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.
Returning to a city that one has known and loved fills you with a delicious sense of warmth.
Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.
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.
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.
Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.
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.
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.
It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.
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...
None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.
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.
As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.
What came next was a new experience for for both the fish and me
Exploration is a dirty game.
Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged....
In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.
Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.
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