For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.

The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.

The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.

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.