Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

The Himalayas hold fossils of sea creatures

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

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.

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.

We knocked the bastard off

Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.

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.

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.

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.

The chai stop

The bus stopped where there was nothing except a man with a kettle. Twenty-eight people got off, drank tea from clay cups, smashed the cups on the ground, and got back on.

Wedding on the train

Half the carriage was a wedding party travelling to the ceremony. By hour three, they had taught us a dance and by hour five we were invited, sincerely, and we still regret not going.

Varanasi before sunrise

The boat pushed off in the dark and the ghats woke up in stages: bathers, then bells, then flowers on the water, then the sun straight up out of the far bank.

Kerala backwater bus

The public ferry cost less than a coffee and served as the school bus. Children got off at their own gardens, one by one, waving at the boat.