Name: Caldon Mercieca
Age: 36
Occupation: Creative economy advisor
My best ever trip…
A beach sandal can be comfortable to walk in the desert – if you can avoid poisonous vipers
It was a tour of Switzerland and the Swiss Alps with a group of Birdlife leaders and birdwatchers back in 1994. Nothing beats the feeling of trekking in the mountains, a few thousand feet over winding glaciers, and coming across red deer on your path through the forests.
The group I was travelling with were long-time friends and the evenings were as eventful as the daily excursions.
That was also the trip where one of my co-travellers suggested I should study philosophy, which led to a recalibration of personal interests on several other levels, so it was also a great trip from that point of view.
I felt most relaxed in…
Paris. While visiting a friend studying at university there, I decided to walk from the Montmartre area back to the centre and somehow felt a consonance between the rhythm of the city and the Mediterranean climate I come from – although I admit that might be more of a reflection of my state of mind than of the state of the city!
Dropping into Parisian pâtisseries and second-hand bookshops is a category of traveller’s ecstasy that can only be experienced in that part of the world.
I tend to visit and experience cities from the perspective of books and novels I would have read, featuring the cities almost as an autonomous character. Probably the greatest experience on that level was in St Petersburg, which I wanted to visit simply to be able to see the streets and buildings mentioned in Dostoyevsky’s masterpieces. A visit to the fort in the city centre, on an island opposite the Hermitage, allows visitors to peek into the cell where Dostoyevsky was held prisoner before being exiled to Siberia.
Experiencing new places through the eyes of others, even if these are fictional characters from another century, is probably the most enriching part of travelling.
I felt so welcome in…
Bulgaria. Having missed the train from Sofia to Athens – which was the only route my co-traveller and I had contemplated (and that was back in the days before mobile phones, internet and instant info) – good luck and human charity materialised out of the crowd in the form of a young woman (an art and design student, we were later to know) who offered us free accommodation, a tour of the city’s highlights, and a range of options to leave town at our own ease the following day.
A recent experience in Holland also deserves a mention. A friend from the Dutch games industry had prepared for me a games-related tour around the Netherlands, which included a stay at his parents’ home in a small village in the north of the country.
While the Frisian landscape was covered in snow, I was welcomed inside to a warm stove, tea and a conversation with his Dutch father and American mother, documentary film-makers both of them, which seemed to hover mainly around books, films, art and, of course, food.
I couldn’t wait to leave…
Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. Nothing wrong with the airport itself… it’s just that on this occasion my flight back to Malta was originally scheduled for 10pm and somehow the operator decided to move it to 10am on that same day, which meant that I was left stranded at the airport.
A 2am flight sounded like a convenient alternative, but it didn’t take long for the authorities to notice that my visa expired at midnight, changing my status, as if under an evil spell, from that of a visiting tourist to that an illegal immigrant, and letting loose the unstoppable bureaucratic machinery of the post-Soviet era.
While trekking along the encrusted beach in that scorched part of the Earth, it seems I must have unknowingly trespassed into the property of the Jordanian King
Some positive magic must have made my papers absorb the correct ink patterns from immigration rubber-stamps, and finally led my dazed footsteps onto the right plane!
They had to drag me away from...
Australia. Sydney to be exact. That was quite a long time ago, when at the ripe old age of six, I was visiting relatives Down Under together with my parents and sister. I am told (and I have some pretty crystalline memories which corroborate the anecdotes), that I offered stiff resistance at Sydney airport when we were leaving for Melbourne.
A compromise was reached only when it was agreed to leave all the gifts and presents I had received with my aunt for safekeeping, and that this would inevitably entail (or so it appeared to me at that time) a return to town some time soon. I am still waiting for an opportunity to physically go and claim back those long abandoned toys.
I treasure the memory of…
Drinking tea and improvising a conversation with two soldiers on the Jordanian Dead Sea shoreline. While trekking along the encrusted beach in that scorched part of the Earth, it seems I must have unknowingly trespassed into the property of the Jordanian King.
It took me some time to understand what was happening, and the loosely-held assault rifles pointed at me didn’t help much. Assessing that my presence was quite harmless, I was invited by the sentries, with typical Middle Eastern generosity, to share green tea with them in the shade of their sentry post, and explain the habits, language and history of the strange people inhabiting the islands of my origin, somewhere out there in ‘the White Sea’.
The hardest part of travelling is…
Predicting what will really be required during a trip and what will probably be a waste of precious space, especially where travelling on foot is involved. The urgency of last-minute packing, honed over many years, has led me to economise almost instinctively in the packing process, so that only essentials find their way into the backpack.
Travel has taught me to…
Look further than the limits of my horizons, and appreciate difference as a positive dimension of human experience. It has also taught me to understand that there are different ways of approaching travelling itself.
When trekking some years back with our Tuareg guide in the southwestern Libyan desert and observing local practices, I realised how one can appreciate very basic things from a completely different lens: the use and importance of water, the preparation of food and how it brings people together, storytelling as a way of sharing identities and, most fundamentally, that a leather-strapped open beach sandal can be much more comfortable to walk in the desert than the most sophisticated trekking footgear – if you can sense and avoid poisonous vipers, that is!
I dream of one day visiting…
The 160 volcanoes of the Kamchatka peninsula in the Siberian Far East.