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

Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

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.

I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains.

There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.