Karolina’s Coincidence  

When we first met Karolina, she was upside down. Looking out across the spectacular desert scenery of Jordan as the sunset swathed the rock formations in ochre shades, but upside down nonetheless. But then yoga people do seem to spend large parts of their day in positions which are fairly alien to the rest of us.

Karolina isn’t just a lover of yoga, she is an exponent of acroyoga, a somewhat more exotic and expansive yoga form – and, what’s more, she’s a big fan of yoga-ing in exotic locations around the world and posting beautiful photographs on her Instagram site @acro_yoga_engineer

After a brief and slightly disconcerting chat with her inverted face, we reconvened a little later around the campfire, where we were joined by Khaled, Khaled’s little lad, Eid and a Spanish traveller whose name we’ve forgotten. Evenings in a Bedouin camp have an atmosphere all of their own: strangers from disparate backgrounds whose paths briefly cross beneath the stars and the moon, sharing Bedouin food cooked beneath the sand whilst huddling closer to the fire as the desert air cools.

Khaled and Eid strum their traditional instruments, we all sip herbal tea. Conversations between total strangers from different worlds strike up and the rest of the world drifts out of our thoughts. 

Karolina is Polish, heralding from Gdansk, a direct family descendant of those who fought for their rights within the shipyards, brought the word “solidarity” into everyday parlance and catalysed the end of the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Her eloquent descriptions of her father’s involvement were absolutely riveting.

Now though, Karolina is a resident of London, living no more than 60 miles from our home in England, working in the rail industry and just a little bit obsessive about all things railway. Regular readers will know that the railways are close to my heart too – I grew up in a railway town, many of my forebears worked in the industry and I love train travel to this day.

But actually none of this is Karolina’s coincidence. An hour or so into our fireside chats, she enquired about items of clothing we were wearing, correctly spotting that they originated from Mexico, leading on to comparing notes about trips to Central America. 

So here we were beside a desert campfire, miles from the nearest village, thrown into conversation with strangers from around the world, only to now realise that we, and Karolina, had seen in the new year in the same square in the same city, thousands of miles away in Oaxaca, Mexico, just three months earlier.

How much of a coincidence is it that in a group of six people in a Bedouin camp in Jordan, two different independent visitors could well have stood side by side in Mexico watching the midnight fireworks? It really was one of those “whaaaaat” moments. Ever so slightly gobsmacking.

We have remained in touch with Karolina, comparing travel stories, sometimes inevitably recalling the night of the coincidence.

The morning after the campfire, we all laughed at the improbability of it all. Karolina was, I think, upside down again by then.