Travel Writing Library

I walked along the edge of the street without anyone else who could talk and share with me. Daylight and sunlight made me sick for a while when it burnt my skin. This heart was empty, but my day was not.

He wanted my sleeping bag for the chicken, my knife for the eggs, my headlamp for the rice and my stove for the flour. When I looked at the goat, he only grinned, coercively. As he smiled, his brown, leathery face opened...

Back in 2005 I was invited by my Hungarian friends to join them at their homes in Kescekmet for 2 weeks for some sight-seeing and of course sampling the wonderful Tokaji wine.

There are moments in everyone’s life where one muses: “How the hell did I end up here?” For me, lying naked face-down on a concrete floor in a dark North African dungeon being tortured by a scary toothless octogenarian...

It had all sounded very promising during the sales pitch.. “Come let us take you swimming with our magnificent gentle dolphins in the calm spectacular beauty of their natural Indian Ocean habitat” Mr Seleem had urged.

One of the great things about travelling is that you get to meet a lot of new people in a very short space of time. Remembering exactly who they all are and what they all look like, however, is not always easy.

The monochrome palette of Roman row houses cuts across the winding Tiber River like a batch of swords ferociously tossed into the midst of the battle. This is not Tuscany.

The sun was just starting to dip between ancient trees as our jeep pulled into the jungle camp at Gunung Mulu. Grains of pollen were like glitter suspended in the moist pink haze that wrapped around us and touched everything...

We were escorted by three waiters down a dark, cramped corridor, no wider than a door, with the smell of stale cigarette smoke clinging to the limited air. In shock I muttered to myself, ‘welcome to Istanbul’.

There was enough time to wonder, is this it? Is this what it feels like to pause time, to travel outside of your body and look down on all of your bad decisions: the dark, pot-holed, mid-night drive from the Georgian border...