Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place-your destination-is a great deal worse.

I was happier than I had been since starting this trop on The Iron Rooster. I was driving. I was in charge. I was taking my time; and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic-snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds piled up on the mountains ahead. I also thought: I didn't die the other day.

Tak, ludożercy i misjonarze są dla siebie stworzeni.

I decided to go because I had a free year.

I had my own compartment - plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence.

This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union - in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.