New Zealand wasn’t on The List, at least not in the then-immediate future. It’s no criticism of NZ in the slightest: I’d had a wonderful time there in ’93 and was tentatively planning a return in 2018. But then breaking my collarbone wasn’t on The List either – in fact, it wasn’t on any list. By a curious quirk of fate, the one led to the other. And so, needing to leave Australia briefly for visa reasons ahead of an operation to fix the break which had steadfastly refused to repair itself since a car accident in December, I took myself off to Northland, the northern-most region of New Zealand’s North Island (with all those ‘north’s, you’d think it might be somewhere further up the planet than on a level with the tip of South Africa), ... read more

The word conjures one event, one image: the mushroom cloud rising after the first atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945. When I mentioned that I was going to Japan, I was surprised to hear how often Hiroshima was described as a must-see, and by whom – a retired Royal Navy officer, a long-term Australian resident of Japan, a New York lawyer-colleague, amongst others – and so it went on the list. I’ve seen my share of memorials to the sickening horrors that man can inflict on his fellow man – Phnom Penh’s notorious security prison S21 and killing fields, a plethora of genocide memorials in Rwanda, the convict incarceration centres in Port Arthur and Fremantle – and steeled myself for one more. But Hiroshima is not just one more. In the wake of the ... read more

A Varanasi silk-seller once said to me, “Visit India for a week, and you’ll write a good article. Visit India for a month and you’ll write a better one. But visit India for a year, and you won’t even be able to pick up a pen.” I’ve got the same problem with the Afghan Pamirs. I could probably have strung a few paragraphs together after our first day on the track up from Wuzed. My scribbles would have been better the next day after we’d stayed in our first Wakhi village. But now, back in Dushanbe after three weeks’ away, with a spectacular but long four or five days’ drive at each end, and the intensity of the eleven days’ trekking in the middle, I’m struggling to get my thoughts into any kind of order. I ... read more

There were elephants in camp when we arrived. We didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to reach this conclusion. A small family group were playing in the water between cottages one and two as our boat buzzed round the corner towards the pier. Later, as Tess was showing us to our own cottages at the opposite end of the camp, the path was littered with wrinkled-plate prints of varying sizes and the air was redolent of the unmistakable aroma of fresh elephant defecation. The youngsters had clearly had a blast: most of the path’s night-light fittings were askew, and the occasional flex pulled free of its Delta-sand moorings. Tess shrugged resignedly: this was nothing new. Keith was making his annual pilgrimage to Africa to check up on his PhD students and renew acquaintances in pursuit of further research ... read more

The statistics for the Amazon Basin are mind-blowing, even in what was, briefly, our infinitesimal part of it. Only 1.67% of Amazonia falls within Ecuador’s borders, yet it comprises just over half of Ecuador’s landmass. One hectare may contain more species of tree than the entirety of North America. The whole area contains approximately 5% of the world’s plants. More than 600 of mainland Ecuador’s over 1,600 identified species of bird have been seen here, about half of all species of bird found in the entire Amazon basin. There are more than 4,000 species of orchid. Of the 410 species of mammal, 165 are bats and 15 are monkeys. With over 450 species of amphibians, Ecuador is third in the world in terms of diversity of amphibians, and is seventh in diversity of reptiles with approximately ... read more