However, it was not to be. Ship-wrecked by a Typhoon in the Polynesias, our sole provisions one cask of biscuit (and another of Rum, without which I should surely have come to grief), we were salvaged some months later, bronzed and ragged, and worked our passage through the South Seas and across the vast Pacific. There we reassembled and refitted the expedition in Buenos Aires, that Paris of the Americas and pearl of the Rio de la Plata. Thence over-land into the depths of the measureless Southern American continent to the great Cataract called by the savage Guaraní people, i-guasu, and upriver into the swarming malarial cloud-forests of the great Amazon Basin, haunt of giant insects, strangely-formed fruits of Nature’s bounty, and countless Grotesque Creatures in all their myriad shrieking and gibbering hosts.

Afterward forsaking the low-lands in favour of higher altitudes, we made our way through the former possessions and Vice-Royalties of the Spanish Crown, by llama and mule train over the towering range of the Andes. There we searched for the remnant cities of the Incas, hunting for Treasures among their cryptic traps and ruins. Finally, fevered and footsore, our bearers speaking in tongues and worshipping strange gods and idols, we determined to seek the Coast once more, carrying with us a cache of temple gold (retrieved at some personal risk to myself).

And it was there in the Sacred Valley of the Incas that I was nearly done to Death by my erstwhile Nemesis, that malicious Jesuit Father Valentine. I say “erstwhile”, indeed, Dear Readers, for, staking all on a cunning Stratagem of Disguise and posing as a half-Indian porter in my employ whilst harbouring evil intentions, the Brilliant and Nefarious Fiend made his ultimate play against me on the precarious heights of the great Ruins of Machu-Picchu, and I may report with some satisfaction that there the matter ended, and his Deviltry shall trouble the world no more.

Later, having concluded an expedition through the Amazon in search of the monstrous saurians described by Challenger and Malone, I had freshly returned to what passes for Civilization in such territories, and established myself as the guest of my newest patron, the Doña Isabella Mercedes María del Socorro Ibáñez y Valiente. I had been resident there only a short time when, awakening from a night-mare (a re-visitation of the Infamous Mongoose Incident, as my Nocturnal Phantasms so often are), I chanced to overhear the Doña herself giving directions for my arrest and incarceration.

This conduct was in singular contrast to her previous manner toward me (as I trust that my Audience will believe), but it is explained by Disquieting Intelligence I have since uncovered which intimates that the late Valentine of hateful memory may have been her Father in every sense. This hypothesis, while odious, seems to me rather likely than otherwise — but that I leave to the reader’s taste.

This Shocking Betrayal from the most Unexpected Quarter has forced me to flee without delay in bare feet and shirt-sleeves, forsaking pocket-watch, waistcoat and revolver. A certain Fallen Woman of my seemingly permanent acquaintance has also absconded from Captivity (with, it must be said, the aforementioned gold) and we have now made our Rendez-vous at a secret Zeppelin field. She has completed her own correspondence ahead of me, and now waits with well-concealed impatience for me to finish my own.

The Doña’s ruffians are closing in and time is of the Essence, yet I should not feel at ease with myself had I leapt into Unknown Hazards without a parting Dispatch. We fly out of menace into danger, Dear Readers, and I cannot misrepresent that we are in mortal peril of our lives from this moment on.

In the past I have moved Heaven and Earth to place my dispatches in the hands of my Publishers, but henceforth I can promise nothing. While there is Wit and Strength and Will left to me, I shall continue to do so by any means I can devise, but my freedom and bodily safety are far from certain. My enemies are crafty, ruthless and many. Danger besets me on every side, and you are right to fear for me. There is every hope that we may yet reach our destination unmolested, and I may be heard from again in a fortnight. But if Cruel Fortune should decree that after this Valediction my words never again reach the salons and drawing-rooms of the Empire, I beg that my Faithful and Constant Audience should not despair of me, and continue to believe in their hearts that my adventures continue.

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart, and although I fear that this new century has little place for my kind, there yet remains for me “some work of noble note”. And so I launch myself once again into the empty spaces of the map, to sail beyond the sunset. Pursued as we are by foes, our lives in Dreadful Jeopardy; still, as ever, my soul strains at the leash. I can admit to no regrets. The Lure of the Unknown masters me, and it is not in my power to resist. Give me forever the great waste-lands and the savage Frontiers. Adventure awaits, and I shall never be found wanting.

Once again I beg leave to address my compliments to the erudite scholars of the Royal Geographic Society, and to her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria, but necessarily not to my former patron the Doña Isabella, engaged as she is in attempting my demise.

I am, and I shall always remain,

Christopher Liberty, Gentleman Adventurer

It’s been four years of strange food around the world - some bad, some fantastic, as you can read in the articles dedicated to those two topics. But I’ve still got my favourite restaurants back home. Some of them I’ve been thinking about at least once a week while we’ve been gone, and some of them it’s taken me a couple of years to realize that I miss eating there. All I know right now is that the instant I get back home I’m going to stuff myself at every one of them.

Here, the eighteenth article in the World Tour Highlights series, I present 15 Toronto Restaurants I Miss, in alphabetical order. If anybody out there knows that one of these places has been closed, or burned down, or anything… please don’t tell me.

1. Albert’s Real Jamaican Food

The best curry roti in the city, by popular acclaim. Each one is big enough for two meals. Albert himself was still behind the counter half the time, when I left. And they have Ting.

2. Banjara

This is one of the better cheap Indian takeaways in Toronto, which has a lot of them. I love Indian food - north, south or in-between, and I’d eat it every day if I could. Actually, if I’m being honest, it was one of the main reasons I wanted to go to India in the first place, and it’s definitely the reason we stayed there so long. Indian food in Toronto can’t be as cheap as in India, but I hope my now better-educated mouth still likes it as much.

3. Burrito Boyz

Home of the late-Saturday-night, massive two-meal burrito. Not cheap, but spicy, tasty and filling.

4. Fairmount Bakery

I’m cheating a bit here. This legendary bagel bakery is actually in Montreal, not Toronto. There are only two kinds of Montrealers - those who prefer the Fairmount, and those who prefer rival St. Urbain. Me, I know the best when I taste it. There’s a queue at all hours, and not a single person makes it out the door before they’re opening the bag.

5. Fran’s

A venerable Toronto institution, this family restaurant makes the best open-faced hot turkey sandwich anywhere - mushy, drippy comfort food if ever there was. The decor hasn’t changed since the Sixties, neither has the menu, and nobody wants it any different.

6. Future Bakery

Cookies and tea and pierogi night on Tuesday; sitting alone for hours with a book and an empty mug of tea in the winter, or on the patio with friends and a jug of sangria in the summer. It’s not as cheap as it once was, but it’s still a special place for me.

7. La Paloma

This neighbourhood gelateria was a short walk from my apartment, and I used to go there a couple of times a week in the summers for the best gelato I’d ever had. Now, I’ve been to Italy, and I’ve lived in Buenos Aires, the home of the world’s best gelato, so I’m curious to know if the place still holds up well.

8. Lakeview Lunchroom

A Queen West landmark, this greasy spoon is legendary for its terrible food, glacially slow service, fantastic ambience and amazing malted chocolate milkshakes. Breakfast there will last you all day… when you finally get it.

9. Lalibela

This drab, down-at-the-heels place made me fall in love with Ethiopian food. Huge mixed platters served on springy injera flatbread, smoky and spicy enough to make your nose run. Still the best I’ve ever had.

10. Okonomi House

I loved okonomiyaki, the so-called “Japanese pizza”, long before I ever went to Japan, and this tiny lunch counter is the reason why. Grilled in front of your eyes, they come to your table still sizzling on a cast-iron plate, and the smoke from the grill keeps you smelling of okonomiyaki for an hour afterward.

11. Shanghai Cowgirl

A late-night diner near the Queen West club strip, popular with gothy types and rock n’ rollers. Great patio out back, good corned beef hash and friend potatoes on the menu. Just don’t look to closely at the cooks.

12. Sneaky Dee’s

Those who know it call it Sneaky Disease, but don’t let the name fool you, this beloved Tex-Mex restaurant, bar and concert venue has veggie chili that even confirmed carnivores will cross the city for, and jalapeno omelettes that will sweat out the toughest hangover.

13. New Generation Sushi

I haven’t got any particular attachment to this specific place, but Toronto is full of cheap sushi restaurants. Sushi is expensive pretty much everywhere I’ve been, even in Japan, and it’s a big indulgence when travelling, so I miss it.

14. Swiss Chalet

Highbrow it ain’t, but the longer we travelled the more Sheryl and I realized that we were craving this chain restaurant’s rotisserie chicken and iconic salty, spicy dipping sauce. Twice toward the end of the trip we had packets of the sauce brought to us (thanks, Steven and Heather) but it’ll still probably be one of our first stops when we get home.

15. Tim Horton’s

All right, it’s a pretty sad addition to this list, but I wouldn’t be Canadian if I didn’t miss Timmie’s just a little bit. There are at least seven locations of this franchised coffee-and-doughnut shop on every street in Canada (seriously, it’s a law). I’m going to have a maple-dip doughnut and a Dutchie Timbit and then I’m never setting foot in the place again.

I’ve left out all the obvious things that I’m looking forward to: seeing family and friends, being able to speak the language, having money, and that sort of thing. What I’ve got here are all the things - abstract or concrete - that you might not have thought of as being among the drawbacks of long-term budget travel.

This was originally going to be called something like “things I won’t miss about travelling”, but that seemed a bit negative and I’m trying to be more upbeat about the upcoming end of the trip. So, inverting the concept gives us the seventeenth in the series of World Tour Highlights lists. Here, in no particular order, are the things I’m looking forward to about going home at last.

1. My Own Bathroom

It’s not a pleasant subject, but after four years of travel it’s one thing that’s definitely getting to me. Budget hotel after guesthouse after hostel, each with its own unique take on bathroom arrangements. For the amount of money I’m usually willing to spend, you’re almost always looking at a shared bathroom. In some of the more disgusting hostels I’ve encountered, the bathrooms never get cleaned. Even when they do, you’re sharing toilets with fifty other crusty backpackers and all their diseases and fungal infections. I don’t think I’ve sat down on a toilet seat the whole time I’ve been away.

Not to mention the various hygiene rules in all the different countries. Throwing used toilet paper into the basket in South America rather than flushing it, for example - or not having toilet paper at all, and splashing with water instead, like in India or Indonesia. Squat toilets in Asia. Chemical toilets on buses and trains. Paying for toilets everywhere.

Cold water showers. Salt water showers. Showers with a dribble of rusty water or sparking electrical wires or dog-sized roaches. Showers like a high-school locker room with a row of nozzles and no privacy. Showers with a wad of other peoples’ hair blocking the drain and ankle-deep scummy water.

A bathtub. I am very much looking forward to a bathtub, it seems like an unbelievable luxury to me. I don’t even remember the last time I saw a bathtub (no, I tell a lie, I do remember, but there was no way in hell I was letting anything but the soles of my feet touch it). Hot baths are a thing you just have to give up when travelling. And a nice fluffy bath towel, I’m looking forward to that, too, I’ve been using the same wretched “quick-dry” camping towel for four years now.

What else? Not having to keep a cover on my toothbrush. Not having to squeeze shampoo into little bottles. Having a blow-dryer so I don’t have to have wet hair all the time (freezing in cold climates, mildewy in hot climates). Mouthwash. Looking forward to mouthwash, it’s too heavy to carry in a backpack. Rusty, septic disposable razors, I won’t miss those. Ditto athlete’s-foot powder.

This sort of thing can get on your nerves. It’s not a life for the squeamish. I could rant for another thousand words about this, so I’ll stop now. I’m really just looking forward to having a safe little clean room that I don’t have to be afraid of.

2. My Own Kitchen

Similar to the above. Budget travel means that sometimes you have a kitchen, and most of the time you’re eating street food or sandwiches. Years of terrible, unhealthy food have taken their toll on my health, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’d almost rather starve than eat yet another pile of greasy, salty, unidentifiable fried slop. Sheryl and I try to stay at places where there’s a kitchen available, but that brings its own set of problems. Where does the food come from? You spend half your life running around trying to find a shop, market or grocer. And we always seem to be carrying a huge bag of food with us wherever we go, because we never really know where our next meal is coming from, and we’ve gone hungry enough times that we like to have something on hand to eat. That’s heavy, and that’s annoying. And again, on our budget, it’s pretty much pasta and sauce all the time. It’s almost impossible to have a balanced, healthy, cheap diet while travelling. I’m very much looking forward to having a kitchen and the chance to control my own diet. And to make all those dishes I’ve been missing and haven’t been able to make - if I can even remember how to cook, any more. And I really can’t wait to have some spices and condiments. You just can’t carry a hundred little jars with you in your backpack, and so your diet gets blander and blander as you go on. A kitchen, even a small one, with an oven and a fridge, sounds like a pretty amazing thing right about now.

3. My Own Home

Home is only the place where you hang your hat, they say - whatever four walls and a roof you’re currently inhabiting. It’s true, to a certain extent, and nobody knows that better than me. But I’ve had 363 temporary homes over the last four years - do the math, that’s an average of only four nights each. After all that, and after sleeping in a car for five months and a tent for three, I’m longing for a place to call my own.

Privacy is a big part of that. A budget traveller leads a very public life, sleeping in dormitories, eating on the street, and sharing bathrooms. It’s rare that I have the opportunity to shut the world away behind a door. And as someone who has always needed a lot of time alone, that’s been difficult.

But the small things get to you, too. I’m really looking forward to having my own bedroom, with nobody’s feet in my face and nobody snoring. I’m looking forward to not having to dress in wet shower stalls every day, to having lampshades instead of bare ceiling bulbs, to clean walls, being able to control the temperature of a room, to windows that both open and close, and to not having to keep everything I own locked up or watched like a hawk every moment.

4. My Own Computer

I’ve been working with computers all my adult life, and I’m used to having a fairly powerful machine for my own personal use. But Sheryl and I have been sharing a crappy little netbook for almost the whole time we’ve been travelling. It’s our main tool, we couldn’t travel without it. It’s our only way of editing photos, updating our websites, and keeping in touch with everyone we know. But there are two of us, and there’s one computer, and that’s been a big source of stress and negotiation. And it’s tiny, cramped and underpowered. I’m looking forward to having my own computer back, all to myself. I’m looking forward to not having to squint at a tiny screen, to having a full-sized keyboard, and enough processing power to run Lightroom properly. I’m looking forward to having an automated backup and not having to make laborious manual backups every few days.

And I am so very much looking forward to never having to use goddamn Microsoft Windows ever again.

5. Laundromats

I used to complain bitterly about doing laundry. I used to think it was a huge pain dragging all my dirty clothes to the corner laundromat and then hauling the clean clothes back home. And then I started travelling. Coin laundries are a pretty rare thing, out in the world - mostly you have to pay by the kilogram for a laundry service when you’re on the road, and that’s a lot of money. Doing your own is a no brainer. Sometimes Sheryl and I break down and pay to have it done, when it’s just too filthy, or it’s a cold, rainy place and it will never dry on its own. But not often. I’ve spent most of the last four years hand-washing every piece of clothing I own, over and over (and, it goes without saying, wearing the same set of clothes until the smell is intolerable, but that’s just part of the backpacker aesthetic). The idea of clean clothes, all the time, whenever I want them, with no more effort than popping over to the laundromat, well, that’s a beautiful thing to me.

6. Debit Cards

I’m really going to love being able to pay for things with plastic again. Not having to carry a huge pocket full of coins, not having to worry about my pocket being picked, not having to constantly visit the ATM and decide how much to withdraw. And especially not having to constantly scavenge for small bills, or plot and scheme about how to break large bills. Most of the world still operates on a cash basis and, while it has definite advantages on occasion, taken on the whole it’s a big pain in the ass. I’m looking forward with great anticipation to not having to deal with cash anymore.

7. Drinkable Tap Water

People in developed countries have no idea what a stunning, incredible luxury it is, that the water coming out of their taps is safe to drink. They take it for granted, this invisible thing that’s saving their lives. I’ve spent too much time in too many poor countries (which is most countries) where you just can’t trust the water. Sure, there are often ways around it. You can boil it, if you have a stove, or otherwise purify it, if you have the means. Or you can buy bottled water, if it’s cheap enough, and as long as you’re careful to check that the seal on the cap is still safe and it hasn’t been refilled and resold, and if you can handle the burden of ecological guilt when you see the huge drifts of discarded plastic bottles. The idea of filling a glass from the tap seemed more like a miracle every month I travelled.

8. Bicycles

Cycling has always been an overwhelming obsession for me. It’s my way of keeping fit, getting myself around, working out my frustrations, saving the planet and risking my life all at the same time. Ask anybody who knows me - I’ve always been the guy on the bike. I ride year-round, whenever I can. I do my own maintenance, I build bikes from spare parts, and when I left on this trip I had the legs of a bodybuilder. Giving all that up has been one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make in order to travel. To leave behind my fixed-gear alleycat bike and my beautiful Cervélo racer, in exchange for the occasional rented piece of junk, well… that hurt. Getting them back is one of the best things about going home, for me.

9. Gyms

It’s virtually impossible to keep fit when you’re on the road for a long time. Sure, you’re more active on a daily basis while you’re travelling. There’s less sitting at a desk and more walking, climbing mountains and snorkelling and all of that, but there’s also a lot of unavoidably unhealthy food and a lot of enforced idle time sitting on your butt on buses or trains. There’s a net loss of fitness while travelling even when you don’t factor in the negative health impact of constant sickness from bad food and water. Twice during the trip we’ve stopped long enough that I’ve been able to pick up a few weeks at a local gym and try to reverse a bit of that loss, but there’s only so much you can do in a few weeks. I’m really looking forward to a regular gym routine again.

10. Clothes That Fit

The longer you travel, the worse your wardrobe gets. When your shirts wear out or you rip the butt out of your pants, you might not be in a place where you can buy clothes in a style you like, that look good on you, or that even actually fit you at all. As I write this, I’m wearing a hat I bought in Bolivia, a shirt from Australia, shorts from Fiji, underwear from Malaysia, socks from Indonesia and shoes I actually found left behind in a hostel in New Zealand. None of them fit right, none of them look good on me, and I wouldn’t be wearing any of them if I had any choice. This is why so many backpackers look like skid-row rag heaps. Looking good, feeling good about your appearance, these are things you have to let go of as a long-term traveller. I don’t get to dress the way I like, and the way I always have. I wear raggedy shorts, t-shirts with holes in them, and crappy sneakers or brown hiking shoes instead of the big black boots and long black coats I’ve worn all my life. I left that wardrobe behind when I left home, and although it’s still there in boxes in Sheryl’s sister’s basement, I’m not sure how much of it will fit me any more. I’m especially concerned about the boots, since four years of carrying a heavy pack have flattened my arches. But I’m still very much looking forward to at least being able to control my own appearance.

11. Libraries

I’ve always been an insatiable reader and a constant user of the public library. When I’m at home I’ve always got a dozen books checked out. Travelling has had a massive impact on that - I can’t carry a load of heavy books around, for one thing. And books are expensive even at the best of times - I could never afford to buy them while travelling. And we’ve spent most of the last four years in places where English books (or even French, if I’m desperate enough) are impossible to buy even if there is a bookstore to be found. As a long-term budget traveller, you’re limited to the books you can find on the book-exchange shelves of hostels. Three-quarters of any shelf always seems to be in German (the best argument for learning German, I’d say), and the rest is a mixed bag indeed. I’ve been forced to read some of the worst trash that has ever been written, just because it’s better than having nothing to read (to be fair, I’ve come across a few gems that I wouldn’t otherwise have thought to pick up, but those have been rare). So the thought of a whole city-wide library system of books - in English, that I can read for free - makes me very, very happy.

12. Convenience Stores

Nothing mysterious here. I’m a little tired of the eternal traveller’s problem of finding out where to buy a thing you need, then finding that tiny shop or market stall, then finding out they’re closed for siesta or whatever. The convenience of convenience stores cannot be overstated, and I don’t take them for granted anymore. I’m going to love being able to go down to the corner shop any time I want, for anything I need.

13. Freedom from the Tyranny of Publishing

Travelling these days comes with the heavy expectation that you’re going to keep some sort of travelogue website going. Being a web developer by trade, I support the idea, and building this site and Sheryl’s has been interesting and fun. But providing the content was never as much fun as building the sites. It was fine at the beginning. I’ve always liked to write, and when the trip was new and novel, and interest and feedback were strong, there was a lot of incentive to carry on writing. But the longer you travel the more the interest of your audience wanes, until after awhile it seemed like I was really just writing for myself, and then it became a chore. Travelling itself is a full-time job, and while keeping and publishing a journal seems like a great idea and a manageable thing during the early days, it soon becomes difficult to keep up to date. Besides the writing, I take a lot of photos, and editing, preparing and publishing those takes a lot of time too. Strange as it sounds, as much as I’ve complained in the past about how nobody’s interested, I’m looking forward to the end of the trip as being the time when I get to lay down the self-imposed burden of my role as content provider.

14. Not Being a Guest

When you travel, you’re a guest everywhere you go. Every minute of every day, you’re a guest in a restaurant or a hostel or someone’s home. Even at the highest level, your legal status in a country is contingent on your good and lawful behaviour. But more, being a constant guest carries an obligation to be sociable and friendly. Always a good idea, but being sociable and friendly 24/7 is not as easy as it sounds. And when you slip, there’s always someone there to snap at you to go home if you don’t like it here. And mostly there’s going to be a big language barrier that prevents you from explaining or making amends.

It’s way too easy to cause offence, to bruise feelings or egos or to violate any of a thousand unspoken local social rules. This is a big component of culture-shock, of course, and culture-shock is the hardest thing for a traveller, and the thing responsible for keeping most trips short.

But even more - for me, at least - being a guest means stepping lightly around your host’s opinions. So learning the art of diplomatically avoiding an argument is an essential skill in a traveller’s tool-kit, and that means reacting to unexpected nasty conversational turns. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to bite my tongue and smoothly change the subject when a host says something racist or vile or morally objectionable. At home I’d speak up, tell them they’re wrong and stupid and closed-minded. But disagreeing with people (virtual strangers, most of them) and getting into arguments with them is a luxury you have when you’re not dependent on their goodwill.

I’m really looking forward to being at home, that way. Not because I’ll be surrounded by people with the same ideas as me of what’s good and decent, though that’s a minor factor. It’s because at home (at least after the initial round of visits) I won’t be anybody’s guest. I won’t have to care what anybody thinks of me, or worry about the immediate and possibly dangerous consequences of disagreeing with somebody.

15. Not Being an Ambassador

This is closely related to being a guest. When you’re travelling, you don’t just represent yourself, like it or not. When people meet you, be it a fellow traveller or a local, they’re going to judge your whole country and everybody in it based on what they see in you. It’s not fair, but it’s true. People judge based on what they’re shown. What else do they have to go by? But it’s a burden, knowing that you’re an unwilling ambassador for your whole country. And it’s one more reason, among many in a very public life, that you’re always required to be on your best behaviour. And believe me, it gets tiring knowing that if I’m having a bad day and I snap at a taxi driver in Cambodia he’ll dislike Canadians from then on. Or if I let my guard down and get suckered by a money-changer in Slovenia he’ll think Canucks are an easy target. It’s a tough part of travelling, for me. Naturally it’d be easier if I just didn’t care, but I think about these things, I can’t help it.

I have found one way of temporarily escaping the pressure, though. Every time I’ve done something dumb, or if I just can’t stand being polite for one more minute, I pretend I’m American. Nobody can tell the difference in accents anyway, and there has to be some benefit to always being mistaken for a Yank. A fair exchange, I’d say, for all the times I’ve caught Americans with Canadian flags sewn onto their backpacks.

16. Not Buying Things Based on Weight

I’ve been carrying all my worldly possessions around on my back for the last four years, and there’s nothing better for teaching you what you really need and what you really don’t need. At this point I’m not carrying a single gram that I can’t justify. Sounds great, except that things get used up or wear out and need replacement. Of course I’m limited by price first, but quality isn’t important to me anymore. Nor is durability. Clothing style, size and colour doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters to me anymore is how much something weighs. Although it’s more cost-effective, I can’t buy that big bottle of shampoo, because it’s too heavy. Can’t take advantage of any volume discounts. Buying clothes, I buy thin things and layer them even if that’s not as warm as heavy clothes. There are a thousand examples. It might take me years to get over this reflexive evaluation of the weight of a thing as a primary purchase consideration.

17. Free Medical Care

Being Canadian, Sheryl and I are used to decent, free (or nearly free) medical coverage, and it was a scary thought to be without it. Before we left we signed up for a year of travel medical insurance from RBC (who I can’t praise highly enough). In my case it was a waste of quite a lot of money, but Sheryl used it in India to pay for her hospital stay, and she came out even or a little ahead. We never thought at the beginning that we’d be travelling so long, and a year seemed like enough. We were able to renew the policies for three more months after that first year was up, but after that renewal there wasn’t an insurance company who would touch us and since then we’ve been working without a safety net. This is nerve-wracking, to say the least. We had to pay for Sheryl’s second hospital stay in Indonesia out of pocket. We were lucky that it wasn’t that expensive, comparitively speaking, but it certainly could have been. I’ve never been able to shake the constant low-level dread of the knowledge that accidents can happen any time. At home, it’s comforting to know that if something happens you can show up to the hospital, present your health-insurance card and be admitted, no questions asked, and I’m definitely looking forward to that. Unfortunately I have to be resident in my home province for six months before I’m eligible again, so I’ll just keep my fingers crossed until then.

18. Good Conversations

No offense meant to Sheryl, naturally, but we’ve spent twenty-four hours a day together for the last four years, and we’ve pretty much exhausted all the conversational topics at this point. But what gets to me, and what I know gets to a lot of other people while travelling, is the Generic Backpacker Conversation that you end up following with almost everybody. Where are you from? How long have you been travelling? Where are you headed next? Et cetera, et cetera. It’s virtually impossible to break free from this conversational black hole when meeting a fellow traveller for the first time. When you’re on the road, very nearly all your relationships with other people are only a couple of hours long, and you meet a lot of people, so you have the same conversation a lot. With complete seriousness, I’d estimate I’ve probably had that generic conversation or a close variation of it something like 1500 times, and I’m heartily sick of it. I’m really looking forward to having conversations that are longer, deeper, and about other things than travelling. That’s if I even remember how, and if I actually have anything else to talk about, which is an open question.

19. Seasons

I hate winter, and avoiding that horrible season was one of my main reasons for long-term travel. But you can’t spend all your time in the tropics, and after so many different latitudes, altitudes, climates and temperatures, I don’t mind telling you that my body clock is seriously messed up. Even travelling slowly, like we prefer to do whenever we can, every place confronts you with a different temperature, weather pattern, and length of day. It’s deeply unsettling in an almost indescribable way. Humans just aren’t physiologically meant for constant travel - even nomadic peoples are predictable in their migrations. The subtle cost of our continual changing of place has taken a long time to show, and it surprises me how much I miss the orderly change and progression of seasons in my northern home. If I never see snow again I’ll be a happy man, but after four years of as much summer as possible, I miss the autumn and the spring.

20. Never Having to Pretend to Care About Football Again

Football, or soccer if you like, is the thing that holds the world together. Everybody loves fútbol. It’s a worldwide obsession and a common language. Kids play barefoot soccer in dusty fields in every country, dreaming their dreams of escaping into a better life. As a man, it’s the one thing that I know, without question, that I can have a conversation about with any other man I meet, regardless of language or culture, anywhere in the world, from the slums of Buenos Aires to the deserts of Namibia. I can sit in a bar or a train station or a restaurant and if there’s a match on the television, I can be less of an outsider, all of us brought closer through its universal bond.

It’s such a shame, then, isn’t it, that I just don’t give a shit about football. I really don’t. There, I’ve said it. I’m sorry. I just don’t care. I’ve been faking, this whole time, just to be polite, to fit in and to have something to talk about.

Also, I don’t care about cricket. Or rugby.

Five Party Spots We Avoided

1. Goa, India

There’s a certain type of person who, when they find out I’ve spent time in India, immediately asks if I went to Goa. And then blink in confusion when I say no. I’m in India, why would I want to hang around on beaches with a bunch of foreigners? Not to mention that Goa has been thoroughly discovered, and so it’s slick, crowded, and expensive. We stayed a state south in Kerala, where things are a tenth the price, it’s quiet and unspoiled, and you can still get your secret beer served in a teapot if you want. The only thing I regret about not visiting Goa is missing out on the vindaloo.

2. Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand

You have to get pretty far off the tourist circuit in Thailand to get away from the rampaging hordes of gap-year Australians and British. They travel in huge, brattish packs, unbearably loud, perpetually drunk and not wearing anywhere near enough clothes. One of the places they congregate is the island of Ko Pha Ngan on the eastern coast. Ko Pha Ngan is the home of the infamous Full Moon Parties, all-night beach raves of legendary proportions. Packed like sardines on the beaches, the kids spend all night out of their tiny minds on sugar, booze-buckets and fistfuls of pharmaceuticals, dancing to ground-pounding beats and the light of fire-baton twirlers. Sounded incredibly lame to me. We stayed one island over on the peaceful, sweet little snorkelling paradise of Ko Tao.

3. Pattaya, Thailand

Sex tourism, go-go bars and transvestite hookers. Pattaya is a bottomless black hole of sleaze, and the source of muttered legend among the greasy, shifty-eyed, middle-aged white men who flock to Thailand’s southeast looking for child prostitutes. I wasn’t about to go within a hundred kilometers of the place. You’d probably catch half a dozen diseases just by breathing the air, let alone touching anything. Maybe I’m being unfair, maybe it would be an amusing place to visit. I can take honest smut in my stride with a smile any day. But judging from the sort of people I overheard raving about the place, well… yuck.

4. Munich, Germany

Sheryl and I were in the Netherlands, trying to decide how we should use the last day of our rail-pass. It made sense to us to go as far as we could to make the most use of it, so we decided to go as far south into Germany as possible. The train schedules worked for Munich and the connections were good from there, so I went ahead and started trying to find accommodation. Nothing. Not a single bed available in the entire city of Munich. It was bizarre. Clearly my brain was not working at full speed that day, because it took me a few minutes to make the connection between Munich and the current month. Dear god, Oktoberfest. Munich is a nice place, and I like it, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to be there during Oktoberfest. We opted for Nuremberg to visit the grim and disturbing museums documenting the Nazi era instead - more or less the opposite of Oktoberfest’s beery good cheer. When we finally did make it to Munich a few days after the festival finished, the whole town centre was covered with trash and broken glass.

5. The Yasawa Islands, Fiji

Like Bali, Fiji (or fayJAY, as they call it) is immensely popular with Aussie tourists on cheap package holidays. They get picked up at the airport in Nadi and shuffled straight onto the ferry (included in the package) to one of the islands in the Yasawa group off the west coast of Viti Levu. There are lots of budget resorts all catering to the package tours. These aren’t all-inclusive Caribbean-style resorts - all you get is a bunk bed, three meals a day, and the opportunity to drink as much overpriced beer as you want and then puke on the beach. The Yasawas themselves are beautiful, and we thought hard about going despite the atmosphere - but in the end it just wasn’t enough value for money and we went east instead.

Five Party Spots We Didn’t Avoid

1. Vang Vieng, Laos

Vang Vieng is a… special kind of place. Most of Laos is quiet and peaceful, but not here. Vang Vieng is a haven for the sort of backpacker that feels they aren’t getting the most out of their travels unless they’re stoned 24/7. The restaurants all have prominent menus by the door advertising “space” pizzas - your choice of psychoactive toppings. They all play back-to-back DVDs of Friends episodes on permanent repeat for their clienteles of bleary tank-top-clad 20-somethings, all on the nod. The main tourist activity in Vang Vieng is to go floating down the river on inner-tubes, stoned out of your mind, collecting beer from all the riverside bars, and then to go stumbling and screeching incoherently through the streets in search of munchies, sunburnt and covered in body-paint. We knew the reputation of the place beforehand, so we went with our eyes open. In fact, Vang Vieng is a charming little town once you’re away from the backpacker ghetto, and its situation amidst fascinating limestone karst landscape couldn’t be better. We rented bikes and spent our time caving in the surrounding hills.

2. Bali, Indonesia

In Australia, especially, we heard a lot of people claim to have travelled in Indonesia. But under further questioning it almost always emerged that they’d just been to Bali, taking advantage of cheap flights and package holidays. Bali is as much representative of Indonesia as Amsterdam is of the Netherlands, or as Goa is of India. Now, I wouldn’t claim to be an Indonesia veteran by any means; I’ve spent two months there in Sumatra, Java, Lombok and Borneo. And I’d definitely never claim to be an expert on Bali, having spent less than 24 hours there going from a ferry on one side of the island to another ferry on the other. Indonesia’s a vast and diverse country and every island has its own distinct culture - Bali, arguably, most distinct of all - so no one island could ever be representative of the whole. But - barring the remote inland mountain areas which are said to still be unspoiled, Bali was one of the places worst ruined by tourism I’ve ever been. The locals are servile, hostile or both, and the entire economy is geared for money-extraction from tourists. And half the island seems to be given over to one big party zone for the Australian kids. Twenty or thirty years ago Bali might have been lovely and fascinating, but now it’s a clapped-out caricature of itself.

3. Bangkok, Thailand

If you’re travelling in Southeast Asia you can’t really avoid Bangkok. And if you’re on a budget in Bangkok, you can’t avoid the Banglamphu district. And if you’re in Banglamphu you certainly can’t avoid the pathetic and disgusting freakshow called Khao San Road. Bangkok is an incredible, vibrant city full of culture and history, and the Thais have wisely and quietly concentrated the drunken hordes of obnoxious, shouting foreign backpackers to this one area of town. That not being enough, the “naked ghosts” all pack themselves into these few blocks of grotty pavement that I unaffectionately (but accurately) called Puke Street. “The KSR” is a 24-hour party strip lined with heaving bars and filthy, lice-ridden backpacker flophouses with cardboard walls. It’s the epicentre of the Banana Pancake Trail, an irresistible gravitational attraction for stoned gap-year assholes, and a Lonely-Planet-approved money-extraction machine built around the worst, most blatant kind of tourist-pandering. We took one walk down Puke Street just to prove to ourselves that it really was that lame and ridiculous, and then took a little room in a quiet alleyway at the very edge of the Banglamphu ghetto, and had a great time in Bangkok staying as far away from the noise and stupidity as we could get.

4. Queenstown, New Zealand

It bills itself as the “adrenaline capital of New Zealand”, a designation that ought to be enough of a warning. The town’s full of operators offering exciting, expensive activities like bungee-jumping, skydiving and the like, so the hostels are full of overstimulated backpackers loudly outdoing each others’ daily Adventure Activity, all regressed to an atavistic state of fist-pounding dumb-jock Bros and Dudes. It’s just like being in high-school again. The town itself is gorgeous, and its setting among the beautiful peaks of the Remarkables mountains can’t be beat, but it’s a very hard place to like. Such are my memories from an earlier trip, at least, and that’s what I was expecting when it became obvious that Sheryl and I wouldn’t be able to just quickly pass through town on our way north, but would have to stop a couple of days to have our visas renewed at the immigration office. But luck was with us. We were there over the Easter weekend, and the town was deserted. Turns out Queenstown’s a pretty nice place after all.

5. Galway City, Ireland

I can have fun sometimes, really. I mean, I am actually capable of it, despite the snarky impression I might have given here. I’ve left Galway for the last to prove that. I liked the place a lot. It’s got an amazing energy, friendly people, and a fantastic live music scene. We had a great time there, even though it was a holiday long weekend and the place was crammed with groups of bachelor parties and hen nights. It was like some demented but entertaining, totally improvised carnival. The most memorable evening there we spent with our German friend Armin and a Swiss girl, and it began with me horsewhipping a man in the middle of the street and ended with Armin running around a park asking all the men if he could measure their toes.

Me in a 20m free-dive, filmed by Mark Kellock; Mariner’s Cave, Vava’u, Tonga.

We’ve gone snorkelling in some of the best spots in the world, and although there are a few big-ticket creatures I haven’t yet run into like whale sharks and hammerheads, there are endless numbers of fascinating, beautiful things down there. So the fifteenth list in the series of World Tour Highlights articles presents, in alphabetical order, my ten personal favourites.

1. Christmas Tree Worms

These things are everywhere in the tropics, and I love them. They’re tiny tube-worms, no more than a couple of centimeters long, and ringed with spiral feathers that make them look, in shape at least, exactly like a fake plastic Christmas tree, or one of those conical green Lego trees. They come in every possible combination of colours, and they cover the rocks and coral heads in a profusion of vivid little points. But their most entertaining feature for me is their habit of reacting to any nearby disturbance by snapping back into their sheltering tubes faster than the eye can follow. Now you see them, now you don’t. It’s endless fun for me, waving my hand over a rock and watching hundreds of brightly-coloured little feathery cones disappear instantly, and then slowly poke back out.

Photo by Jan Messersmith (under CC license)

2. Cowries

Everybody knows these shellfish from the tiny Money Cowrie - domed oval shells with a double row of ‘teeth’ on the underside - but some species can be the size of your hand, and have the most amazing geometric patterns on their shells. They’re Sheryl’s obsession, not mine, but I got interested in the course of trying to find them for her. They like to hang out on coral heads or just under the edges of a reef. They’re distinctive and easy to spot, but the problem is that the animal secretes a particular slime that keeps its shell free of crud, algae and barnacles, so if you spot a nice shiny one it’s invariably still occupied. I’m strictly catch-fondle-and-release, so it didn’t bother me much, but Sheryl collects shells and got a little frustrated by this. But in the end persistence paid off and we found some nice vacant ones for her to mail home from Fiji.

3. Crown-of-Thorns Starfish

I like starfish, I think they’re pretty neat animals. So I was in awe of the Crown-of-Thorns Starfish when I first encountered it in Tonga’s Vava’u group of islands. They grow huge, more than half a meter across, with up to 21 thick arms, and they’re covered in long, thick spines like an urchin, that shade from their various body colours to blue or green at the tips. They’re strong, and surprisingly fast movers for starfish - I saw them crawling a couple of meters in a minute. And their spikes are dangerously sharp (and poisonous) as I found out when trying to turn one over to see what it looked like underneath. Overall, fascinating creatures, but the problem is that, having spread beyond the range of any of their natural predators, they’re breeding out of control in many waters. At one spot, floating above a reef in Fiji and turning a full circle, I counted more than 20 in sight. And they’re massively destructive, chewing through coral like a lawnmower. And naturally, being starfish, they’re practically impossible to kill - chop them up and each piece regenerates - so population control is difficult. One village we visited on the island of Taveuni in Fiji, near the spectacular Vuna Reef, has taken to offering a starfish bounty to the local kids.

Photo by Simon Spear (under CC license)

4. Giant Clams

Okay, I heard the same stories you did, about the divers that drown when a giant clam closes on their fin underwater. So I don’t stick my feet in them, when I see them, and that seems to work fine. I can never get enough of the vivid, almost iridescent coloured stripes and spots on the frilled lips of these creatures. And I admit I have the bad habit of snapping my fingers in front of them to watch them snap closed. They’re not really giant clams - they couldn’t swallow you whole, like you think when you’re a kid - but these guys can get over a meter across, which is pretty impressive for a clam. In the South Pacific they eat them, fishing them up from the bottom by letting the clam snap closed on the boat’s anchor chain and hauling them up with a winch. Giant-clam half-shells, bleached white in the sun, are the most common garden planter-box and walking-path border decoration in Tonga.

Photo by Phil Camill (under CC license)

5. Humpback Whales

By far the prize of my underwater explorations. Sheryl and I waffled for days over the question of Samoa vs. Tonga as a destination, and the fact that it was the humpbacks’ calving season in Tonga at that time settled the question. They are unbelievably stunning, incredible animals. We got the chance to swim with a family of three in Tonga’s Vava’u islands. The male was breaching high out of the water and splashing down with great crashes (nearly onto me, but that’s a different story), and the mother and month-old calf let us watch them for a moment, floating suspended in the water, before calmly and effortlessly flicking their tails and vanishing in the blue. Without a word of a lie, it was one of the most incredible, joyful experiences of my life. I was shivering and grinning like a madman when I got back on the boat.

A few days later, taking a rest on the rocks from snorkelling around some of the nearby reefs, Sheryl spotted a spout in the shallow channel between the two islands on either side of us. I looked, and sure enough the broad back and flukes of a lone humpback broke the surface. We took off after him and tracked him by his spout, but never got close enough to see him underwater. But still, where else but Tonga can you go out for a day’s casual snorkel and see a whale?

6. Jellyfish

I still love jellyfish, despite a huge swarm of them trying to kill me in Sumatra. They float along, pulsing so peacefully, upside-down half the time, in all their different elaborations of form and structure. I could watch them for hours. And I always feel sorry for them when I see them washed up on the beach, and I put them back in the water if it seems like it might not be too late.

7. Lionfish

This is the only actual fish on the list, I realize now. Lionfish and their cousins the scorpionfish are fascinating, distinctive, and deadly. They’re not big, maybe 20 or 30 centimeters, but they look much bigger because of the great spreading feathers of their dorsal and pectoral fins, which are vividly striped and flutter in the currents. I always wanted to see one, and they’re not at all uncommon, so I was getting quite frustrated when, after so many days snorkelling in the tropics I still hadn’t found one by the time we reached Tonga. But then I discovered that they like to hang upside-down on the undersides of rocks and coral heads. Once I knew that, I seemed to find them all over. Their venom can be deadly, but they seem to be quite calm and placid fish, and I was able to examine them at quite close quarters without either party getting upset.

Photo by Albert Kok (under CC license)

8. Manta Rays

This is another creature I’ve always been fascinated by. They’re magnificently strange animals, with their great diamond-shaped wings and the furled horn-flaps of skin beside their mouths. I always wanted to see them, but I never thought I’d get to swim with them. But when we were staying at a little place in Vava’u, Tonga (which we’d chosen for the great snorkelling offshore) the owner came to me one day and said he’d spotted some mantas playing in the surf on a reef he’d gone out to with a fishing charter. He said the fisherman hadn’t been interested, so he was going out the next day to try and find them again, and if we wanted to come we could all take turns minding the boat while the others swam. I didn’t hesitate for a second, didn’t check with Sheryl, just said hell yes. It was a dream come true for me, after all.

When we got there the next day it took us awhile to spot them. First there was a group of six very deep, in a very strong current, on a mission and swimming too fast for me to keep up. But then we saw two more on the surface doing a strange looping barrel-roll, breaking the surface with their white bellies up, then diving down, circling around vertically and rising upside-down again, one following the other around and around. We jumped in and joined them. They came to investigate me, swimming right for me and then veering off gracefully with a flick of a wingtip. Their strange rectangular mouths were wide open and I could see right in and through their huge gills to the blue water behind. They let me play tag for a few minutes, following them just above and behind them almost close enough to touch their backs. In a weird confusion of the senses it felt for an instant as if I was flying with the huge creatures, pulled along in the slipstream of their wings, twice as wide as my height. Magic. They swam away and came close in ever-increasing ellipses until finally they vanished in the distance, leaving me feeling like I’d had a religious experience. It was incredible, and I owe a great big thanks to Kurt of Lucky’s Beach Houses in Vava’u for making it happen.

Photo by Steve Dunleavy (under CC license)

9. Nudibranches

Nudibranches and sea slugs are odd animals. They’re mostly variations on the basic slug shape, but occasionally fluted and elaborated with fluttery feathers and protuberances. They come in all manner of bright, vividly-coloured strips and spots and speckles, and they mostly like to hang around in the corals and sludge at the bottom of shallow to medium-deep water. The best known is the nudibranch called the Spanish Dancer, with its fluttery skirts in rings of deep red and hot pink and its two little devil horns above its eyes. I finally saw my first one off the north coast of Fiji’s main island, rippling along suspended in shallow water near a reef, making its way slowly to the rich mud of the bottom. Later, in other waters around Fiji, I saw even stranger and more vivid sea slugs. And, researching this list, I discovered that the mysterious things I’d seen here and there on the reefs, that looked like rosettes of spiralled fabric in bright pink, were in fact the egg ribbons of the Spanish Dancer.

Photo by Hani Amir (under CC license)

Photo by Ken Tam (under CC license)

10. Sea Turtles

Turtles are one of the best things in the world, and sea turtles are even better. It’s always a huge treat when I see one of them cruising along in the water or hanging around on the bottom. They’re calm, slow creatures, and often they don’t seem bothered if you come close. I love their big black eyes and their expressions of ancient dinosaurian wisdom. And their beaks make them look as if they’re smiling, which is always a plus. I remember one massive old creature in the waters off Gili Trawangan in Indonesia, who was so placid and unworried that I spent five minutes diving down close enough to have touched him, while he munched his way through the reef. I hadn’t realized until then just how destructive their voracious appetites can be - I watched him rip and tear at the corals and anemones with his beak while he shovelled the torn pieces toward his mouth with his flippers. The water around him was swirling with a cloud of organic debris from his grazing. A reef is just a giant salad bar to a sea turtle, I guess.

And baby sea turtles are the cutest thing there is. We got to play with them in Malaysia and again in Indonesia. And naturally, no word on baby sea turtles would be complete without mention of Mister Raisin. I found him washed up on a beach in southern India. Who knows how long he’d been floating, but he was completely mummified. I kept him and brought him around the world through twelve countries, terrified at every border-crossing that I’d be inspected and arrested for trafficking in an endangered species. I finally mailed him home from Australia because the next destination was New Zealand, and they don’t just arrest you for that, they actually hang you right in the airport. Mister Raisin made it home safely and is currently recovering from his exertions in my brother’s curio cabinet.

1. Valencia, Spain

I’m not really sure why I liked Valencia so much, to be honest. We only spent six days there, it rained for four of them and I was busy trying to finish our websites most of the rest of the time. But it just felt good there. I loved the architecture, and there was great graffiti, and a linear park in a dry riverbed. There was cheap food and sangria, and good paella. And the coat of arms of the city has a bat on it, which always helps.

2. Marrakesh, Morocco

Marrakesh is a bad old town, in every sense of the world. A corrupt sun-baked hive of deviltry and wickedness. I loved it from the first moment, when an angel-faced little boy tried to lure us down a dark alley. You need your wits about you in Marrakesh all the time, or you could just vanish and never be heard from again. It’s an overwhelming experience for all the senses, that city - the souks, the streets filled with tagine smoke, the donkey-carts in the narrow alleyways, the chaos in the mornings, the stillness of the afternoons, and the bustle of the evenings, and the calls from the minarets floating over it all.

3. Budapest, Hungary

Budapest is another entry in the list of cities that only spent a few days in, and that I loved, but couldn’t quite tell you why. Part of it is certainly the architecture, and part of it was the charmingly rattly old trams that run everywhere around the city. A lot of it was definitely the stray kittens and hedgehogs we saw all over the place. Any city that has kittens and hedgehogs playing together is a good place, I’d say. And there’s a castle and thermal baths and caves under the city, and the odd split-personality of Buda’s hills and Pest’s floodplain.

4. Paris, France

Paris. What could I possibly say about Paris that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, by writers a thousand times better than me? How about this: I didn’t fall in love with Paris. Well, not quite true. I did love Paris, I just wasn’t in love with Paris. I liked the city a lot, and I’d happily live there for a year or two. There’s a lot of overwrought sentiment about Paris, and I was prepared to be underwhelmed before I arrived. But it’s true, there really is nowhere quite like it. The buildings are stunning, it seems like every flat surface is tastefully ornamented, and the quality of light is truly unlike anywhere else. Notre Dame and its gargoyles, the Metro and its wrought-iron, the crèpes and the Catacombs. And there’s an energy about the place that’s caused by hundreds of thousands of people determinedly going about the daily business of making art that I found irresistible.

5. Kyoto, Japan

I swear that someday I’m going to come back and live in Kyoto. It’s a beautiful place, and one of the most liveable, walkable cities I’ve ever seen. Kyoto felt like home instantly, in a way that Valencia did, and in a way that Cape Town or Mumbai never could. It’s a dense city, without being crowded, and it has lots of urban green space. The quiet neighbourhoods are full of traditional wooden houses, and there are moss-covered temples and shrines everywhere. The river runs north to south with a walking and cycling path on both sides, its marshy shallows home to herons and egrets. It seemed like a nice spot to put down the packs and just live for awhile. I was powerfully tempted to do just that - enough to start looking at apartment listings, in fact - but in the end the urge to be on the road was still too strong.

6. Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo is the citiest city of them all, an unthinkably huge Futurist construction that ticks along like precision clockwork. There are 23 special wards that make up the megalopolis, each one a quasi-autonomous city in its own right. Overlaid on this amalgamation, though, is a patchwork of real neighbourhoods. We stayed with friends for three weeks in an area of Shinagawa ward called Nishi-Oi - a residential district of quiet, crooked streets and dog-walkers, a much-needed refuge from the intimidating city. Tokyo is a blur of impressions for me: the spaghetti tangle of the subway map’s twenty lines; Shinjuku’s cascades of glowing vertical signage; the geek’s dream of Akihabara; the costumes in Harajuku and the flash shops in the Ginza; the glittering skyline of the city from the monorail at Odaiba and the stillness of the Imperial Palace in Chiyoda. Noodle shops and lantern festivals and giant robot statues and tuna auctions and fireworks. I’ll never be rich enough to live in Tokyo, but I have wonderful memories of it, and I’ll be back there someday.

7. George Town, Malaysia

George Town, the capital of the Malaysian island state of Penang, is a very special place for me. We arrived exhausted after ten months of restless, relentless travel through India, Nepal and Asia. We didn’t fall in love with the place at first - in the beginning it was just a safe, cheap place we could stay, and Malaysia gave us three months entry visa-free. With time to breathe and relax at last, we just collapsed for awhile. But as the days turned into weeks, I realized that I really liked the place… a lot. What I didn’t know at the time but was later to realize, was that a lot of what I loved about George Town were actually things I loved about Malaysia itself - the mix of ethnicities, the real attempts at tolerance and multiculturalism, the good parts of Malaysia that are the same as the good parts of Canada. We spent six weeks in George Town, just living - eating at the same Indian restaurants and visiting the same temples, listening to the call to prayer from the minarets and feeding M&M’s to the geckos. Sheryl spent time watching her gang of elderly taxi drivers playing dam on a nearby street corner. Nights, we’d get watermelon juice and hawker food from the stalls in Lebuh Chulia. The buildings were old and crumbling and had trees growing from the roofs, the mosquitoes were ferocious and the rats were bigger than the cats, but I love the place, and I’d go back in a heartbeat.

8. Kuching, Malaysia

A lot of the things I liked about Penang, I liked about Kuching. It’s the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the jungle island of Borneo. We arrived there overland from Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, ill and physically worn out from the stresses of travelling cheap in Indonesia. Kuching was instant magic for me. Even the name, kucing, means “cat” in the Malay language, so I knew I’d love the place before I even arrived. We weren’t there three days before deciding we’d stay awhile, and in fact we stayed for two months. We took a room on Jalan China in a hostel run by a crazy Swedish girl, who I miss terribly. I got a membership at a gym and I walked across town every day, past the shophouses and all the local businesses, making friends with all the stray cats and ladyboys, doing my best to repair my budget-travel-ravaged health while simultaneously sabotaging my efforts by eating steamed buns, milo ais and Sarawak laksa as often as I could (we went to the same laksa vendor every time and he knew our order by heart). Every day at about 4pm the humid, thick air would coalesce into a huge downpour for an hour, and an hour after the streets would be dry - they understand good drainage in Borneo. We’d chat every day with people whose fathers and grandfathers had been headhunters, and took day trips out to see the orangutans in the jungle. I was sad to leave Kuching. I don’t know if life will bring me back to Cat City - Borneo is far away from anything - but I hope it does.

9. Wellington, New Zealand

I have fond memories of Windy Wellington from my first visit years ago, and that probably influences me now, but there’s still something about the place. It’s small enough that you feel like you know everybody, but big enough to feel like a real city. It’s hilly, and I love the little private funiculars that the rich people build to take themselves up to their houses. The sunlight on Wellington Harbour is always changing as the clouds blow in and out. And knowing there’s a huge geological fault-line right under the city and that it could all be shaken apart any day just makes me treasure it more.

10. Buenos Aires, Argentina

They call Buenos Aires the Paris of South America, and it’s true. It’s a huge, vibrant city with fascinating elegant, ornate and characteristic architecture. I fell in love with Buenos Aires the way that everyone told me I was supposed to fall in love with Paris. The people are sharp but friendly and affectionate. They live in the sidewalk cafés and never seem to sleep - you’ll see families with toddlers in the parks at 3 in the morning, but it doesn’t seem to shorten their tempers. Our first visit was for a month and a half in the spring, and there’s no city better in the springtime than BA. Wave after wave of different flowering trees: purple jacaranda, yellow tipa, fuschia bougainvillea, the pink blossoms and white fluff of the silk floss tree. We took a room in the quiet suburb of Belgrano with its cobbled streets and dog-walkers. Buenos Aires has its dark side, to be sure - crime is rampant. The worst downturn of our World Tour was a terrible theft that happened in the bus station there, and that led to our second six-week stay in the city. But even though it did me wrong, I still love the place, bad and good.

1. Bamboo

Bamboo is quintessentially Asian, and although I’ve seen it everywhere from Argentina to Fiji, I remember it most in China and in Japan.

2. Baobab Tree

The famous upside-down tree. I saw them again in Australia, but they’ll always be the iconic African tree for me, since that’s where I saw them first. Their barrel-shaped trunks are topped with stubby, spindly, bare branches, exactly as if someone had buried their crowns in the dusty ground and left the roots exposed to the sky.

3. Basket Fungus

I love all mushrooms and fungi. Every autumn at home I go on a mushroom-hunting expedition. When Sheryl and I arrived in the South Island of New Zealand I was happy to discover that it was mushroom season there. We saw a lot of good ones in Fiordland National Park but had to wait until we got to the other end of the island before I saw the one I really wanted to see - the bizarre Basket Fungus. They grow in a round pouch mostly buried in the ground, and when they’re ripe any little bump will split the pouch and let the compressed fungus inside explode out into a big hollow ball made of crinkly white slime-covered tubes. They’re a member of the stinkhorn family, so when Sheryl and I went hunting them in Farewell Spit and in Picton we often found them with our noses before we saw them.

4. Cobas Tree

A fond memory from the deserts of Namibia. A rubbery, alien-looking tree with soft papery golden bark and a bulbous trunk and branches. They’re actually succulents, so more closely related to cactuses than woody trees, and they’re so flexible that the wind makes them vibrate - for that reason, I thought these were the trees referred to as Quiver Trees for the longest time, only to find out that Quiver Trees were another tree entirely. We saw them all over Namibia, growing from seemingly barren rock outcrops in the desert.

5. Fern Trees

Cycads and fern trees always thrill me. The curled frond is New Zealand’s unofficial emblem, and no wonder - the forests there are full of a hundred variations: giant ferns than unroll themselves straight from the ground, or tall palm-like trunks with a spray of fronds at the crown. They’re so alien-looking and so green and lush. Whenever I walk through a fern forest I like to pretend to myself that I’ve been sent back in time 175 million years to the middle of the Mesozoic Era and with every bend in the trail I might see a dinosaur.

6. Fig Trees

Fig trees are everywhere, but there are two kinds I love particularly. There’s the parasitic Strangler Fig, which begins life as a seed blown by the wind into the branches of another tree, and then sends snaky roots winding down to the ground, using its host for support until it’s finally choked to death. Sometimes the host tree rots inside the strangler’s grasp and only the fig is left, a hollow tubular net of branches holding air. I remember these trees from every jungle and rainforest, and in cities in India and Malaysia, but I recall them best at the temples of Angkor in Cambodia.

Banyan trees are another fig variation. These are immense trees that send down creepers from their branches. When the creepers touch the ground they grow into new trunks, so that in time one tree can become a huge forest. Walking among the trunks of a banyan grove can be a spooky and awe-inspiring experience.

Photo by stretchdog (under CC license)

7. Fish Poison Tree

It took me ages to find out what this tree really was. I saw its fruit washed up on shore as early as India - they look like squared-off coconuts with one pointy end. And then I saw them blooming in Borneo - their flowers are a spray of white and pink threads in a cup of waxy white petals, and have a very strong scent. But no matter how many places I asked, nobody knew what they were called. I begged a hundred locals in different countries for the name of the tree in their language, thinking that would give me a starting point, but every one just shrugged, looked either puzzled or embarrassed, and told me they didn’t know, or that those trees didn’t really have a name. It took me two and a half years, but finally I came to Fiji and finally found a man who knew. Their name in Fijian is vutu, and that led me to Barringtonia asiatica, the Fish Poison Tree, so named for its toxic effect on fish. It’s also called the Box Fruit Tree, for the shape of the floating fruit.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

8. Frangipani

Frangipani flowers are emblematic of the tropics. Waxy white or pink swirled petals with a yellow centre. The spindly branches of the trees always look bare and dead to me, with more flowers than leaves. I’ve spent many nights in the tropics with the heavy, sweet scent of frangipani filling the air.

9. Ghost Gum

These eucalypts are named for their thick, wrinkled, spectrally white trunks and branches. They grow on the banks of Outback Australia’s dry riverbeds. The white of their bark is always shocking against the red rock and the red dust, and the little shade they give from the merciless sun is always welcome.

10. Heliconia

Another denizen of the tropics. I remember seeing it for the first time in Laos, but I may have seen it before that. They have long, dangling bracts of deep red flowers, waxy and hard and flat, pointing downwards, offset like zipper-teeth on a stem. They’re sometimes called Lobster Claw plants for the shape of the flowers.

11. Jacaranda Tree

One of my favourite trees. Although I saw it again in Australia and Argentina, for me it will always be iconic of Africa where I saw it first. Arriving in Nairobi from Europe, the whole city was filled with these big trees covered in deep purple flowers. And in Buenos Aires in the springtime the streets are lined with blossoming mature jacaranda trees. When the flowers begin to fall, the plazas and avenues were thickly covered in drifts of purple.

12. Kauri Tree

New Zealand’s kauri trees are magnificent. The whole country was covered with them once, but now only isolated stands remain, protected by law. Kauri are massive, tall trees. Their scaly trunks are perfectly round, straight and bare of branches until the crown. They’re gigantic arks of life, supporting hundreds of species of birds and insects, and their branches are covered with a profusion of ferns, mosses and epiphytic plants. Sheryl and I drove for hours north of Auckland to see the tallest living kauri, Tāne Mahuta, the Lord of the Forest - more than 50 meters tall and 2500 years old, and Te Matua Ngahere, the Father of the Forest, even older and with a trunk so big around it would take ten people holding hands to encircle it.

13. Mangrove

Stands of spindly mangrove trees line the rocky shores of the island of Nananu-i-ra just off the north coast of Viti Levu in Fiji. They stand on tiptoe, with their trunks off the ground, supported by their roots, just as if they were about to scramble back to the water. It’s hard enough to fight your way through the interlocking roots when the tide is out, but at high tide when the roots are all under water it’s a quick way of breaking an ankle. Sheryl and I discovered this on our separate circumnavigations of the island, and had to resort to swimming, wading around, or forcing a scratchy path on the inland side.

14. Mimosa

The famous Sensitive Plant. I first encountered it in India, and have seen it through the tropics ever since. And I think I have fondled every single plant I’ve come across. It’s irresistible - you stroke the leaves gently and they shrink and fold up almost instantly. I could do it for hours.

Photo by Dianne Frost (under CC license)

15. Papyrus

All I really ever knew about papyrus was what I learned in history class: the ancient Egyptians made paper out of it. I never really thought about what the plant itself looked like. So when I was being poled along in a makoro dugout canoe through the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and the boatman started talking about the papyrus grass, I paid closer attention. It’s tall marsh grass with big seed heads that rise up on long stalks like big green pom-poms nodding in the breeze.

16. Pitcher Plant

A bizarre species native to the jungles of Malaysia. Their round-bellied pitchers hang down from the plant on green stems. They’re rust-red and green, striped with veins, and have fleshy flaps that cover the open mouths of the pitchers. Pitcher plants are carnivorous - insects fall into the pitchers and drown in the standing water inside, where they’re slowly dissolved them to feed the plant.

17. Protea

South Africa’s proteas are strange things, like flowers might look on another planet. They’re all big, chunky flowers, and the thick, fleshy, closely-laid petals of their buds look like fish scales in bright colours.

18. Rafflesia

Sheryl took me on a 4×4 expedition for my birthday in 2010, in the Cameron Highlands of central Peninsular Malaysia, to go and see the biggest flower in the world. They are huge - single flowers up to a meter across, sprouting from a vine half-buried in the jungle floor. They’re a strange flower, too, with their fleshy red petals speckled with white polka-dots. They feel like spongy leather - more like a fungus than a flower. They’re said to smell like a rotting corpse, to attract the flies that pollinate them, but Sheryl and I agreed that it was kind of a nice smell, actually.

19. Sausage Tree

Another strange tree that I just can’t imagine Africa without. It has massive tan-coloured hard-skinned fruit that hang down like sausages in a butcher’s shop. We were told that only baboons have jaws strong enough to get through the tough skin of the fruit.

20. Silk Cotton Tree

With Strangler Figs, above, these are the famous trees that are slowly tearing down the temple of Ta Prohm in Angkor, Cambodia. Their roots wind like liquid or like tentacles around and between the stones of the temple, snaking into the smallest cracks and growing. The sight of the temple drowning in tree roots is spooky and humbling.

21. Silk Floss Tree

Not to be confused with the Silk Cotton tree above. Silk Floss trees belong to the same family as the baobab. They have bulbous, barrel-shaped trunks covered in squat spines. Their flowers are glorious pink and white-striped things like stringy hibiscus blossoms, and in the spring the trees are covered in white cotton puffs that the wind slowly shreds and blows to the ground. There was so much cotton on the ground in the spring in Buenos Aires that it looked as if it had snowed.

Photo by Font del Vi (under CC license)

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

22. Sundew

Another strange carnivorous plant. We found it in the peat bogs of Fiordland National Park in New Zealand. They’re tiny crimson plants with lobe-like leaves covered in sticky hairs. Insects get stuck and digested by enzymes in the fluid.

23. Tamarind Tree

Another tree I saw first in Africa and subsequently through the tropics. It has wonderful light, feathery leaves and bright orange petal-like flowers. The long seed pods dangle down from the branches and twist in the wind, and they taste really good too.

24. Tipa Tree

In Buenos Aires in the springtime, Sheryl and I were always baffled when we’d be walking down the street or through a park and we’d feel drops of water (we hoped) sprinkling on us from above. There would never be anything above us but the branches of trees, and it was never raining. We were puzzled for ages and eventually came to the conclusion that these particular trees just… drip a lot. We could look up and see a cloud of tiny droplets falling in the sunlight, under the tree. I’m still not sure where the liquid comes from or why they drip. They’re called Tipa trees in Argentina - their Latin name is Tipuana tipu. They’re lovely tall trees with twisted black branches that arch over the streets, and they probably didn’t deserve the name we eventually gave them: “Pee Trees”.

Photo by Beatrice Murch (under CC license)

25. Tea

I never drank coffee before starting on this trip - I was always a dedicated tea drinker, and I’d always planned to make my pilgrimage to Darjeeling someday. I did succeed in that, and the sight of the rolling hills covered in a flat green maze of interlocking pruned tea bushes was as satisfying to the eye as the drink is to the mouth. We watched the tea leaves being plucked by hand, one by one. Later, in the highlands of Malaysia, we visited another tea-growing region where the leaves are harvested with shears, which results in a much lower grade of tea.

1. Agama (Tanzania)

Funny-looking two-tone lizards. We first spotted one in Tanzania with a bubblegum-pink head and body and a blue tail, sunning on the rocks in the Serengeti, and then others later in Malawi with a bright blue head and a yellow body.

2. Cane Toad (Australia and Fiji)

Ah, the legendary Cane Toad. Object of utter loathing and hatred in Australia. An introduced species there, they have no predators and are wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Everywhere we went in Australia people would either tell us to kill them, or inform us that you can get high by licking them. They’re also all over the place in Fiji, where we counted 200 in the space of an hour on a big grassy field in Levuka, Taveuni.

3. Chameleon (Tanzania)

I’ve always thought chameleons were the weirdest thing, with their sticky long tongues, their eyes that move around independently and their strange little feet. We saw a semi-wild one in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania.

4. Crocodile (Zambia and Australia)

I don’t even know where to start talking about crocodiles. I remember them feasting on dead hippos in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. And they were lurking in every river and lake in Africa, it seemed like. We were warned about them while rafting the Zambezi and camping near Lake Malawi. And of course the salties in Australia were always out to get us.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

5. Frilled Lizard (Australia)

Frightening looking things. When they’re feeling mean or nervous they flare their huge neck frills in an attempt to look intimidating. Judge for yourself how effective it is from the photo below. Driving through Australia you’ll see signboards warning about forest fire prevention with the tag-line “We like our lizards frilled, not grilled.

6. Gecko (The Tropics)

Anywhere damp and warm, you get geckos. I love these little guys. I can’t count the number of nights I’ve fallen asleep listening to their little chirps and rustlings. I just don’t know if I could ever permanently settle in a place without geckos on the walls. Most of my fond memories are of the little squishy kind. I like to catch them off the walls - once they’re caught they’re happy to sit on your hand, flattening their little cold-blooded bellies against your skin to absorb your mammalian warmth. There are lots of different species throughout the tropics, mostly small, but not all. I remember sharing a shack in Sumatra with a massive Tokay Gecko the size of a rat, and a cottage in Fiji with a gecko we never saw, but who I named Godzilla because of the amount of noise he made running around inside the walls.

 
But no list of gecko love would be complete without mention of Licky. We shared a room in Penang, Malaysia with Licky, who - like all Malaysians - had a big taste for sweets. One day we left some M&Ms candies out at night and saw in the morning that the candy coating had all been licked off. It wasn’t long before we had photographic evidence of the culprit - a little gecko headed for reptilian diabetes.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

7. Green Tree Frog (Australia)

These guys were the cutest damn thing. Sheryl and I were newly arrived in Darwin, Australia, suffering culture-shock and missing Asia, living in a tent in a horrible dusty trailer park. Near the shower block were a bunch of hollow metal pipes sticking up out of the ground, and Sheryl discovered one day that they were full of squishy green frogs hiding out from the harsh sun. We visited those frogs every time we went to the bathroom or took a shower. There was just something so endearingly sticky about the way they all looked up at you from out of their pipe.

8. Legless Lizard (Brunei)

The Sultanate of Brunei is a conservative sort of place, and so the hostel Sheryl and I stayed at during our visit had segregated wings for men and women. One night, strolling furtively back to my dormitory after saying goodnight, I came across what seemed like a very slow, thick-bodied, blunt-nosed snake nosing around in the grass and poking its head into little holes and crevices. It hardly took any notice of me - even when I was right down beside it, and so I was able to get a good look and identify it as not a snake at all, but a legless lizard of the Ophisaurus genus - most likely Ophisaurus buettikoferi, the Borneo Glass Lizard.

9. Miniature Frog (Cambodia)

I have no idea if these were frogs or toads (the distinction is a bit blurred at the best of times), and no idea if they were a separate tiny species or just a mass hatching of babies, but one day in Cambodia, exploring the ancient temples of Angkor, the wet and puddled ground was swarming with tiny amphibians smaller than the nail of my little finger. There must have been millions. The ground was alive with them, anywhere I looked. It took me ages to get across the grounds of one temple, I was stepping so slowly and carefully. At the far end, Sheryl and I were pressed into impromptu babysitting duty for a little Cambodian girl, maybe two years old, who thought those tiny frogs were just the neatest thing ever and tottered unsteadily around chasing them and cackling with delight. At that age their hand-eye coordination isn’t so good, so whenever she managed to catch one between her pinching fingers and staggered over proudly to show it to us, it was a very unhappy little frog indeed.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

10. Monitor Lizard (Southeast Asia and Australia)

Monitor Lizards were surprising things to me. They’re practically dinosaurs, they get so big. Some of them like the water, like the ones patrolling the moat of Lumphini Park in Bangkok or those in Penang National Park in Malaysia, and some like the dry, hot land, like the perenties of Australia. I’m still crushed that we weren’t able to visit the largest members of the species, the legendary dragons of Komodo Island in Indonesia.

11. Mudskipper (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific)

All right, they’re not really amphibians, but they’re amphibious fish and so I’m giving them a spot on the list. They’re almost everywhere, the weird little things, but I remember them particularly in the brackish mud flats of Bako National Park on the island of Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, competing for space with the fiddler crabs, and on the island of Nananu-i-ra on the north coast of Fiji’s Viti Levu, swarming around the roots of the tidal mangrove swamps.

Video courtesy of Sheryl

12. Sea Snake (Fiji)

I’m sure there are many different species of sea snakes, but the one I know has black and white bands all along its body and a yellow head. Sheryl and I saw them for the first time when on a snorkelling adventure at the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. Later we saw them curled up during low tide in wave-worn crevices in the rocks of the well-named Snake Island near Caqalai in Fiji. During the long swim back to Caqalai from Snake Island, grumpily remarking to each other that sea snakes were very lazy, Sheryl saw a two-meter long example nosing around the coral heads at about 10m depth. We followed it until it came up for air, surfaced about five meters from us and tried to swim over to check us out. We couldn’t decide if it was curious about us or wanted to bite us. We’d been told that banded sea snakes are among the most deadly poisonous snakes, but that they can’t open their jaws wide enough to bite a human. Not really wanting to put that to the test, we swam backwards as it slid closer.

13. Skink (Everywhere)

I don’t think there’s an ecological habitat in the world that skinks haven’t occupied. Lots of different colours, but always more or less the same shape and size, skinks are the default Small Skinny Lizard that lives in crevices in rocks the world over. Once, during an expedition to the Lost City rock formations of Australia’s Litchfield National Park, Sheryl and I met a family and took over temporary uncle and aunt duties for the three stairstep girls. Delightfully nerdy kids, I remember the youngest - maybe seven years old - pointing and shrieking at the top of her squeaky lungs, “Look! Mom! Dad! It’s a skink! Look, a skink!” Naturally that became a running gag for us; we can’t hit the high notes, but every time we see a skink, you can imagine what we say.

14. Tortoise (Everywhere)

No, they’re not exotic, but I don’t care. I love tortoises. We’ve seen them in the most unexpected places; munching phlegmatically on lettuce in a campground in Croatia, trundling single-mindedly down a road in Namibia, or amusing themselves on the floor of a laundry in Buenos Aires. A great regret to me on our World Tour is that we won’t have the money to make the expensive trip to the Galapagos Islands to visit the giant tortoises there. Someday, someday.

15. Tuatara (New Zealand)

New Zealand’s endangered tuatara are considered living fossils, like coelacanths - a remnant of an earlier epoch. They have a vestigial third eye in their forehead, which surely bespeaks some kind of primitive wisdom. Sadly reduced in habitat to a few of New Zealand’s offshore islands the tuatara clings doggedly to its ever-weaker position in the eternal shuffling of competing genes. But all hope is not lost; Henry, the patriarch of the tuatara population at Invercargill, is 113 years old and still doing his bit to perpetuate the species.

1. Breadfruit (Fiji)

Breadfruit grows practically everywhere in the tropics, though I first ate it in Fiji. It’s a round, knobbly green fruit, about the size of a big grapefruit, with a funny fibrous texture inside. It’s a starchy staple food, eaten boiled or fried. The taste and texture is a lot like a root vegetable.

2. Dragon Fruit (Malaysia)

We must have eaten hundreds of dragon fruit during our two month stay in the town of Kuching, in Malaysian Borneo. It’s a cactus fruit with bright fuschia-red rubbery skin that has leathery scales curling away from it. The flesh is mild, sweet and melon-like with tiny black crunchy seeds all through. There are red-fleshed and white-fleshed varieties. The red, with drippy beetroot-coloured juice that stains everything, are much better than the white. I miss them.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

3. Durian (Malaysia and Indonesia)

Durian is called the King of Fruits, but not by me. It’s a huge delicacy in Malaysia and Indonesia. Durian season in Borneo coincided with our last couple of weeks in Southeast Asia, and the streets and markets were full of their unmistakable stench. The smell is so pungent and stomach-turning that lots of buildings and buses prominently display a No Durian Fruit sign. People kept telling me that it’s an acquired taste, that they taste much better than they smell, and that I shouldn’t judge until I’d tried their particular favourite variety. I tried a few, but though I did eventually get used to the smell - even developing a certain fondness for it - the taste always made me gag, and there’s no way in hell I’m ever putting durian fruit in my mouth again. I remember sitting in a ferry from Brunei to Pulau Labuan in Sabah with somebody else’s box of durian between my feet, and wondering if my nausea was due to the rough sea, the durian or the gory Thai martial-arts movie being shown. Probably all three.

4. Engkalak (Malaysia)

A strange fruit like a squashy green-white acorn with a leathery green cap. Ready to eat when it turns red; not to be eaten before that or your tongue will fall off, according to a cleaning lady we met in Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei. At least, that’s what she claimed her mother always said. We bought half a kilo in the market in Miri on Borneo just because they looked so interesting. Sheryl ate an unripe one and said that her throat and the base of her tongue prickled and burned uncomfortably for hours afterward, so maybe there’s some truth to the old wives’ tale.

5. Feijoa (New Zealand)

A green fruit about the size and shape of an egg, white inside with a tomato-like texture. The flesh smells and tastes very strongly of cheap perfume. Native to South America but grown all over New Zealand. I didn’t like it much, but I didn’t hate it either.

6. Jackfruit (Malaysia)

A massive, heavy green fruit that grows directly from the trunk of its tree. Densely covered in short thorny points. The blobs of flesh inside are rubbery and firm and taste a bit like banana custard. We first saw this in India, but I don’t think we actually ate any until we got to Malaysia.

7. Kumquat (Fiji)

Like a tiny, oval mandarin or clementine, with a sour, acidic, citrus taste. It grows all over, but I only really ate it in Fiji. I just love the name kumquat, it’s fun to say.

8. Longan (Malaysia)

Round fruit with a pebbled skin, much like lychees. The flesh is similar, too. When you take the shell off, the black seed inside the white flesh makes the fruit look like an eyeball - in Malaysia they called them mata kucing, cat’s eyes.

9. Mangosteen (Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia)

The Queen of Fruits. Impossible to get outside Southeast Asia because they don’t ship well. A squash-ball sized hard purple fruit with four green leaves like a persimmon. Crack it open gently and the white pulpy segments inside look and feel like lychee flesh and taste like a strawberry pineapple. My very favourite fruit in the world. We were lucky to be in Borneo during mangosteen season. I must have eaten a thousand of them.

10. Miracle Fruit (Malaysia)

A strange little red berry without much of a taste in itself, but that has the curious property of making everything taste sweet for an hour after eating it - even sour or bitter fruit tastes sweet after eating a miracle fruit. I didn’t believe it before I tried it, but it’s true.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

11. Passionfruit (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific)

I wasn’t much of a fan of passionfruit. It’s slimy and I don’t like the taste or the smell. But Sheryl loves it and so there were always some around. And their amazing flowers make up for the nasty fruit.

12. Pomelo (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific)

Like a huge yellow-green grapefruit with pebbled skin. It tastes like a less-sour grapefruit, too. They’re so big that we never bought them, but only ate them when it was offered.

13. Rambutan (Malaysia)

Red, orange or yellow fruit like lychees or longans, but covered in long, soft spines like messy hair. Sold in bunches still on the branch, like longans or grapes. There’s always a big pile of rambutans in the markets of Southeast Asia.

14. Salak (Indonesia)

Called snake-fruit for its hard, scaly green-brown skin. The off-white flesh is hard and crunchy and has a strange bitter-acid-sweet taste that made my tongue wrinkle up and dry out. Another one of those fruits we bought in a market because we thought it looked neat.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

15. Starfruit (Southeast Asia)

Yellow-green fruit with big ridges running lengthwise so that it looks like a star in cross-section, which is how it’s always cut to be served. Tastes like mild, sweet citrus. Very juicy flesh like a grape. Seen in markets everywhere in Southeast Asia. We ate it from time to time.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl

10. St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof (Berlin, Germany)

This is a small churchyard cemetery in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighbourhood. Sheryl and I found it while following a map I’d made of filming locations for one of my favourite films, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), filmed in 1987 here and in many other spots in the former West Berlin. St.-Matthäus has some evocative angel statuary and some interesting mausoleums lining the outer walls. It’s a nice calm green spot away from the traffic, and the Brothers Grimm are buried there.

9. Raheenyhooig Burial Ground (Dingle, Ireland)

I never knew that this tiny graveyard had a name until the time came to research this list. You’ll only find it if you go out from Dingle Town along the curve of Dingle Bay towards Eask Tower. That’s how I first found it eight years before on my last visit, and I was happy to find it again. It’s a small graveyard by the side of the road, slowly being engulfed by the grass and the ivy. A stone angel with outstretched wings covered in orange lichen watches over the scene.

8. Recoleta Cemetery (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Recoleta Cemetery is two big city blocks wide and the same length, and it’s laid out as a small city itself, in avenues and streets. There’s hardly a tree or a bit of green to be found in this paved necropolis of elegant mausoleums with ornate wrought-iron doors. Time has had its way, here, and many of the little houses are swathed in cobwebs, or have broken panels exposing their depths and the stacked coffins inside. Moth-eaten silk draperies hang in yellowed folds, undisturbed by the feral cats which are the only living inhabitants, who slink silently down the stone lanes.

7. Capela dos Ossos, Igreja de São Francisco (Èvora, Portugal)

A spooky and shivery bone chapel. The inscription over the door, translated, reads We, the bones that are here, await yours. The walls and pillars of this dimly-lit chapel are crusted with bones to more than head-height, interspersed with rows of skulls. The crosses on the walls hang against stacked thighbones. Two dessicated bodies, an adult and a child, dangle in chains from the vaulted roof. The air is musty and dry and sounds are muted by the strange acoustic qualities of the bone walls. The message that life is fleeting is chillingly clear.

6. Zentralfriedhof (Vienna, Austria)

Vienna’s Central Cemetery is an immense city of the dead, with a larger population than most living towns. It extends for many hectares of green, grassy lanes. Some districts are open and given over to flat headstones, and others are built up with rows of mausoleums. There are Jewish quarters with pebbles piled upon the tombstones, and even a Buddhist cemetery with a Tibetan stupa. A precise count of the inhabitants is no longer possible after the cemetery was bombed during the Second World War; a jumbled pile of smashed tombstones has been left as a memorial to those whose graves and identities were impossible to determine. They’re in illustrious company, at least - many of the great composers have their ornate monuments here: Beethoven, Strauss, Schubert, Brahms, Salieri; even an empty tomb for Mozart, whose pauper’s grave was never found.

5. Town Cemetery (Coober Pedy, Australia)

Coober Pedy is a rough-and-ready opal-mining town in the dead centre of Australia. Nobody wants to build a life there; they come to make their score and move on. Hardly anything green grows in Coober Pedy except for a few scrubby gum trees, and the cemetery is a barren stretch of red dirt and rocks surrounded by a sad chain-link fence. The graves are rows of long, humped mounds of gravel under the pitiless glaring sun, and the hand-worked headstones, carved hurriedly into whatever red spoil was handy, tell a bleak story of pointless, empty deaths, their emblems beer bottles, pickaxes and shovels. That barren graveyard impressed me with a fascinated sort of loathing, and I’m still thinking about it even now, a year later. “If you hate me,” I remember telling Sheryl at the time, “bury me someplace like this”.

4. Montmartre Cemetery (Paris, France)

Lovely old gravestones covered with ivy, crumbling, mossy mausoleums and a population of feral cats. Montmartre’s cemetery is quiet and dark. A massive overpass cuts out part of the light from above, and huge old twisted trees filter most of the rest. I found, unexpectedly, the grave of Jean Foucault.

3. Catacombs (Paris, France)

The Catacombs of Paris are a huge network of tunnels filled with stacked bones and skulls. They were populated in the last decades of the 19th century, when it was realized that the overflowing cemeteries of Paris were causing serious disease. The bones were exhumed and brought across the city at night in wagons covered in black cloth and followed by priests chanting the Requiem for the Dead. Huge walls of bones are lovingly and carefully arranged in shapes like arches or crosses, and skulls sit on top of crossed bones.

2. Sedlec Ossuary (Kutnà Hora, Czech Republic)

The Sedlec Ossuary in the town of Kutnà Hora outside Prague, is stunningly macabre. It’s a large room decorated with the skeletal remains of 40,000 people, most of them dead of a plague, that were stacked and wired together by an insane woodcarver in 1870. There are four huge pyramids of skulls in the corners, and the coat of arms of the Schwarzenburg family, sponsors of the project, composed completely of bones, on the wall. A magnificently horrifying skeletal chandelier, reputedly containing at least one of every human bone, hangs in the centre of the chamber, and garlands of skulls extend from it and drape the vaults and pillars of the ceiling.

1. The Merry Cemetery (Săpânţa, Romania)

The Merry Cemetery is the life’s work of one man, and later his apprentice. Another eccentric woodcarver, he hand-carved and painted hundreds of wooden gravemarkers for the villages all around. At first glance the cemetery is lovely and charming: the markers are tall and narrow, with little tin roofs to keep the rain off, painted in bright sky-blue with colourful ornaments, carved and painted verses and portraits of the occupants. When you look a little closer you realize that although some of these portraits show the person going about their trade or posing with a favourite object, many of them show them at the moment of their death. Often gruesome death. I saw a decapitation, a firing squad and a tractor accident in the space of two rows. And reading the translated inscriptions you realize they’re gloomy and bitingly sarcastic. In fact, I realized, the whole cemetery is a huge joke - an elaborate expression of the black Romanian sense of humour which can laugh at even the most horrible things. “We’re laughing at death,” the gaily-painted graves seem to say, “because you have to laugh, but death is death and it always has the last laugh. And isn’t that a bit funny too?”