There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.

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

There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

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

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

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.