The next morning I set off early and within an hour reached the massive turquoise lake I had seen from the hilltop the previous day. Some time later an old truck rattled past and ground to a halt ahead. It had big rounded wings at the front, in the pre-war style, and...

The next day I walked out of Gyantse in the direction of Lhasa. After a few hours I came across a scruffy old bus that was full of Tibetans and parked by the roadside. I stuck my head in the door, pointed eastwards and said Lhasa. They nodded and so I climbed aboard....

It was another day of walking and there were very few vehicles; about one truck every hour, none of which even slowed down. Storm clouds approached, the temperature dropped and I was walking up a long, seemingly endless hill. Rain had started to pour down and the wind...

The plateau stretched out across vast distances, with each horizon serrated by mountains. It was an uninhabited desert, alive with colours and strange sounds made by the wind, much more inspiring than the rather static photographs one sees in the National Geographic...

The road from Khasa was surfaced with gravel and clung to the gorge precariously. Soon it became clear why there was no traffic: as I walked along I could hear boulders crashing down from the forested gorge above, bouncing over the road and plunging into the abyss...

Kathmandu seemed seedier than ever as I waited for my Chinese visa. I had to keep busy, I couldn’t sit around all day or I would get depressed. It was August and the weather was hot, too hot, and by mid-afternoon I would feel slimy with sweat, as if I had been...

Professor Fastl seemed like a kind man. He was tall, handsome and pre-occupied. He had renovation projects going on all over Austria and wasn’t going to look too carefully at this scruffy applicant. He had no reason to not believe …

- You want a job? Here? In Vienna! Are you mad? You don’t even speak German! My new friend Andras was most amused. He was short, athletic, handsome and spoke fluent English. His family were obviously rich; he had his own flat in the centre of town and didn’t seem to...

I finally made my move and got a train ticket to Warsaw. After a few minutes the train stopped in East Berlin’s hauptbanhof (main station). There was a wild bustle of activity as hundreds rushed for the carriages, clouds of steam rose into the black metal roof arches;...

Having finished university and gone back to Edinburgh, the big challenge was to raise enough cash to get to Shanghai – my target destination. Every job I’d ever done had only paid peanuts; washing dishes, selling books and working on building sites had been useful...

Although I loved the city of Liverpool I found the university itself really boring. What helped me stick it out was mixing with ordinary people. In my first year I had hung out on a building site – there was too much drinking and fooling around to say that I actually...

My brain stopped working. I couldn’t think, couldn’t come up with the right words and couldn’t stop the room swaying. I was pickling in a hot bath, trying to stay awake and vaguely aware of conflicting feelings: the opportunity of …

We lived in a white house on the Firth of Forth, the estuary just north of Edinburgh. It was called Society House and there was a sign at the top of the road which read Private Road to Society. It was so close to the sea that in rough weather waves would crash into...