APRIL 1 — Riddle me this: is it not disingenuous to be marketed all these promo airfares and travel packages in the middle of what is likely to be a very long energy crisis?

No, travel booking website, I am not going to book a vacation just in case they manage to negotiate a ceasefire.

Perhaps it was divine providence I followed the strange pull that drove me to book three trips with less than two weeks between them, with my last one happening next week.

Or I was just stir-crazy after barely being able to walk four metres during my cancer treatment without getting winded and now all I want to do is walk.

Yet the reality is this — the world’s never ending love affair with fossil fuels continues torridly.

Malaysia is more insulated than most because we do have a domestic oil and gas industry but our reserves can only hold for so long, and it’s simply not feasible to just “stop” exporting oil and using what we produce locally.

Finding out we sell the nicer oil and buy less nice oil for domestic use was certainly eye-opening.

That means we are still going to be affected by price hikes; I feel sorry for those who commute on the Labuan ferry because service has now been paused due to high diesel prices.

I remember during the pandemic people still foolishly thought they could travel and then ended up being stranded due to Covid-19 measures.

Being stuck in a foreign country with no confirmation on when you can return is scary and very expensive.

Hearing that many of those stranded overseas in the earlier days of the current conflict were not covered by travel insurance, due to war being a standard exclusion, I was just very thankful that I had never had any desire to visit Dubai nor fly onboard any of the Gulf airlines.

Yet I expect more tales of people being stranded while on vacation because there will be people who will travel anyway, whether due to non-refundable bookings or the knowledge that the “safer time to travel” might not come.

I hope that if you travel, you have enough savings or at the very least, enough to hunker down until you can evacuate if the war comes to your doorstep anyhow.

My next trip will involve trains and ferries and of course, a lot of walking.

Right now though as I’ve been sick with what is likely the flu, my walks have mostly been in the world of Pokopia, traversing seas, mountains and decayed buildings to build houses for the worst interior design clients ever — Pokémon.

You try building a house for a creature who decides roofs make things too “dark” and are only satisfied once you strip down your building to a door and one low wall made up of 10 stones.

I did end up crying a lot while playing, not so much because of the game itself (building homes for cute monsters isn’t that harrowing) but the writing.

The game doesn’t outright tell you what happened to all the humans, why all the Pokémon are left alone but instead you find little clues as you go along, playing the little missions, deciding which Pokémon would be happier rooming together.

It’s the little things, like how one monster keeps saying they hope that whatever you, the main character are doing, that it’s enough to persuade the humans to come home.

Ditto, the Pokémon you play in the game, is perhaps the saddest of them all — being able to mimic or shapeshift into anyone or anything, you instead choose the shape of the person you loved most, your human trainer.

When I get back from my next trip I hope I have enough stories to tell because I am rather tired of commentating on the state of the current world.

Mocking politicians has gotten stale now they’ve become expert at becoming self-mockeries so here’s to telling stories of travelling, recovering and mending my broken body and threadbare heart. 

At least we’ll always have Pokémon.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.