With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.
As the man was bundled into an armoured police van, he turned and shouted: ‘Don’t waste your life following others! Be individual! Live your dreams!’I stood there thinking. He was right. Ours is a soc...
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.
Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.
Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat p...
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.
My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.
In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.
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.
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out...
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
My journey to the land of the Shuar tribe had taught me the importance of practical gifts.
In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.
In India everything has a use and a value.
Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so...