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.

The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.

Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.

Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees....

Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?

My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the...

The porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end.

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.

Prideep pointed to the flames of paraffin lamps as they came alive in the distance and cackled in awe at the experience. (…) I was to discover that making tasty soup with one carrot, ten...

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

There’s nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

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.

I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.

Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as...

Inscribed on it was a verse from the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mystic. Reading the words aloud I prepared for a most amazing journey:The sages who have compassed sea and land,Their secret...

The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.

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

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book...

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.

The quest for a lost city erodes your body, damaging you beyond all reason. But it is your mind that bears the heaviest toll. Listen to the doubters, the worriers and the weak, and the...

In India everything has a use and a value.

For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news — as you learn how much more of it’s been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that...

As anyone who’s ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.

Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one’s head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this....

The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.

[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.

The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: ‘The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people...

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

In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists.

There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.

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.

Exploration is a dirty game.

Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one’s elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass...

I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.

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.

As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.

In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

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.

Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.

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.

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.

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

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...

In Morocco,” said Osman, “word spreads like a fire tearing through the depths of Hell.

A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by...

A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation

Stories are a communal currency of humanity.

The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each...