Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

Chai is a shared word

From Turkish cay to Hindi chai and Russian chai, most of Asia uses a version of the same word, carried overland from China.

Tea horse road

The old caravan route is a hiking trail now. In one village a man was still pressing tea into cakes by hand with a stone and a cloth, exactly as the museum described.

Monsoon means season

The word monsoon comes from the Arabic mausim, meaning season, used by sailors who timed voyages to the reversing winds.

How you climb a mountain

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.

Bamboo can grow a metre a day

Some bamboo species grow up to 90 centimetres in 24 hours, which is why it is used for scaffolding across Asia.

Rice terraces at flooding

In February the terraces fill with water and the whole mountainside becomes a mirror in fifteen hundred pieces. Then the rice grows and it is just a hillside again.

The Mekong feeds four countries' fisheries

The Mekong supports one of the world's largest inland fisheries, and Cambodia's Tonle Sap reverses direction every year.

It's not the mountain we conquer

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

Tea ceremony is a form of meditation

The Japanese tea ceremony can take four hours and is judged less on the tea than on attention, hosting and restraint.

Hong Kong at eye level

We took the Mid-Levels escalator up through the city and looked into offices, kitchens and living rooms. It is public transport that is also a documentary.

Asia has the most megacities

More than half of the world's cities over ten million people are in Asia, led by Tokyo, Delhi and Shanghai.

The night market rule

Pick the stall with the longest queue of people who are not holding cameras. It worked five nights out of five.

Africa spans two hemispheres twice

Africa is the only continent crossed by both the equator and the two tropics, so it touches all four hemispheres.

We knocked the bastard off

Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.

The Sahara is bigger than Australia

At roughly 9.2 million square kilometres, the Sahara is about the size of the United States and larger than Australia.

Sleeping in a ger

The stove goes out at three in the morning and someone gets up to feed it. On our second night it was my turn, and I got it wrong, and the family were extremely polite about it.

Sahara dust fertilises the Amazon

Winds carry millions of tonnes of phosphorus-rich Saharan dust across the Atlantic each year, feeding Amazon soils.

The Nile has two sources

The White Nile rises near Lake Victoria and the Blue Nile at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. They meet in Khartoum.

Because it's there

Because it's there.

Eagle hunter's arm

The bird weighed six kilos and he held it out one-handed for twenty minutes without a tremble. Then he handed it to me and I lasted eleven seconds.

Egypt's pyramids predate mammoth extinction

The Great Pyramid was already old when the last woolly mammoths died out on Wrangel Island around 1650 BC.

Cleopatra lived closer to us than to the pyramids

Cleopatra's lifetime is nearer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

Altitude arithmetic

We flew from sea level to three and a half thousand metres and thought we felt fine. Walking up one flight of stairs corrected that opinion within thirty seconds.

What we get by reaching

What we get by achieving our goals is not as important as what we become by achieving them.