It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.