It is a momentous time we live in. Turns out, history has not ended! As is shown by the complex events in Ukraine, the endless surprises of Sochi Olympic games and even by the sudden and innocent switch between the Estonian Prime Minister and EU Commissioner, history is alive and well and will continue spicing up our existence.

I am by now in New Zealand after spending a month in Australia. Australia is truly magnificent, but at times it shows a traveller its less friendly side, mostly in very simple comfort questions. You are asked to check out at 9:30 in the morning (what?), you have very limited access to internet – no free wifi even in expensive hotels, and even paid wifi is very slow. For example a new critical update for iPhones is 1GB large – forget about downloading it in Australia! Because of this limited web access every time I published a post on the blog, it seemed like a giant triumph of will.

All this threw the chronology of my journal in quite a disarray. I will continue publishing some experiences from Indonesia and further on as I went, but I might also make some sudden posts from the present moment, as I did with Sydney Mardi Gras.

Of course there is also the second reason why I am late with updating the blog. Australia and New Zealand have been so intense and so interesting that it seems life just sucks me in like a hurricane not leaving time for anything else really. I have already accepted that there is no way I can sleep as much as I’d like to ever. Sleep seems simply a criminal waste of a critical resource. I have no time to read books, to watch movies, to meditate – all these activities I thought I would be doing in abundance on a round the world trip. Nothing like that.

This is what I’m missing the most on this trip – time. And it is the main lesson of the trip. You suddenly realise how valuable time is and how little we have of it. That’s why it’s so important to concentrate our attention on what truly matters.

There is another lesson I learnt from this trip. It is that you always have to DO that what you want to do. Even if you are tired, you’ve no money, you’re in a hurry, you’ve no more strength, you’re not sure – DO IT ANYWAY. You painfully regret afterwards the things you did not do, the people you did not meet, and almost never the things you actually did, even if they did not go quite as you would have liked. Looking at the list of expenses on your bank card statement, I am always surprised by how small they look several months after the facts. And I regret not having done more.