Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

Yemen has a mud skyscraper city

Shibam's tower houses of sun-dried mud rise up to eleven storeys and date from the 16th century.

Cycling Shimanami

Seventy kilometres over six bridges between islands, with a blue line painted on the road the whole way. You cannot get lost, which leaves you free to look at the sea.

Socotra looks like another planet

A third of Socotra's plant species exist nowhere else, including the umbrella-shaped dragon's blood tree.

Travel is like love

Travel is like love, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness.

Pakistan has five peaks over 8,000 m

Pakistan holds five of the world's fourteen highest mountains, including K2, widely considered the hardest to climb.

Bathhouse in Busan

A woman scrubbed me with a mitt until I questioned several life decisions, and I emerged feeling like a new person and slightly smaller.

The Karakoram Highway is the highest paved border crossing

The Khunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China sits at 4,693 metres and closes with the first heavy snow.

Movement and stillness

In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.

Bangladesh has the largest mangrove forest

The Sundarbans span roughly 10,000 square kilometres of tidal forest shared with India, and shelter Bengal tigers.

Seoul at four in the morning

The city does not really stop. At four we ate fried chicken with people finishing work and people starting it, and nobody could tell which was which.

Bangladesh's rivers braid and move

Hundreds of rivers cross Bangladesh, and some shift course by kilometres in a single monsoon season.

Two tramps

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.

North Korea uses its own calendar

Juche years count from 1912, the birth year of Kim Il-sung, and appear alongside Gregorian dates.

The DMZ tour

The most surreal part was not the soldiers, it was the gift shop. We bought a fridge magnet at the edge of the world's most fortified border.

Siberia has a pole of cold

Oymyakon has recorded temperatures near minus 68 degrees Celsius, the coldest for a permanently inhabited place.

Hutong hospitality

We took a wrong turn into a courtyard and were handed sunflower seeds by three grandmothers who wanted to know our ages and marital status in that order.

The Trans-Siberian takes a week

Moscow to Vladivostok is 9,289 kilometres and takes about seven days without stops, crossing 87 cities.

The whole object of travel

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

The Gobi is a cold desert

The Gobi can drop below minus 30 degrees in winter and sometimes gets snow on its dunes.

On the wall at dawn

We started at five to be alone. For two hours the only people on that section of wall were us and a woman selling water who had walked up ahead of us and was not out of breath.

The Himalayas hold fossils of sea creatures

Ammonite fossils found near Everest prove the range was once seabed before India collided with Asia.

An adventure is an inconvenience

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.

Asia holds the lowest and highest points

Both the highest land on Earth, Everest, and the lowest exposed land, the Dead Sea shore, sit on the same continent.

The overnight sleeper to Xi'an

Six bunks, thermos flasks of hot water, and a card game we did not understand but were dealt into anyway. By morning we had lost imaginary money and gained four contacts.