I'd found the harbor by getting deliberately lost. Valletta's tourist circuit ends at the Upper Barrakka Gardens, where everyone points their cameras at the Three Cities across the Grand Harbour and calls it done. I walked the other direction — down Merchants Street, then left through an alley that smelled of diesel and dried paint — until the cobblestones ran out and the boats began.

The luzzu are impossible not to stare at. These flat-bottomed wooden fishing boats, painted in crayon-bright bands of red and yellow, bob in clusters along the quay. Each one bears an eye of Osiris on its prow — an ancient symbol the Phoenicians left behind, still watching the water three thousand years later. I crouched at the edge of the dock to photograph one and nearly fell in. The fisherman — sixties, weathered in the precise way of men who've spent their lives arguing with the sea — caught my elbow and laughed without a sound, shoulders shaking.

We sat on a stone bollard and shared the bread. He showed me something on his phone: a photograph of a fish so large it barely fit the frame. He pointed at himself, then at the sky, meaning yesterday or last week or ten years ago. I nodded with the pure sincerity of someone who has no idea what's being said and doesn't want to interrupt the feeling.

The harbor smelled of salt and rust and something floral — jasmine climbing a cracked wall nearby, indifferent to everything. A cat wound between my ankles. The morning light came in flat and gold across the water, the kind of light that makes everything look like it's about to be remembered.

This is what the guidebooks call "authentic Malta" but never quite reach: not a heritage site, not a menu translated into six languages, just a man and his bread and the ordinary miracle of a morning that has happened exactly this way, in variations, for centuries.

I left without knowing his name. He waved once, already looking back at the water.

#travel #malta #offthebeatenpath #wanderlust

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15Saturday

The woman has been awake since four. I can tell by the way she moves — unhurried, deliberate, every gesture carrying the quiet confidence of someone who has done this ten thousand mornings before. She anchors her wooden boat against the riverbank with one bare foot, then arranges bundles of morning glory and water spinach in rows so precise they look placed by a florist.

This is Thu Bon River before the tourists wake. Before the lanterns are lit. Before Hoi An becomes a postcard.

I'd followed the smell of wood smoke down a dirt path behind my guesthouse at five-thirty, half-awake and running mostly on instinct. The river sat low in the August heat, its surface the color of milky tea. A dozen boats clustered at the bend — women selling bundles of herbs, fresh fish packed in crushed ice, pyramids of dragonfruit still cool from the night fields. The air smelled of mud and green things.

I bought a bunch of rau muống for twenty thousand dong — roughly a dollar — that I had no practical use for whatsoever. The woman looked at me for a long moment, then laughed, a short, surprised sound that carried across the water. She tucked two extra stalks into the bunch without a word.

We shared no language. She offered me a thermos cap of green tea that tasted of cut grass and river. I took it with both hands, which seemed to satisfy something between us.

The heat rose slowly. Motorbikes began crossing the bridge in the distance. One by one the boats pushed off, loads lightened, mornings finished.

There is a version of every place that exists only before eight a.m., only for people willing to follow smoke and instinct down unpaved paths. That version rarely makes it into any guidebook.

It is the only version worth crossing oceans for.

#travel #Vietnam #slowtravel #mornings

16Sunday

The market smells of cardamom and wet stone. It's barely six in the morning in Tbilisi, and the vendors of the Dezerter Bazaar are arranging persimmons into rust-colored pyramids while the city is still half-asleep.

I came here by accident — a wrong turn off Rustaveli Avenue, following the sound of a cart wheel on cobblestone. That's how the best discoveries happen. Not planned. Stumbled into.

An old woman in a floral headscarf presses a piece of churchkhela into my hand before I can protest. The walnut-studded grape-must candy is sweet and waxy and tastes like autumn preserved. She watches my face for a reaction, and when I smile — genuinely, stupidly wide — she laughs and says something I don't understand. We don't need to.

I find a coffee stand tucked between a spice stall and a woman selling homemade matsoni. The barista, maybe nineteen, pulls espresso with the focused gravity of someone performing a sacred act. He sets the small cup on a saucer without a word. The coffee is dark and slightly bitter and absolutely perfect.

This is what I keep trying to explain to people who ask me why I travel. Not the monuments. Not the Instagram coordinates. It's the six-a.m. woman with the churchkhela. It's understanding nothing and feeling completely understood.

Georgia is full of these moments — the impromptu toasts at someone's dinner table, the polyphonic singing that rises from a church courtyard at dusk, the way strangers treat guests as gifts rather than inconveniences. The country holds something old and unguarded in its chest.

I walk back to my guesthouse through the sulfur baths district, the air warm and mineral-sharp. Tbilisi is waking up around me, slowly, without apology.

I am in no hurry. Neither is this city.

#travel #georgia #tbilisi #wanderlust

August 2026