Beijing 1989

Time is a funny thing. Exchanging e-mails with Tadek these past few days, 17 years have rolled back in an instant. So much has happened, in those 17 years that it seems like an eternity. Friendships have been forged and forgotten, a university degree gained, I have emigrated, started a family... and yet my memory flips back to a Beijing as remote now as the 19 year old that was me in 1989 on my first great adventure, as if it were yesterday.

Browsing the photos on Tadek's website brings back a flood of memories, the student protests in Tiananmen Square erupted just after my departure and to see again what I followed so closely in the media at the time, but through the eyes of a young traveller not so different from myself, conveys the human tragedy of what was to follow like no TV news report ever could.