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.

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

Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.

A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.

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.

Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.

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.