VISA” sign. Not working. Check the map. Another one, several blocks away. We started staggering over but it was obviously impossible. 25 years later, still a crystal-sharp memory; heat and dust, shadows, crashing metal shutters closing over colourful carpet shops, smell of charcoal-burners and mint tea, the sense of the souk and its stalls shutting around me. Time running out.
“Hey. You.”
I turned, ready to refuse trinkets, turn down ‘good price.’
“Your friend is sick.”
“Yes.”
“You need medicine.”
And the whole story comes spilling out, the bill and the prescription and the no-money and the not-walking and then, somehow, she’s ensconced in the back of the shop. The shopkeeper’s wife making tea, and I’m breaking all the 18 year-old-girl travelling rules, splitting up, leaving everything with someone we don’t know, literally running to find the ATM. The alleys and passageways, so alluring, romantic, exotic are now frustrating, even threatening.
Neither this cashpoint, nor the last one on the map, are working and I am finally defeated.
Back at the shop Amber is half-asleep, nestled in bright patterned rugs. She looks comfortable, but shivering, and the shopkeeper worries. I explain I still have no cash, therefore no medicine, but we must go. He takes the prescription, disappears. Returns, clutching a bag of medicines and, praise be, car keys! He drives us to the bus, we clamber aboard and then we are leaving Egypt.
The bus journey is nightmarish. Amber is medicated; a little better, but still seriously unwell. She has our double seat, I sit in the aisle. Overnight I lie down, try unsuccessfully to sleep while people step over me, occasionally on me. Outside, the desert unwinds endlessly. I have loved the desert for months, but in those hours I hate it. Amber sleeps so deeply that I, scared and sleep-deprived, convince myself I must regularly check she is still breathing.
Finally at the border, I elbow to the front (I’m good at this now, travel whittles away British reserve). Passports stamped, bags abandoned, we head onto a tarmac strip of maybe only 100 metres but could be miles. We hobble together, her arm looped around my shoulders. Unmoving heat. Unrelieved harshness; armed soldiers and tarmac. At Israeli border control I shove forwards again. Now we are in one country, our bags in another.
I leave Amber with a sympathetic border-guard and turn back into no-mans-land. I’m surprisingly unchallenged re-entering Egyptian territory, leaving immediately with rucksacks. The border-guard has organised a taxi to hospital.
An unknotting. A visceral, physical response to relinquishing responsibility, seeing her in a clean bed, on a drip, face returning to pain-free normality.
I can’t stay though, I have that phone call to make. I have a plane to catch.
Later, my flight booked for months but caught by minutes, I reflected on travel. In the strange half-life of night flights, I pondered the motivations of kind strangers.
The shopkeeper wouldn’t give me his address, I couldn’t send him money.
“Because” he said “I am a religious man. My religion tells me to treat every woman like my sister”.
Treasure Travel – Claire Morsman
“So, you smuggled an Incan artifact out of Bolivia?” An expert at the British Museum was cross with me, her spit snowflakes drifting from the B of Bolivia to melt into my jumper.
Incan? That word was exciting to hear, as much as smuggled was, I believe, unjustified. I suddenly wanted to leave.
My treasure hunting started with beachcombing. Peaceful browsing of muddy Devon foreshores as an only child. Were my finds pieces of pirate pottery, or smashed crockery from the pub? I scrabbled for doubloons through bladderwrack covered shale, sulphurous ooze under my fingernails, only to expose some of the millions of Lego pieces spilled from a ship spillage, infinite nibbled flip flops and baffling numbers of toothbrushes.
I saved up for a metal detector, long before they were cool, and graduated to finding coins – most too eroded to spend – spearmint green mottle spreading like a magnified virus across their heads, or tails. Naïve and optimistic, I hauled this inconveniently long wand about, to pass it, usually very self-consciously, over ground as if scything long wet grass just ahead of me, just longing for that beeeep. The notion of treasures waiting to be found was only made more exotic by being in a foreign land. Head down, I travelled and scratched the dust and sands, always respectfully and usually attracting a friend or two.
A reminiscent dig into my travel diaries calls up memories of my resolute searching.
Rarotonga, The Cook Islands:
Thud! Duf! Falling coconuts. Gentle percussive sound of crickets, backed by bass-drum-boom waves continuously folding onto reef, while I dig hopefully for pirate chests bursting with long salted pieces of eight. I’ve started to tire of papayas!
Mumbai, India:
Beach is too covered with a solid, deep blanket of plastic bags, knitted tightly by needling tides. Just stepped in human excrement – ug – in my excitement to search, failed to link the ‘beach’ with the place I saw locals squatting this dawn, like socially distanced frogs as the tide flushed out.
Fes, Morocco:
I’m fined, of course, for digging, despite permission. Put the detector away but later, sadly, still find myself digging…a grave this time. I buried the emaciated, keen-to-please kitten, under the arch of the Marinid Tombs overlooking the medina. No longer ill, hungry or thirsty now, just hugged tightly by hot earth.
Normandy, France:
Cornflour-textured sand farts wetly as it sucks my trowel to reveal a 1916 Française Republique coin. What’s this nearby? Une bombe?! I’ve uncovered a bomb?? The Gendarmes are efficient and cautious – I calm down with gulps of bitter coffee at the Mairie. Beach evacuated.
This last entry put me off, and I told myself it’s time to look up more when I travel, rather than down. I still think about the mystery history of items embedded in our earth, lost or maybe hidden, last touched by someone that I’ll almost certainly never know about. It’s all out there, these walked over wonders that give glimpses and clues to past people and times. My ‘keeps’ box is heavy with coins, bullets, clay pipes, buttons and bangles, but I never did find gold, or anything conventionally valuable. However, I think back 25 years to…
Isla del Sol, Bolivia:
Am drying on shores of Lake Titicaca. Embarrassed that I stupidly tried to impress a British backpacker I’ve just met by taking nonchalant dive into lake. It was shallow! Have grazed breasts… but am acting as if is no big deal. Staring into late afternoon sparkles of lake, as this boy, who tells me he misses Radio 4 and keeps bank card in his boot where all the crucial numbers have worn away, runs tanned fingers through the sand. Amelie in lentils style. He finds a tiny brown jug. Perfect and sweet in the now setting sun. A child’s toy. Sudden scramble to raise dusty packs onto backs, as have buses to catch, but he offers me the clay jug and ties it around my neck with dental floss. We part…”
This ‘suerte’ jug of luck is worn around my neck for years before I move to London where, on a whim, I take it to the British Museum. A few weeks lapse, then I am invited back to be told, incredibly, it’s an ancient offering linked to Incan religion and ritual.
I stop writing this to turn the jug over in my palm.
500 years pour from the pinched spout.
I’m happy to finally understand that my most precious treasure was never going to be gold and was found without looking, by a now dear friend. Despite the telling off that day in Bloomsbury, the cross lady spat a reprehending flurry that I could keep it. I hastily left before she could change her mind.
Waterfalls – Em Witcutt
Linhope Spout is the stuff of fairytales. Hidden from the path that snakes just a couple of hundred metres up the hillside, tucked into a bowl of its own making. On a day like today, with the low sun streaking through the leaves, it’s easy to imagine Tolkien’s elves making their home here, or else the wyrms – dragons of Northumbrian folklore. It’s well worth the effort it takes to get out of the door nowadays.
One day Finn will gaze, open mouthed here, all complaints about the steep path forgotten. One day he’ll hunt under the trees for toadstools and fairy houses. One day he’ll marvel at the salmon that I pray will still leap each autumn, drawn home by some magic of their own.
Today though, is his first meeting with a waterfall, not that he’s paying it much attention. His loss. He’s just woken from a nap, spreadeagled across my scarf, stretched out on the driest piece of ground I could find, while I reveled in the rare opportunity to eat lunch with both hands.
The scarfs now wrapped around us both, a cocoon for him to feed in. As he does, as the water tumbles alongside, I’m looking up, through the trees to the hills above. The county’s pinnacle, the Cheviot, lurks up there. It’s a boggy, uninspiring lump of a hill, managed for grouse and devoid of much else, but its view across Northumberland and into Scotland is worth every dragging step. At 815 metres high, it’s pathetic compared to other mountains. I’ve stood atop much taller peaks, but the Cheviot’s trig point has so far evaded me.
The first time I was driven away is one of my earliest memories, tucked behind a dry-stone wall with my dad as the wind blasts over our heads. Rain drips into my coat. I’m shivering, my dad thinks from cold, but it’s excitement. Well, mostly. Half pint, he always called me. I was small for my age, and he’d clung to my collar as we trudged across the moorland, every fresh gust threatening to blow me away like a lost kite. He’s dragged us into the scant shelter, and there we sit, waiting for the rain to ease. Eventually we beat our retreat, scurrying back across the moor, tails tucked between our legs. I loved every second of it.
The last time the mountain beat me was just a couple of years ago. My partner and I had coaxed our battered car through a deep frost. As we set off down the track, following the smoke that trailed from the chimney of a nearby farmhouse, I realised that my equally battered walking boots were failing. Glacial water dribbled in, the chill leaking deeper into my bones with each step. The ice crawling up my legs made for slow going. And then the wind started.
As the hours passed, as we crept higher, the cold bit harder. Stopping for a break, we had to beat the water bottle against a rock to break the ice inside, only to find that it had frozen again before the bottle reached our lips.
I don’t know how low the thermometer reached that day, but I do know that it was too cold to be stuck on a mountain. Once again, we turned tail, slipping and slithering back the way we’d come as fast as our sopping boots would take us, spotting the car and its aged heating system with relief as the last of the sun sputtered out behind the hills.
Finn wriggles, dragging me back to the present. A figure has appeared on the horizon above us. The silhouette disappeared a moment later as the track guides him down towards us. As he approaches, I can see him more clearly. Map grasped in one hand, expensive waterproof zipped to his throat and a shock of grey hair escaping from his hat, he’s in the uniform of the experienced walker. He looks friendly enough. Still, a jolt goes through me as I realise every inch of my isolation in this remote corner of Britain’s least visited National Park. I feel exposed. Vulnerable. It was time to go.
Unwinding the scarf, the wind strikes as I detach my protesting son. Wrenching my shirt down and fumbling with the buckles of his sling, I heave us both upright, shoving the scarf into my rucksack. We start back up the hill as the man enters the clearing. As we pass, a smile breaks across his face when he clocks the baby.
“Lovely day”, he says, “Lucky lad, I love this place.” With a tight smile, I continue on, now feeling foolish for my hasty exit.
The Kyrgyz Truck Driver – Geertje Heuermann
The truck slows down.
My eyes dart around like those of a caged animal.
Is there a car behind us?
Another truck?
Even if I run, there will be nowhere to hide. The open steppe of southern Kyrgyzstan desolate. The tarmac road long. Empty. The high mountains of the Tian Shan just an unappreciated backdrop to a helpless situation.
We come to a complete stop.
“Let’s eat,” the driver motions with his hands.
His teeth are yellowed from too much tobacco. A slight beer belly is forming under his torn white shirt. His hands are rough from the hard labor.
He unfolds a fresh loaf of traditional Kyrgyz bread from a tea towel. His sharp knife cuts into cured meat.
My heart beats at 100 mph: is this the adventure I am seeking?
Is this what I need to prove to myself, to call myself an intrepid traveler?
The fear, is it real or made up by my traumatized female mind?
He hands me a piece of bread and motions to my phone. He wants to talk via Google Translate.
“Where are you from?” the metallic voice of the translation app asks me.
“Germany,” I speak into the mic.
“Germaniya. Ah, da da.”
We exchange a few more pleasantries via the translator. He talks about his family, his two daughters, and his wife. I about my made-up son and husband in the German Military, just in case.
Slowly, my heartbeat returns to normal, and I allow myself to nibble on the soft savory bread.
“We do it like the rabbits now?”
I stare at the phone. I’m pretty sure I’m getting the gist of the translation, but I play dumb.
My looks today are not very appealing – out of laziness, out of purpose. My hiking trousers are dirty. My dark blond hair is unwashed. Unflattering prescription sunglasses hide my olive-green eyes.
“Sex. We have sex now?” he tries again.
“No.”
Maybe if I leave my backpack behind, I CAN run away.
“Why not?”
The driver seems unperturbed.
“Because I’m married,” I point at my fake wedding ring.
Marriage is holy in most countries. Even though the woman isn’t respected, the property of the man is.
“Me too, no problem.”
Shit.
“Mmmh,” my brain grasps for ideas.
“It’s against my religion?”
I look straight ahead out of the window of the rusty truck carrying building material to the Kyrgyz/Chinese border.
“What is your religion?” my phone translates.
“I’m a Christian.”
I hold my breath – another white lie.
“Ahh, okay. Me, I’m Muslim.”
He packs away the lunch and starts the engine before I have time to react—discussion over.
“You can drop me here,” I translate and point at an approaching intersection, my hands trembling.
I look in the side mirror. The road is still empty. Hastily, I grab my backpack from the back seat and jump out without meeting his eyes.
One step after another, I walk away from the main road. I focus on the ragged mountains towering above, casting shadows on the green valley that emerges behind the dusty road. On the gentle gurgling of the spring river next to my feet. A herd of wild horses playing in its water further downstream, eying me curiously. On the white yurts of the nomads that sprinkle the green pastures like coarse sugar in the far distance.
Slowly, my breath calms down, and my steps slow down. I take out my phone to check my GPS position.
A black SUV stops next to me.
“Hey, where you go?” a woman with dark permed hair and perfectly manicured hands shouts through the driver’s side window in a strong Kyrgyz accent. Her three children are in the backseat.
“Tash Rabat,” I point in the distance along the dirt road.
“Me too! Jump in, I take you.”
I hesitate.
“Not safe for woman alone.”
I look around, the road still eerily empty, apart from the horses and her shiny SUV.
I unbuckle my backpack and get in.
“Men here,” she tells me in her broken English while driving through potholes and river streams, “they steal women.”
For hundreds of years, any woman walking on the streets of Kyrgyzstan could fall prey to a man in search of a wife – or something worse.
Though ala kacchuu – the ancient tradition of abducting women for marriage – was never officially legal, persecution only started a few years ago.
If at all.
Modern-day rape disguised in old traditions.
I sink back into the soft leather seat of her SUV, close my eyes, and exhale.
Not safe for a woman alone.
Indeed.
Beijing to Bangkok – Glen Loveland
Beijing was dying, though not everyone knew it yet. In my flat near Jianguomen, I watched each act unfold on television: Wuhan’s numbers climbing, each statistic a drumbeat to my mounting panic. My visa was expiring, my bank account was haemorrhaging funds, and most crucially, my supply of HIV medication was dwindling.
The axe swung down with a ruthless precision that was nothing short of chilling. One moment, I was a valued colleague; the next, I was a pariah, and my years of loyalty and hard work amounted to nothing. That fragile document, my work permit, had been my ticket to acceptance and belonging. Without it, I was a mere spectre haunting the edges of a life that had once been mine.
Bangkok beckoned with its promise of salvation: Bumrungrad International Hospital, where my medication awaited.
I observed the transformation of my neighbourhood with the detachment of a man who had already penned his farewell. Police checkpoints sprouted like mushrooms on decay, their thermometer guns glinting menacingly. My favourite hot pot restaurant, where I’d spent countless evenings in animated conversation, now demanded I prove my health status through a government app before crossing its threshold – as if shared meals had become a privilege to be granted rather than a right to be enjoyed. The Bank of China’s doors remained firmly shut, a hastily scrawled sign in Chinese characters mocking my need for overseas transfers.
The compound management had banned local removal firms – ‘infection control’, they muttered with bureaucratic indifference. So, I found myself alone, shuttling thirteen years of a life built abroad to a waiting van. How swiftly one’s status shifts from resident to refugee of circumstance, all existence reduced to boxes and bags.
My phone chirped Air China’s latest cancellation. The noose tightened. I scrolled through the remaining options with trembling fingers. Thai Airways still offered seats, but for how long? Wuhan’s shadow loomed over everything; its lockdown was a dark omen for Bangkok.
Standing in my half-emptied kitchen, I felt the floor shift beneath me as certainty crumbled into catastrophe. One remembers such moments with peculiar clarity: the cold counter against my back, the distant sound of fireworks celebrating a Lunar New Year that promised only uncertainty, and the knowledge that I was utterly alone in a city rapidly reconsidering its tolerance of foreigners.
I packed like a man possessed, throwing clothes and books into suitcases with reckless abandon. Thirteen years of careful curation reduced to hasty decisions: keep, discard, abandon. I filled bags for my neighbour, who was away for the holiday, knowing I’d never see her again.
Beijing’s night descended with uncharacteristic silence, broken only by the muted glow of red lanterns. Sleep proved elusive, my dreams plagued by visions of empty chemist shelves and sealed borders.
The alarm’s shriek startled me into action. Beijing Capital Airport echoed with emptiness, its vast halls amplifying every footfall. My fellow evacuees moved like ghosts, eyes downcast, each nursing private terrors.
From the air, Beijing appeared peaceful, its mighty towers standing sentinel in the perpetual haze. A decade of memories dissolved into the horizon as we climbed higher, leaving behind a city holding its breath.
Bangkok’s wall of humidity hit me like a physical force. I sprinted through customs; the airport’s din faded into the hum of possibility. Bumrungrad’s corridors, usually teeming with international patients, had taken on the hushed anticipation of a waiting room before bad news.
Dr Ekachai’s prescription—a year’s supply of Genvoya—trembled in my hands like a winning lottery ticket. Then I saw the breaking news alert: Thailand had closed its borders to foreigners.
I had escaped by hours.
The tuk-tuk plunged into Bangkok’s maze of sois—narrow alleys that weave through the city—its engine’s whine merging with the symphony of horns and shouts. In the driver’s mirror, I caught a glimpse of myself: a stranger’s face, drawn and haunted but alive. There was no map, no plan, just the humid wind against my skin and the first warm rays of dawn breaking through, illuminating the path ahead.
Silent Tides – Scott Ancliffe
Venice was unreasonably quiet. Not the sort of quiet that comes from peace, but the uneasy stillness that whispers, you shouldn’t be here.
The Acqua Alta had started earlier that morning, but the locals didn’t seem fazed. I overheard them muttering about high tides and shrugged it off as part of the Venetian rhythm. After all, this was the Floating City. Water was its pulse, its identity. Even as the rising canals licked the edges of cobbled streets, I took it as nothing more than the charm of an eccentric destination.
My plan had been simple: get lost. My guidebook advised the best way to explore Venice was to wander aimlessly, so I folded the map and tucked it away. Sunlight glittered off the canals as I meandered through narrow alleyways and over countless bridges, the gentle slap of gondolas against wooden docks keeping time with my steps.
By noon, I had stumbled into a lesser-known campo near the Cannaregio district. No tourists here, just quiet cafés and the faint hum of Venetian life. I found a table, ordered a coffee, and let the day stretch in front of me. The sky darkened into unexpected shades of grey, but the bartender only smirked when I asked if it might rain.
“It’s Venice,” he said. “It always rains.”
I stayed longer than planned, mesmerized by the way the canals seemed to drink the rain, swelling silently as though they had no limit. When I finally rose to leave, the water was no longer beneath the bridges but alongside them. My feet hit the cobblestones with a splash, and I paused. It wasn’t just rising; it was racing.
Panic prickled at the edges of my composure. The streets I had so carelessly wandered had become a labyrinth of ankle-deep water. Shops were closing, their owners hurriedly stacking sandbags by the doors, and the once-calm locals now had a distinct urgency about them.
I tried retracing my steps, but the alleys were unfamiliar. Each turn led me deeper into the flooding maze, where the water rose higher and faster than I could have imagined. A gondolier, waist-deep in a canal, shouted something in Italian I didn’t understand. His words chased me down the street like a warning.
My shoes were soaked; my bag heavier with every step. The tide was merciless now, the streets indistinguishable from the canals. Wading through knee-deep water, I clung to walls, praying for some kind of landmark. That’s when I heard it—a siren blaring through the quiet, followed by the echo of church bells.
I turned toward the sound and saw Piazza San Marco in the distance. It wasn’t the sanctuary I’d hoped for. Instead, it looked like a swimming pool, the basilica reflected perfectly in the floodwaters. Tourists huddled under awnings, their plastic ponchos clinging like second skins. A woman gripped a suitcase and a small dog, both looking equally miserable.
The sirens were relentless now, urging us all to leave. Somehow, I pushed through, climbing onto a raised wooden platform leading to the edge of the square. Boats lined up to shuttle people to safety, and I squeezed aboard one with strangers whose faces mirrored my own confusion and exhaustion.
As we waited to depart, I noticed the gondolier from earlier standing on a nearby dock. He was calm now, gesturing to a small group of locals who seemed unfazed by the chaos. They spoke quickly but smiled, sharing jokes I couldn’t hear. They were Venetians, and this was their normal.
As the boat pulled away, I looked back at Venice, half-submerged but still defiant. The rising tide may have forced us to flee, but the city seemed to absorb the chaos with grace, as though it had weathered much worse and survived.
Back on the mainland, I sat in a quiet café near the station, cradling an espresso. My hands were still trembling, my thoughts swirling between relief and regret. The waiter, noticing my drenched state, asked where I’d come from.
“Venice,” I said, shaking my head.
He smiled knowingly, his face calm. “It’s always like that,” he replied.
My exit may have been hasty, but as I sat there reflecting, I realized it had been exactly what I needed. Venice had shown me its true self—not just the postcard-perfect charm, but the grit and beauty of a place that exists on the edge, forever at the mercy of the tides.
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