I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'