Through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.

In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.

One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.

On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.