The United Nations was the thing I wanted to work for. Like the United Nations Commission for Refugees is what I was interested in. And then people said if you do that you'll hit glass ceilings all the time, because you are not Ghanian or Nigerian and that's the way to progress though a multinational organization like that. In any event, they said do five years' legal experience and come back. And after five years I decided to stay where I was. So I am really an accidental lawyer.

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

Argentina is really in a different category because they butchered all their Indian or indigenous people in the war of the desert in 1850s. Which sets them aside from their neighbors in a macabre way.

My parents don't think about Europe at all. The Continent is somewhere else. And they call it the Continent - to reflect, they are no real part of it.

I tend to prefer traveling in the Third World countries. Like Ethiopia. Or Eritrea.

I have dipped into Ian McEwan and so on. I tend not to stick with one writer. But I dip in here and there.

I don't want to sell other people trips! I want to be there!