If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.
In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.
As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.
Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist.
In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists.
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess.
Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.
Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.
Returning to a city that one has known and loved fills you with a delicious sense of warmth.
It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.
Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.
The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
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 Nam...
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of J...
But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.
The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.
The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
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.
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