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.

With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.

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.

The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.

The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.

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