I told a travel writer friend I’d be joining a press trip to the Haute-Savoie, staying in the Alpine villages of Le Grand Bornand and Les Contamines and hiking in the shadow of Mont Blanc. “That will be wonderful,” she said, “but it won’t be easy to write an interesting piece. Who wants to read about all those majestic peaks and spectacular vistas? What can you say that hasn’t been said already?”

But this trip will be a bit different, I said, hopefully. There’s a fondue picnic and something called Toumo Yoga in the forest followed by a dip in an icy river. She shrugged. “Middle-aged man discovers cold-water plunging and describes how it feels to be cold. Wow.”

She had a point. Hiking in the mountains is like skiing or scuba diving: tremendous fun to do, but deadly dull to read about. Who cares about all those postcard-perfect villages and snow-capped mountains? A younger me might have thought it clever to write “at this altitude the views literally take your breath away” but now that sounds like a tired and lazy cliche.

At least this trip was topical. It was July 2026, when much of Europe was on fire. London was roasting and French cities such as Montpellier and Nimes were again enduring temperatures over 40ºC.

The mountains offered a genuine escape. As a rough guide, temperatures drop about 0.6ºC for every 100 vertical metres you ascend. Both Le Grand Bornand and Les Contamines sit above 1,000m, providing at least 6ºC of relief. But humidity too is lower in the Alps, and breezes feel cooler, further bringing down the “real feel”.

Even so, I was not brimming with confidence about a 15km hike up to the Col de la Fenêtre, a famous viewpoint at 2,250m, and then down through the Reserve Naturelle Contamines-Montjoie, the highest nature reserve in France.

We were a group of four UK journalists and a PR from France Montagnes. Some of us were kitted out in technical hiking gear, others in T-shirts and trainers. Our guide for the day, Laetitia Duperthuy, looked us up and down, handed us each a pair of poles and said: “Okay, I guess we’ll be fine. Drink lots of water.”

Beside us, Laetitia looked a picture of health and vitality, slim and fit, with good teeth, good skin and bright eyes. The product of a life lived outdoors, perhaps.

Like many people raised in the Alps, Laetitia had started skiing at the age of three and was fitted for hiking boots around the time most British kids get their first iPad.

We took a series of ski lifts to a breezy ridge, then hiked up a rocky path lined with wild flowers to an altitude of 2,000m, past lakes and incongruous patches of snow.

We gazed across the valley to the summit of Mont Blanc which looked oddly close. It’s not a classically beautiful peak like Fuji or the Matterhorn but remains a powerful presence, constantly looming over us, almost 5,000m above sea level.

I asked Laetitia if she’d ever climbed Mont Blanc. “Of course. Usually I paraglide on the way down.”

She stopped to point out some rare alpine flowers and medicinal herbs. Like many young people who choose a life in the Haute-Savoie, she works long hours at multiple jobs, guiding hikers in the summer months, leading snow shoe treks in winter and working year round on a goat farm. “I love it,” she said. “The goats are so cute, and their milk makes the best cheese.”

I thought about my pampered life in London with our food deliveries and e-bikes. Would I have been happier if I’d been born in these mountains? Certainly I’d have stronger glutes.

However, it’s not easy for young people to settle down in these alpine villages as property prices have soared in recent years. Typically, they leave school to study at university in Paris, Lyon or Grenoble and return home to find that houses and apartments have been snapped up by investors or second home owners. Local building restrictions maintain the beauty of the valleys but allow few opportunities for young first-time buyers.

We reached another ridge with views down into a wide, lush valley with few signs of habitation. The distant chime of cow bells drifted up on the warm air. Vultures circled overhead.

We scrambled up the last stretch to the Col de la Fenetre and sucked in the panoramic views. Laetitia pointed to the snow line beneath Mont Blanc. “The melt is six weeks ahead of normal for this time of year. We are all worried.”

We dusted ourselves down and hiked down for another hour to reach our lunch stop, the Refuge des Prés, which had recently been converted from an ancient cow shed into a hostel with 30 beds, a cafe and sun terrace. I ordered one of the staple dishes, an omelette with cheese and bacon, served with salad and baguette, which was as perfectly cooked as at any high-end brasserie in Paris.

At the next table, a rare sight: British tourists. A retired couple explained they had bought an apartment down the valley in Saint Gervais. Nice people, but part of the problem.

Les Contamines, once a village of dairy farmers at the head of a steep-sided valley, is now a year-round resort with gentle ski resorts in winter and an impressive array of sports and activities in summer. A small lake with imported sand and water slides is especially good for young children.

It’s also a centre for biathlon, a sport that captured the public imagination at this year’s Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. Competitors alternate between lung-bursting cross-country ski circuits and precision marksmanship, shooting targets 50m away with a .22 rifle.

Stephane Grosset, the ebullient owner of the biathlon centre and a former world-class athlete, taught us to shoot pellets with an air rifle at a distance of 10m. “Okay, not bad,” he grinned. “Now let’s use the proper rifle and real bullets at the Olympic distance.”

It was great fun, and surprisingly affordable. A private session with a professional coach starts at €23 pp, or you can join a group session on Wednesdays at 5pm for just €15.

Across the road from the shooting range is Biche, a restaurant and day spa set up by a young local couple in 2024. The spa (€36 for 90 minutes) had high windows with mountain and forest views, and my lunch - tenderloin steak followed by summer fruit tart - was sensational.

These small French mountain resorts can’t compete in size or reputation with the huge ski domains like Les 3 Vallées and Paradiski which boast hundreds of miles of piste and massive marketing budgets. But they really come into their own in summer with their independent shops and restaurants, well-marked hiking routes and authentic village atmosphere.

On the other side of the Aravis mountain range, Le Grand Bornand is a shining example. With a year-round population of 2,100, it has 25,000 tourist beds. That might sound overwhelming but 80% of those are in private homes and as many visitors come in summer as in winter. In the summer months, 85% of visitors are French.

Grand-Bo, as it’s known to locals, is famed for its Reblechon cheese, made from the milk of local dairy herds. Forty farms in the village produce Reblochon and many of the farmers are young - their average age is around 40, according to the local tourist board. There’s also a growing population of young artists and artisans.

One of the attractions is that Annecy is just 45 minutes away, and it’s only an hour’s drive to Geneva airport. In the 1960s, the mayor of Grand-Bo rejected a proposal to raze the traditional wooden buildings and replace them with concrete blocks. Today, about 400 wooden houses remain, some dating back to the 17th century.

In the early evening we drove up the Vallee de Bouchet along narrow switchback roads to the Col des Annes, a mountain pass with a handful of rustic restaurants. We met our guide, handsome blue-eyed Victor, who took us to a picnic spot.

Along the trail, he showed us wild blueberries and the gentiane plant which is used by locals to make a terrifyingly strong liqueur. We were quietly observed by a herd of Abondance cows with distinctive white faces and brown-ringed eyes.

Victor carried a huge backpack which he disgorged at the top. The contents tumbled out: portable gas stove, two wheels of Reblechon, local craft beers, bottles of water, apple juice, bread, cutlery, plates. He told us that earlier in the week he’d completed an 80km trail run. It took him 11 hours and he came 8th out of 400 entrants. Hearing that, I didn’t feel so bad about him carrying my dinner.

We ate the fondue - which was delicious - as the sun set, illuminating the jagged peaks of the Aravis mountains. Although this treat was laid on for our group of journalists, it can be booked through the tourist office, at a cost of €43 pp including dinner and transport.

We woke early and met the yoga teacher, Alexia Vulliet, who walked us into the forest. We stopped at a clearing in the trees beside a stone bridge over a clear mountain stream. Barefoot and a little chilly, we huffed and puffed our way through a series of stretches and breathing exercises to generate an “inner fire”. Then we stripped to our swimsuits and plunged neck-deep into the water. “We stay in for 11 minutes,” said Alexia, cheerfully.

I managed seven minutes before I could take no more. And, yes, I was positively buzzing afterwards as all those “feel good” hormones coursed through my bloodstream.

Alexia said she did this every day, even in the cold depths of winter. I wondered whether, if I did the same, I’d be as full of health and vitality as these mountain people. It seemed an awfully high price to pay for good skin.

More information

I was a guest of France Montagnes. I stayed at Chalets Láska in Les Contamines and Chalet Valora in Le Grand Bornand. The Toumo Yoga experience can be booked through the Tourist Information Centre in Le Grand Bornand tourist office. The tourist office in Les Contamines can organise numerous guided hikes including to the Col de la Fenêtre.

A version of this article also appears on 101 Holidays (where I actually make a living). Unless stated otherwise, the photos are by me.

“Bangkok is the Venice of the East and whether bent on business or pleasure you must go by water.”

Henri Mouhot, the French explorer, wrote those words in 1864. These days Venetians would have a seizure if their city were compared to the choked, gridlocked Thai capital. Perhaps the only quality they still share is that both are sinking; Bangkok, according to one estimate, by four inches a year. But Mouhot’s advice remains sound. Millions spent building flyovers and expressways have done nothing to ease congestion in Bangkok and smart travellers stick to the water taxis that skim up and down the greasy Chao Phraya River.

Many people’s thoughts turn to leaving Bangkok and this too can be done by water, and in some style. The Mekhala is a converted teak rice barge which chugs lazily up the Chao Phraya towards the former summer palace of Bang Pa-In. King Chulalongkorn, who ruled Siam for 42 years until 1910, made the same journey every April when the heat and humidity in Bangkok became unbearable. The king and his entourage of monks, caterers and concubines would have travelled in a similar boat, although possibly without the benefits of our air-conditioned cabins and cocktail bar.

In many ways, Chulalongkorn was the architect of modern Thailand. He built schools and hospitals and, rather less auspiciously, Bangkok’s first roadways. His son, Vajiravudh, drove the first motor car through the streets in 1902 and, as the craze took hold, newspapers announced regular processions of automobiles.

We left behind today’s traffic processions, cruising past the flower market and the Maekhong whisky distillery, and into the suburbs where wooden houses stood propped on stilts over the water’s edge, their little jetties decorated with pots of orchids. Lone fishermen dodged the endless stream of barges bringing landfill down to the city, and teak to the mills.

Further up river we saw factories and villages then, suddenly, in a clearing between the trees, a dazzling red and gold temple with soaring pillars and glittering, serrated rooftops.

We moored beside a monastery where the monks had left their sampans entangled in water hyacinth. A funeral ceremony was nearing its final day and a wall of loudspeakers had been built on the grass beside a brick stupa, blaring blessings into the warm evening air.

The three-man crew served us dinner on deck; tom yam soup, red curry and French wine. On the horizon we could see a sodium and neon glow hanging over Bangkok and the silent, blinking silhouettes of planes coming in to land at Don Muang Airport. The music stopped and we retired to our cabins only to be kept awake by the air-conditioning and the sound of tug boats passing every few minutes.

At dawn, the boat’s skipper led us to the monastery to give alms to the monks. We each had a bag of gifts (soap, toothpaste, candles, incense and a can of pineapple juice) and were briefed on the correct way to present them, taking care not to point with our feet. Two monks sat before us, the younger one yawning widely. They chanted a blessing in Pali and Sanskrit then smiled and wandered off to see what the other monks had collected for breakfast. The whole thing might have been embarrassing and contrived but it wasn’t. We felt calm and glad.

Chiang Mai in the north is Thailand’s second city and fast becoming a mini-Bangkok. Only three years earlier, pedal-powered saamlors had plied the main streets; now they have been replaced by Toyota pick-ups and air-conditioned cars with blackened windows. Many tourists use the city as a base to visit tribal villages in the surrounding hills and dozens of dubious tour companies have appeared, offering treks and day trips.

Bringing tourists into these fragile communities is like peeling back the petals of a lotus flower - exposing them to the outside world can only accelerate their demise - but the demand is there and some operators at least are trying to soften the blow.

Ton Lung is a village of 80 Lisu families one and a half hours out of Chiang Mai. Under the guidance of a British anthropologist, John Davies, a tour company has set up a guest house there using local materials and building techniques, then adding Western bathrooms and gas water heaters. The lodge can sleep eight and the village headman has agreed that tourist numbers should not rise above this. In exchange, guests contribute to a medical fund which is used to send villagers to hospital in Chiang Mai. When we arrived, one man had just returned from a drug rehabilitation course, apparently cured of an opium addiction.

There was nothing glamorous about Ton Lung with its dirt tracks, free-range pigs and mud-floor houses, but the people made up for that. The women wore tunics of pink and turquoise, long black trousers, silver jewellery and sashes around their waists. The men’s dress was more sober except that some sported emerald green pantaloons. All treated us with politeness and restraint.

We ate well at low tables on the raised bamboo floor of the lodge. A couple of local men appeared and played traditional tunes on a banjo and a set of pipes. Two young women who worked in the kitchen downstairs came up to watch. We persuaded them to dance and they agreed, shy at first, then throwing back their heads and stamping their bare feet to the music. We bought them beer and Coke and they gave us a bottle of the local corn whisky which has a name that translates as “gets you drunk”. The musicians did not ask for money. It had been fun, they said as they left, a bit like the all-night party they have at new year.

Sleep came easily despite the sounds of pigs and chickens below, and thanks in part to the “gets you drunk”. We rose late and went with a translator to meet the former headman, now aged 76, who as a young man had fled his native Burma. Driven to despair by a hostile government, the entire village had simply packed their things and walked through the night until they reached Thailand. The Lisu are thought to originate in Tibet and their history has been one of fleeing oppressors, first the Chinese, then the Burmese. Life was far better now, said the old ma, and besides they had television which was proving hugely popular.

As animists, the Lisu revere the spirits of trees and the sun and moon. They also worship their ancestors which they keep in bowls displayed on shelves inside their homes. We were invited into another house which was divided into three small rooms; a bedroom, kitchen and living room. It was a rest day - the new moon meant that bad spirits lurked in the forest - and the family was at home. Children ran about playing as mum fried tea leaves over a wood fire. A few neighbours had dropped by for a chat and granny sat in a corner with betel-stained lips and watchful eyes. The father, dressed in T-shirt, pantaloons and tracksuit top, sat us on miniature stools and poured tea. He pointed out his ancestors in a row of Chinese cups along the far wall. His wife’s family was not represented as she had been an orphan which was fortunate, he explained, as he had not needed to pay a dowry.

Did he have any questions about us? He thought for a while. “Do you also have a spirit shelf in your house?” We shook our heads. “So what do you do with your ancestors?” It was unclear what best to say. They go to a better place, we said without much conviction, and he seemed satisfied with that.

I asked if he had been to Chiang Mai. What did he think of it? “It’s a good place to make money,” he replied, “but too noisy.” How about Bangkok? Had he been there? No, but someone in the village had.

“I’ve heard there are beautiful roads that go into the sky,” he added, “I’d like to see that.” But something in his steady gaze and careful, measured speech suggested that he was in no rush to get there. At least, not yet.

• Originally published in The Financial Times in 1995. Words and photos by Mark Hodson.

• The lodge at Ton Lung still exists, though is much smarter these days and known as Lisu Lodge by Asian Oasis.

“How far is it to China?” I asked my guide Mr Altaf. “About 150 miles.” A brightly-painted Transit van thundered past farting black fumes, a dozen men clinging to the roof and rear door. “Think we’ll make it?” I asked. “No problem,” he smiled.

We would not have been the first. Long before the Highway was laid in the 1960s and 1970s, opening the region to trucks and tour buses, Chinese pilgrims came this way to visit Buddhist sites in the Lower Indus Valley. The journey, by foot, would have taken months, even years. That morning at Chilas, we had seen rock carvings made by pilgrims 1,800 years earlier: drawings of animals and Buddhist temples, prayers and messages in the ancient Kharoshti script.

Chilas is in wild country. The people there are strict Sunni Muslims who have been fighting bloody family feuds for more than 500 years. Some have forgotten the original cause of the disputes (though most almost certainly involved a woman) yet still they live in houses without windows in case an enemy creeps up at night to shoot them in their sleep. The Chilasis kill at the slightest provocation and government troops had to move in a few years back when local tribesmen massacred a team of Chinese road workers for eating lunch during Ramadan.

As we drove past, the men glared with cold, dark eyes and tucked their bushy beards into upturned collars. Their faces were not unlike the terrain: rugged, hard, unforgiving. Changing tack, I smiled and waved at the next group and each saluted me, with broad grins.

In summer, when the snow melts on the peaks of the Karakorams, the water level of the Indus rises by as much as 40ft. In winter, it falls to reveal banks of fine, white sand that is scattered by the wind to form perfect rippled dunes beside the road and even up the sides of hills. The effect is startling, a desert at 4,000ft.

Fertile plateaus along the valley were embroidered with fields of wheat and corn. Shepherds kept goats and cattle and crisscrossed the river on shaky suspension bridges. We passed hot sulphur springs (bath time for the pilgrims, perhaps) and a bleak village called Gunar Farm where men stood around in thick jackets and flat woollen caps as if waiting for something to happen. On the edge of town there was a police garrison built like a fortress and, on the main street, a bright red pillar box.

The skyline was dominated by Nanga Parbat which at 26,660ft is the ninth highest peak in the world and, because of the confluence of the Earth’s plates, is rising by a quarter of an inch a year. Climbers call it Killer Mountain and at least 62 have died on its slopes. Four great mountain ranges - the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Pamir - converge in Pakistan to form a formidable pile of statistics: the world’s second highest mountain (K2), the longest glaciers outside the Polar regions, the most peaks about 24,500ft (130), and so on.

By midday, we reached the regional capital, Gilgit, a den of smugglers, gem dealers and shoe salesmen. The bazaar crackled with the sounds of Tajiks, Ismailis, Pathans and Kashmiris haggling over Afghan cigarettes, second-hand jackets and Chinese digital watches. Bizarrely, I spotted a Mk I Ford Cortina with furry steering wheel and curtains in the back window.

A crowd jostled around a medicine man from Peshawar who waved his arms and promised herbal remedies for every disease under the sun. A few eyes glanced up as a Chinese woman, conspicuous without a veil, sauntered past in a black trouser suit and slippers.

Local tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims sometimes explode on to the streets of Gilgit and the town was crawling with police and soldiers. It was not a place to hang around unless you had a room at the Aga Khan’s opulent Serena Hotel. After a stodgy lunch at the Tajikistan Inn, we followed the Karakoram Highway into the Hunza Valley, which was where the car broke down and we started to walk.

After two or three miles we stopped at a break in a dry-stone wall and, beyond it, a garden of Eden. Beneath apricot trees and mulberry bushes lay a terraced lawn so perfectly trimmed that you could have played croquet on it (memo to gardeners: get a goat.) There were willows and walnuts, a single apple tree and a young woman washing clothes under a waterfall.

The village was called Rahimabad, just a dot on the map with a headcount in the hundreds, yet it was worth a thousand dusty cities. Marigolds and weeping willows had been planted along the main road where five or six shops sold apples, almonds and dried apricots. As I stood there jotting superlatives in a notebook, the storekeepers appeared to eye me with sadness and suspicion, as if I were some government inspector come to abolish all this perfection. There was a food joint there, the “Hassan Shan Hotal and Restourent”, where we had tea and shook hands with everyone while we waited for the car to be fixed. “You think this place is nice said Mr Altaf, “wait and see what comes next.” We were on our way to Shangri-La.

The Hunza Valley got prettier at every turn: snowy peaks, fruit drying on the flat roofs of stone cottages, magpies swooping between the juniper trees and patchwork fields perched on top of sheer cliffs. Rock slides were a persistent nuisance and several times we had to swerve around huge boulders, as if the mountains were trying to reclaim the road. By the time we reached our stopover at Karimabad it was dark and cold and the electricity was down.

Sunrise revealed the town’s heart-stopping location, notched into the side of a rock face and surrounded by four towering peaks, all over 24,500ft. The slopes were terraced with stone walls and planted with corn, vegetables and fruit trees. There were wild flowers and children laughing and the leaves of the poplars were starting to turn red. Even the most hardened cynics could believe that this was, in fact, the original Shangri-la described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon.

Many of the people in Karimabad originate in central Asia and have pale skin and blue eyes. They smiled easily, wished me good morning and offered directions. I was heading for the Ultar Glacier, a fierce climb that I eventually abandoned after three hours. It was an odd experience standing in a steep gorge with the sun beating down and snowflakes falling, not knowing whether to feel hot or cold, or whether to keep going or turn back. I was told later that the glacier leads up to two peaks, neither of which has been climbed.

The route north got increasingly desolate and, in a sense, more beautiful. Wide glaciers reached down to the roadside like rivers of molten candle wax. All around, the mountains seemed to be closing in. The last real town was Sust at 9,750ft where we stopped at a truckers’ diner and ate bowls of yak stew which tasted quite good, like beef but with more fat.

As we stepped out in the bright sunlight, we came face to face with an enormous hairy yak tethered to a post. It was looking at us with sad, accusing eyes. “You know, at the top of the mountains they eat all the beautiful flowers,” said Mr Altaf, which made me feel a lot better.

After Sust, we were waved through half a dozen checkpoints then crossed into the Khunjerab National Park where a game warden looked over the car for hunting rifles. On the roof on his windowless hut were the horned skulls of an ibex and the endangered Marco Polo sheep.

From there on, the road narrowed again and threatened to disappear altogether in an assault course of potholes and deep craters. Army engineers were trying to keep it open using bulldozers and shovels but winter was advancing and it was a battle they could never win. The final stretch sliced through a deep valley then up past the snow line, around a series of hairpin bends and out on to the Khunjerab Pass. The road there is said to be among the world’s highest at 15,400ft, and a chill blew across from China making the air unspeakably cold.

There was little to acknowledge our achievement, just a single barrier, a sentry box and a lone border guard, the last man in Pakistan, who stood in silence clapping his gloved hands and stamping his boots. What hideous crime had he committed to earn such a posting?

Arrival should have warranted some sense of elation but my head throbbed, I felt giddy and breathless and my eyes blinked icy tears. After a couple of minutes I got back in the car and we turned around to head home. On the way down, Mr Altaf pointed to a herd of 50 or 60 yaks grazing beneath a marble-white glacier. “You see, there are no beautiful flowers left,” he said, and I realised I was beginning to feel hungry again.

• Originally published in the Financial Times, 1996. Words and photos by Mark Hodson.

After three hours in Phnom Penh I was lying by the roadside, bleeding from the leg. This atrocity was nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge - I was knocked off my rented bicycle by a 10-year-old boy on a moped.

Three giggling mechanics working on a battered Toyota helped me up and straightened the front wheel. One offered me a grimy rag to use as a bandage. The boy smiled and sped off: no need to exchange names and addresses as nobody there has a driving licence, let alone insurance.

The recent murder and kidnapping of Western tourists would make most people consider a trip to Cambodia as a holiday in hell, yet every day more flights arrive from Bangkok, Paris and Singapore bringing young backpackers and latter-day explorers. So what is the fatal attraction?

In the 1930s Phnom Penh was said to be the most beautiful city in French Indochina, its wide boulevards lined with palm trees and mansions with sweeping balconies. But it has suffered years of neglect. The Khmer Rouge destroyed much of the housing then abandoned the city and frogmarched its inhabitants out to work in the Killing Fields. Later, occupying Vietnamese troops looted much of what remained.

Since the signing of the Paris Peace Accord in 1991, restoration work has begun in earnest and now like a proud elegant madame, Phnom Penh is back on her feet, dusting herself down and powdering her nose. Good breeding, after all, will out.

If your nerves can stand it, renting a bicycle is a fast - and usually painless - way to see the capital. Down broken backstreets stand crumbling colonial villas with wrought-iron gates and pock-marked porticos. Art Deco houses once occupied by French merchants and diplomats would be worth millions in Miami. Some have been restored by foreign embassies but many others are occupied by squatters.

On patchwork rooftops, turrets lean dangerously, apparently held up by a spider’s web of telephone wires and electricity cables. Lines of laundry are strung between TV aerials, and green peeling shutters hang from broken hinges. It looks as if one firmly slammed door would flatten a whole neighbourhood.

The roads in Phnom Penh were laid on a grid system but are maddeningly hard to negotiate. There are no street signs and no apparent logic to the numbers. Rue 113 runs alongside Rue 105 which is followed by Rue 85, and then the main thoroughfare Monivong Boulevard which is also known as Achar Mean Boulevard.

The city boasts just one traffic light and everywhere bicycles vie for elbow space, their panniers piled with video recorders, mattresses and squealing piglets. Unofficial motorbike taxis loiter in packs at every street corner but even those that speak some English seem permanently lost.

I pulled up at a busy junction to get my bearings and a French-speaking policeman drew me a map and waved encouragement as I wobbled off in the right direction. Along the main streets, ethnic Chinese families sell everything from tractor parts to croissants. The shop names have been translated into English and many are collector’s items: Up To Date Elegant Wears, Hung Hut Sell The Glasses and a bar called Drink Tiger Beer No Problem.

At the central market, a star-shaped yellow concrete building, you can buy underwear from Thailand, copy watches from Taiwan and handfuls of fried cockroaches which I could not bring myself to taste.

After getting my leg cleaned up, I ate some spicy fish soup and a baguette at the Capitol Hotel, the favoured hangout of budget travellers. It was a fly-blown dive where German backpackers rubbed shoulders with bleary-eyed French photographers. One drawling American with a big Russian motorbike and a handlebar moustache claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, but behind the Ray-Bans he looked a little too young.

Later I ventured into the Heart of Darkness, an all-night bar where travellers play pool and trade tall stories. I had planned to walk there but a motorbike taxi driver asked to give me a free ride in the hope that I would need him on the way home. Sure enough, when three of us piled out later to go to a nightclub across town, he was waiting. We raced down deserted unlit streets three abreast, swerving potholes as big as bomb craters. Lone soldiers stood at street corners smoking cigarettes, automatic rifles slung across their shoulders. Otherwise, the city slept.

After 15 minutes we ducked down a back street past building sites and ghostly tenement blocks, then turned a corner to see a huge disco heaving with revellers. With banks of flashing lights and pounding music it looked like a party at the end of the world.

The bouncers on the door ignored us: they were busy shaking down a local teenager who was trying to walk in with two handguns stuffed in his jacket pockets. Inside it was wall-to-wall prostitutes. Dozens of pairs of sultry almond eyes followed us to the bar. Hair was hastily adjusted and hemlines wriggled into place. There were 50 or 60 girls there - Vietnamese, Thai and Cambodian - and we appeared to be the only men. “What would you like?’’ whispered a barmaid. We turned and looked at each other. I cleared my throat. “Three pints of Carlsberg, please.’’

Phnom Penh has few sights, the most notorious being the Killing Fields themselves where a glass-panelled stupa packed tightly with human skulls stands in a tranquil meadow. It was there, five miles outside the city centre, that some 17,000 people were massacred. Many were first tortured and mutilated and to save ammunition the Khmer Rouge lined up their victims along the edges of mass graves and clubbed them to death with axe handles.

Scraps of clothing and human bones lie around the field but it remains an inadequate memorial to such a horror. Birds sing in nearby trees and glittering rice terraces stretch out to the horizon. It fails to shock which, in a strange way, makes the experience all the more disturbing.

Far more horrific is Tuol Sleng, a former school turned war museum once used by the Khmer Rouge to torture intellectuals. Countless atrocities have been catalogued there and whole walls covered with pictures of victims who were meticulously numbered and photographed when their time came to die.

Despite Phnom Penh’s bleak history, most visitors are captivated by its vitality and prickly energy. There are so few sights, you feel as if you shouldn’t be there, which is part of the fun.

The newspapers were full of “incidents’’. The previous day three people had died when a train was ambushed by the Khmer Rouge. Such attacks had become so common that the poor were allowed to ride in the front two coaches without paying. It was not exactly free travel: if the train hit a mine, some would pay with their lives.

Cars were stolen by gangs in neighbouring Thailand and waved across the border by corrupt officials which was why half the vehicles were right-hand drive even though Cambodians, officially at least, drive on the right. Landmines remain the greatest danger. There are estimated to be 10million buried around the country, more than enough for every man, woman and child.

Next day, I took a cruise up the Mekong River with a group of British and Australian expats. They had hired a local ferry boat and were knocking back Johnnie Walker and Tiger Beer before lunch. We found a deserted sandbank that would serve as a beach and swam in the slow murky water as it neared the last leg of its epic journey from Tibet to the South China Sea.

In the late afternoon we went in search of food at a riverside village where wealthy locals spend their weekends. There was a string of floating restaurants along the bank but none seemed interested in serving dinner. At one, a group of soldiers lay slumped across tables piled high with empty beer cans. Outside, bare-chested men with tattoos of Buddhist temples across their backs played boules in the dirt.

We got back in the boat for the return journey to Phnom Penh as the sun dipped low over the water. Clouds appeared to the east near the border with Vietnam and sheet lightning flickered across the sky like a broken strip light. We waited for half an hour before the first thunderclap then sat looking to the heavens as fat raindrops exploded on our parched faces like tiny, friendly bombs.

• Originally published in the Financial Times. 1994 Words and photos by Mark Hodson.

I posed this question to a group of old friends on a recent night out. We all had to think long and hard before coming up with an answer. I landed on a night in New York City in 1989 that was equal parts glamour, grit and crazy luck.

It was easy to meet people in New York back then if you were young and had a British accent. I joined a group heading to a basement cocktail bar in the East Village, then on to a gig in an abandoned church overlooking Tompkins Square Park. The park was notorious for drug dealers and crack addicts and, less than a year earlier, it had been the scene of violent clashes between police and activists battling against gentrification.

The band was the Meat Puppets. I’d never heard of them, but later found out Kurt Cobain was a fan. It was a wild gig - anarchic, thrilling and way too loud. Two months later, Nirvana released their first album, and grunge began its lurch into the mainstream.

Buzzing on the music and the booze, I ended up in another dive bar with a girl from Chicago. She had short platinum-blonde hair, tattoos and leather boots. She suggested we go back to hers for a nightcap.

“I’m house-sitting…” she said.

“Okay,” I replied.

“… for Martin Scorsese.”

“Hang on,” I said. “You’re house-sitting for Martin Scorsese? So we’re going back to his actual house?”

“Yass!” she grinned.

It was an ordinary-looking brownstone in the East 50s, but inside it had the full superstar treatment. A private cinema. A lift. A huge living room with plush sofas. On the walls, a stunning collection of signed movie posters. Mr Scorsese, it turned out, was in Los Angeles viewing the rushes of his newest movie, Goodfellas.

In the morning my new friend suggested we head out for “brunch”, a word I’d never heard before.

I think it’s fair to say that, at that moment, I was cooler than I’d ever been - or ever would be. But did I realise it? I don’t think so. Maybe I thought life would always be this wild and spontaneous. I probably didn’t give it a thought.

That was my first time in New York. I was 24, I’d taken two weeks off work and bought a courier ticket from London (£199 return), which meant delivering a sealed envelope to a man at JFK. This was before email, a safe way to get documents across the Atlantic.

I found a room at the YMCA, walked the streets gazing at steam rising from sidewalk vents. I rode the Subway, ate sushi for the first time, and learned that if you tipped the bartender a dollar, your fourth or fifth drink was on the house.

New York in 1989 felt like the most exciting place in the world. Edgy and volatile, a grimy city of graffiti and racial tension, with soaring crime rates - there were 1,900 murders that year. But it was also alive with creative energy: avant-garde art, punk gigs, student protests. Artists outnumbered bankers. It was still the city of Lou Reed, Debbie Harry and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Alone for the most part, and not keen to spend too much time at the Y, I walked and walked. I ordered breakfast at the counters of cheap diners and ate bagels in the park. I went to CBGB’s and Yankee Stadium, and saw Jenny Holzer’s LED art flashing across the Guggenheim.

That trip didn’t just give me a cool story - it marked a shift in how I saw the world, unlocking a new sense of possibility. Two years later I quit my job at a newspaper to backpack around Asia.

But I kept going back to New York, even as the artists moved out and the yuppies moved in. I stayed with my friend Gary, who had a coding job and a cool apartment in the East Village. In 2001, after 9/11, Gary lost his job and moved back to London.

When I started writing travel for The Sunday Times, I persuaded my editor to send me to New York on a near regular basis. One time, the Four Seasons hotel declared it had introduced the most comfortable beds in the world. I suggested she might need a writer to investigate the claim. She agreed.

In spring 2003, British Airways announced it was retiring Concorde. The final flight would be in six months time. The public response was extraordinary - thousands of people dipped into their savings to experience flying at supersonic speeds, paying up to £8,000 for a return trip.

I persuaded my editor she needed to send a writer to experience the flight, and the excitement on board. BA gave me a free ticket and I managed to blag a few nights at a swanky hotel in SoHo.

Flying Concorde was strange and thrilling. London to New York in just over four hours. The five-hour time difference meant you arrived before you took off. The cabin was cramped but the atmosphere was giddy, a party at 57,000 feet. I’ve never seen so much champagne drunk before or since.

I agreed with British Airways that I’d fly back to London on one of their new Club Class seats, so I could write about this exciting new innovation for business travellers - flat beds. When I got to JFK for the flight home, staff told me I’d been upgraded to First Class.

“No thanks,” I said. “I need to fly Club.”

They looked stunned. Possibly the only time anyone has turned down a free upgrade to First.

I’ve been back to New York several times since then, including once with my kids. My daughter, who was nine, bought an adult-size Yankees baseball cap and only took it off to shower or sleep. We skipped the museums and galleries and did the full tourist circuit: the Empire State, Shake Shack in Times Square, bowling in Brooklyn, cycling in Central Park.

And I made a discovery: by deliberately trying not to be cool, we had a lot more fun.

A friend of mine, David, lived in Manhattan for two decades but moved to Chiang Mai during the Covid lockdown. He says he’ll never go back - it’s too expensive, too full of bankers and lawyers. But he also admits a new generation of New Yorkers is arriving even now, discovering their own thrilling version of the city, creating their own future nostalgia.

I may return to New York one day, but maybe not. That’s okay. I had my time there and I have my memories. It’s just not my city any more.

A note on the photography: I was using a Canon AE1 SLR, shooting on Fujichrome Velvia 50, mostly with a 50mm lens. I had prints made from the original transparencies, and what you see below are scans of those prints. I haven’t adjusted any of the colouring.

Like most Vietnamese I met, these cyclo drivers in Hoi An were delighted to pose for a photograph. I love their laughter, their jaunty hats and their languid ease with each other, one even sitting on his friend’s lap.

In Ha Noi, I stumbled on a wedding where the bride arrived in a rather dilapidated white wedding car decorated with flowers. The couple pose awkwardly for a local photographer, framed by the car’s back window. I saw very few private cars anywhere in Vietnam.

A fruit and vegetable market in Ha Noi and a typical street scene: washing strung from the shuttered windows of French colonial buildings, no advertising hoardings, no phone wires.

On the waterfront at Hoi An - which today is packed with tourists day and night - these women selling fish burst into fits of bemused laughter when I asked to take their photograph.

A lone aircraft on the tarmac at Ha Noi airport. I was there to catch a flight to Vientiane aboard an ancient Russian-built Tupolev jet. As we descended, the cabin filled with steam, but we landed safely.

Hạ Long Bay had yet to be developed for modern tourism and the local people were as curious to see us as we were to see them. The only place to stay in town was a Russian workers’ hostel where I shared a room, sleeping on a mat on a concrete floor.

The railway station in Hue, from where I took an overnight train to Ha Noi. It wasn’t a comfortable journey: the bunks were planks of wood with no bedding and cold air blasted through the broken windows. As we passed through the countryside, children threw rocks at the carriages.

It wasn’t unusual in the countryside to see buses like this one, powered by a wood-burning stove. Breakdowns were commonplace.

In spite of the hardships, the people were a constant delight. This old man was happy to pose for a portrait at a Chinese temple in Hoi An.

Ha Noi in winter was an austere, grey city but it looked a little warmer under the yellow light bulbs that were switched on as dusk fell. The sign translates as: “Sticky rice with sausage, chicken heart and liver porridge. Instant noodles”

Hoi An was by far the most photogenic town I visited. I love this shot of a barefoot boy with an armful of corn and a smiling old lady preparing food. If you’ve ever taken pictures of cute kids on your travels, you might enjoy my essay, All those travel photos of other people's children. Where are they now?

In Nha Trang - now a popular beach resort - local people were happy for me to photograph a back-street cock fight. The two women in the top right corner also appear to be squaring up to each other.

An elegant woman buys ice cream for her young daughter in Hoi An.

At the market in Da Nang, an old woman curls up for an afternoon nap while another stall holder tucks into a bowl of noodles.

I stopped making New Year’s resolutions more than a decade ago. Instead, I started doing some kind of year-end review. Lately this has involved making a lost list of activities I did over the previous 12 months - from country walks to poker games - and scoring them out of 10 for enjoyment and what the Greeks called eudaimonia, perhaps best translated as human flourishing.

This year I also scrolled back through my camera roll and found something really interesting. One of the common experiences of getting older is that time appears to speed up. When you’re in your teens and twenties, a year can go on for ever, but in midlife the years start to tick over much faster. There can be a sense of watching your life flash past you. The main culprit is routine - we sleepwalk through our lives.

But this last year for me has been filled with travel adventures. I spent eight weeks between mid-January and mid-March in south-east Asia, mainly in and around Chiang Mai, with a side trip to Central Vietnam. Then another eight weeks between mid-October and mid-December, again in Northern Thailand with a side trip to Cambodia.

There were travels in between: a week’s sailing in Turkey, a fly-drive to Croatia, a week with my daughter in Kefalonia and a weekend in Kent with a group of old friends. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to report this.

Looking at my camera roll, that trip to Thailand last January seems way more than a year ago, more like two or three years. So much has happened in 2023.

Even more strange is the sense that the year didn’t pan out in a straight line. There are photos of Chiang Mai taken in January that feel relatively recent - because I’ve returned to those exact places since. Whereas the trip in June to Kefalonia - an island I’d never previously visited - seems like it happened much earlier. Strange.

There’s a lot of talk these days about longevity. Many people are working on ways to extend their lifetimes by a few years (and tech bros in Silicon Valley have literally set their sights on living forever). But what’s the point of existing for longer if you’re just a spectator in your own life?

I’m not a huge fan of the mindfulness movement when it instructs us to “live in the moment”. I get the point, but I think anticipation and memory do a lot to enrich our lives. The more we plan, and the more we actually do, the richer our lives. And the richer your life, the more you experience it as slowing down.

So, for me, the way to extend life is to pack it with excitement and novelty, accumulating experiences rather than things, meeting new people while deepening my connections with the people who remain constants in my life. This also means I’m freed up from the urge to do ultra marathons or week-long water fasts. Living a longer, richer life needn’t involve ordeals I don’t enjoy.

My drug of choice is travel - going to new places, returning to the same places and delving deeper, expanding my horizons and occasionally nudging myself out of my comfort zone. So in two weeks’ time I’ll be flying back to Asia for another adventure, starting with a yoga retreat in Thailand, a new experience for me. Then perhaps time on a beach, or a return to Vietnam.

Happy New Year!

* Tell me about your plans for 2024 in the comments section below. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please hit the like button. It’s good to know people are actually reading this!

Taking shelter from a sudden unseasonal rain storm in the Old City of Chiang Mai, I stopped at a cafe, ordered food and got talking with a teacher from Belgium who was on a year-long sabbatical. Emily was three months into her trip and newly arrived in Thailand after travelling through Indonesia and Malaysia. So far, so normal.

She beamed as she told me this was a trip of a lifetime, something she’d dreamed about, planned and saved up for over many years. It was every bit as marvellous as she’d hoped. Only there was one thing missing. “It’s that feeling, that deep sense of emotional connection, briefly forgetting yourself and your life. I’ve only really experienced that once in three months.”

Emily had been joined for the first six weeks of her journey by her newly-retired father. She explained that he was a perfect travelling companion - delighted by everything, unfazed by challenges, his sense of humour never failing. They bonded like never before and they both had wept when they parted ways in Jakarta.

One evening on the island of Sumatra they had joined a trek to the rim of an active volcano to watch the sunrise. At the peak they watched the sky and the lake in the caldera slowly infuse with light, the colours constantly changing, almost unworldly in their brilliance. “It was a feeling, so beautiful, I can’t really explain it,” she said.

Emily realised then that this sudden rush of emotion was like one she had felt as a child on holiday with her family in the Ardèche in southern France, surrounded by nature, enchanted and free. She had wanted all her adult life to recapture that feeling.

“This whole trip is amazing, I’m doing wonderful things, meeting interesting people, but that feeling is hard to find,” Emily told me. She had just returned from a two-day trek in the mountains north of Chiang Mai. It was fun, she said, but too short. She had never really felt immersed in nature. “It was very … organised.”

This got me thinking. When had I experienced that feeling? That sense of being fully immersed in the moment, unselfconscious, filled with wonder. In a word, awed.

I started to make a mental list, and it proved instructive. Although I profess to love cities, the times when I had that feeling were almost all in nature. In the Maldives I had swum a little too far from the shore and found myself circled by a huge pod of dolphins. Recently in Cambodia I cycled to a temple in Angkor in the misty early morning to find that I was the only person there.

Often this feeling of awe lasts for only a fleeting moment, an unexpected and profound emotional response to the environment and the people around me. I’ve had the feeling on a sleeper train in Thailand as I pulled back the curtain to see dense forests flash past, and when skiing fresh powder in a perfectly silent Alpine valley. And all those huge technicolor sunsets. But however practised I become in designing my ideal lifestyle, those moments remain rare.

Maybe that’s their point. A lot of people get themselves into trouble by chasing the feeling, wanting to gorge on it incessantly. They binge on drink and drugs, they fall in love again and again, they have risky sex with the wrong person, or engage in ever more dangerous sports.

But the feeling would lose its value - and maybe its meaning - if we could order it like room service. It’s elusive by nature.

As travellers, I wonder if we make it harder for ourselves to experience genuine awe because we’ve seen so much, both in real life and in the media we consume - film, TV, YouTube, Instagram and so on. Who now could be genuinely surprised to catch sight of the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu?

There are people who can take a walk around their own garden and feel the same sense of awe and wonder they might experience in the Serengeti or climbing Mont Blanc. I envy them. Only very occasionally do I get flashes of that. Recently returned to the gloom of London after two months in Asia, I was surveying the wreck of my own garden when the first hint of dusk bathed everything with a strange ethereal glow, a colour I can’t begin to describe.

Thinking about my own experiences of awe turns out to be surprisingly informative. Many of my most profound travel experiences have involved the sky and the changing quality of natural light. A meteor shower in the Canary Islands, a starry night in the Thar Desert of Northern India, an electric storm in Ko Lanta. I suspect I’m not alone in this: there’s something primal and universal about our fascination with the sky.

Wildlife encounters can also spark joy and awe, but for me they need to be natural and unexpected. Walking in Richmond Park in south-west London and coming across a lone deer, each of us standing still, staring at the other, before the young deer skipped off into the undergrowth - that was magical for me. But being taken to a farm in Thailand to feed and bathe a lumbering, indifferent elephant - that left me totally cold.

Time of day can change everything. In Vietnam, I felt overwhelmed by the crowds of tourists in the old town of Hoi An. But returning next morning at 6am on a rented bicycle, the streets were deserted and the light was luminous, the colour of ripe apricot.

Bucket lists have become commoditised, but ultimately we each need to work out what it is that lights our own particular candle. In his book, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, Geoff Dyer wrote a wonderful essay about a frustrating and miserable trip with his wife to Norway to see the Northern Lights. Now that the Northern Lights feature in just about every traveller’s bucket list, Dyer’s disappointment seems almost heretical.

Maybe Norway in winter isn’t your thing. Maybe elephant farms aren’t your thing. That’s okay.

As for me, it’s taken a while, but I’ve worked out where the magic tends to happen. I know I can’t force those moments of awe, but I can create the circumstances where they are more likely to occur. Being immersed in nature, getting up before sun rise, swimming in open water, going outside on a clear night far away from artificial light, travelling alone or with a small group of likeminded people. For better results, I try to combine two or more of these conditions. Swimming in the sea at sunrise, for example, is almost guaranteed to send shivers, in every sense.

I’m also trying to resist the urge to respond to moments of awe by reaching immediately for my phone. Why break the spell by trying to capture something that by its very nature cannot be captured?

I don’t wish to tell other people how to enjoy themselves, but I think the world would be a better place if we all looked inward to find what brings us real joy. One of the many problems with social media is that it doesn’t just tell you where to go, it also tells you what you ought to feel when you get there. And when a thousand other people arrive in the same place because they’ve followed the same Instagram accounts, that feeling is almost bound to elude you.

Back in Chiang Mai, the storm had passed. I settled my bill and said farewell to Emily. Stepping out again on to the street, I noticed the lights from a temple reflected in newly-formed puddles, and an almost-full moon had appeared from behind the scudding clouds. Next day I’d get up early and go for a hike.

Lonely Planet celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Like me, it has found itself alarmingly and undeniably middle-aged.

The origin story of Lonely Planet is well known by now, Tony and Maureen Wheeler scribbling away on their kitchen table to write a pamphlet on how to bounce around Asia on a shoestring. LP was a true pioneer, laying a trail for thousands of young people to explore the world, fall in love, take unfamiliar drugs and catch amoebic dysentery. I managed to tick off all of the above.

But pioneers become settlers and, eventually, colonial powers. By the time I quit my newspaper job aged 27 to go backpacking - a concept I needed to explain to every single person I knew - it was 1991 and the trail had become, I discovered, well worn. Virtually every traveller I met was clutching a Lonely Planet guide and followed its suggestions dutifully. The tag line across the top of each book read “Travel survival kit” and there was a feeling that if you lost your copy, you’d be lost, both literally and figuratively.

This brought its own problems. Once a guest house or restaurant was mentioned in the book, it had a guaranteed stream of daily arrivals. It could hike its prices, squeeze more backpackers into its dorm rooms and replace grandma’s noodle soup with a mass-produced version. Most people wouldn’t notice, and few cared. That was a time before everyone was a food critic and hotel reviewer - life was much more fun when, rather than posting an incandescent one-star review, you just accepted some things were a bit shit.

The familiar path through Southeast Asia became known as the Banana Pancake Trail, named for the ubiquitous snack found on every street corner across Thailand (fittingly, it too was an import, a muslim dish that came from India via Malaysia, but few of us knew that then, we just wanted something sweet and starchy to soak up the Mekhong and Red Bull).

I still have my copies of those books from the early 90s: Thailand, India and the Philippines. They have real heft - together they weigh considerably more than my MacBook Air - and a fair amount of sentimental value, with my many margin notes in neat pencil. 

Life on the road may have been cheap, but the books were not: my 1993 copy of Lonely Planet India (5th edition) cost £14.95 new, equivalent to £48.30 in today’s money (according to the average earnings index). Admittedly, it ran to more than 1,000 pages, but you could buy a lot of masala dosas for that.

Dipping back into those books now is a glimpse into another world. In Thailand, the region of Nan warranted less than a page because the army had only recently succeeded in driving out bandits who would sabotage any attempt to lay paved roads. In Krabi, the occasional junk would sail in from Singapore, “and if you know the right people you can buy tax-free cigarettes and other luxury items while one of these boats is in port”.

In Chiang Mai, the section on Places to Eat begins with a list of travellers cafes where you could “hang out and eat western food and drink fruit smoothies”. Budget travellers could find steak, pizza, ice cream and burgers without looking very hard. 

Read on and you’d find a short section on Thai food, including a thumbs up for Thanam Restaurant on Chaiyaphum Road which served local dishes like “khao soi (Burmese chicken curry soup with noodles”. It closed at 8pm, didn’t serve alcohol and - admirably, in my view - refused to serve customers wearing “beach clothes” and “tank tops”.

It’s easy to sneer now at this apparent lack of culinary courage. Today, many khao soi joints in Chiang Mai are TikTok-famous and backpackers will happily queue for a table so they can post a pic on Instagram. Thai food is loved worldwide and everyone’s a self-declared foodie.

That wasn’t the case in 1991. Eating street food in Thailand was a real adventure and not just because of the absence of English-language menus. Some places would simply refuse to serve foreigners, perhaps assuming they’d made a mistake in veering off the well-trodden tourist path.

Today, with Google Maps, TikTok, Facebook and Booking.com, does anyone really need a guide book? It’s an open secret that some guide book writers do a portion of their “research” online. And if they do actually hit the road, attempting to visit every new hotel and guest house, by the time their book finally hits the shelves, the information may be 12-18 months out of date. You could get away with that in the 1990s, but not today.

Covid was the final nail in that coffin. Businesses across Asia shuttered, moved premises or pivoted. When countries reopened to tourists, everything had changed.

In Thailand, the legalisation of cannabis led to thousands of weed shops popping up everywhere from backpacker sois to hi-so shopping malls. But any guidebook writer trying to keep track of all the latest new dispensaries (with witty names like High Got You and Wake N' Bake) would be more confused than a stoner who’s spent an evening on the Gorilla Glue.

What’s more, the new government in Thailand is currently hinting at a reversal of the law: all that legwork might be in vain if those weed shops are forced to close overnight.

The problem of midlife - as I well know, and Lonely Planet has discovered - is not that you’re too decrepit to travel, but that you struggle to remain relevant, or even visible, to young people.

This can be an advantage for a writer. I can sit in a cafe eavesdropping on conversations and nobody under 30 even notices my presence. But it’s not great if you’re an international publisher hoping to sell a gazillion guide books.

As it celebrates its 50th birthday this month with a big party in London’s Waterloo, Lonely Planet has had to adapt. The original books - once dubbed “bibles” by backpackers - have been rebranded as Blue Spine guides. This year’s Thailand edition sells for £17.99, or £8.95 for the digital edition which, coincidentally, is exactly what I paid for my 1990 print copy.

LP also has pocket guides for city breaks and Experience guides that contain a “curated collection of unforgettable experiences” which it says are largely written by locals. More recently, it has published a small collection of coffee table books themed around niche hobbies. A guide to wild swimming spots around the world appears to be an inspired choice. I like the look of Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan.

As for me, I’ll be gratefully knocking back the complimentary wine at Lonely Planet’s 50th birthday party. Then, a week later, I’ll board a flight to Bangkok for a couple of months of travelling, working and slurping noodles. Thailand may have changed a lot in the last 30 years but it’s still one of my absolute favourite places in this endlessly fascinating, precious world.

What’s your idea of a dream holiday? Perhaps a five-star private island in the Maldives, or an expedition cruise in the Antarctic, or a luxury tented safari in Botswana. Maybe something else altogether?

Now, let’s say I offered you this holiday for free. Take a plus-one, anyone you like. Choose any dates. I’ll even throw in unlimited spending money. But there’s a catch: when you return home, you won’t remember a single second of it, nor will your companion. You might come back with a suntan (or frostbite) but no memories, no photos, no knowledge acquired, nada.

It still sounds like a great offer, right? You will literally have the time of your life.

But there’s one more catch: you’ll have used up your annual holiday allowance. No more foreign holidays, weekend breaks or staycations for 12 months.

Still keen?

My guess is that your enthusiasm is waning and perhaps you’ve decided – like me – that you will definitely not accept the offer. 

I think this is because travel isn’t – or shouldn’t be – just a matter of pure hedonism. It’s a way of forging memories that (hopefully) will last a lifetime, and change who we are. 

This struck me recently as I spent a few days in Hoi An, a pretty town in Central Vietnam that I’d first visited 30 years ago. It has since become such a tourist honey pot that I barely recognised it. But more worryingly, I realised I had literally no memory of the place other than the few remaining photos I’d had developed on my return.

That month-long trip to Vietnam was one of the highlights of my travelling life yet this particular section of it had entirely disappeared for me. Of course I could still brag that I’d been to Hoi An decades before the tour groups and Instagrammers, but that felt like scant consolation for the loss. 

Maybe this won’t be a problem in 30 years time. Everyone will have bazillions of smartphone photos that their robot companion can sort through, thus retrieving - or recreating - their actual memories.

I’ve written before about the unreliability of memories, but what really would we be without them?

To my mind, there are three stages of a trip I’m keen to savour: the anticipation, the experience itself, and the memory. All three are valuable, which is why I rarely jet off on last-minute holidays: I enjoy the planning, counting down the days. 

We are often told we should “live in the moment”, which sounds appealing in theory but soon breaks down when we realise our lived experience exists almost entirely in the past or the future – our memories and knowledge of the world, our hopes and fears for what’s to come. Sure, there are rare episodes of total immersion, when we experience that elusive “flow” state, but it’s hard to manufacture those. Indeed, trying to live in the moment might be the very act that makes it impossible. 

Is there a way to optimise memory? I think there is, and I think it comes down to packing your days with novel experiences but leaving yourself open to happenstance, the gloriously unexpected. 

For me, that means a combination of planning and letting go, putting myself in situations where I’m open to random events. Wandering the streets of a city aimlessly at night, talking to strangers, saying yes when my first instinct might be no. 

Of course sometimes you might just want to sit on a beach, facing the sea, twiddling your toes in the sand, as I’m doing right now, as I write this. Will I remember this moment? Probably not. I can live with that. 

I recently extended my tourist visa in Thailand where I will have spent a total of three months this winter, mostly in the Northern capital of Chiang Mai.

I’ve started to get to know the city, and even found a girlfriend here - an American expat, Beth, who teaches at an international school. I’ve got my routines, my favourite places, and I’ve reached the point where tourists who stop randomly in the middle of the pavement to stare at their phones have become a bit annoying. Can’t they walk and look at Google Maps at the same time, like everyone else?

And yet I enjoy being a tourist. I love the feeling of arriving somewhere for the first time, dazzled and confused by the unfamiliar, wandering aimlessly, open to every unexpected new experience. I don’t want to lose that.

In truth, I’m living in a liminal space between tourist and resident. Having done my time in hotels and guest houses, I’m now staying at Beth’s house in a suburb five miles south of the moated Old City of Chiang Mai. 

Some days while she’s at work I’ll take a taxi into town, where I flip open my Macbook Air at the same air-conditioned cafe, nursing a hot cappuccino. Being surrounded by other laptop users, all diligently tapping away, makes it easier for me to focus on work. No words are exchanged. Even eye contact is rare, but we are all clearly checking each other out. 

Some of the younger workers eat at their desks, but I always go out for lunch, strolling the sun-baked sois, wandering around markets, returning to one of half a dozen favourite restaurants where there’s no English menu and the staff smile indulgently at my few faltering words of Thai. 

I’ve seen all the main sites, but this country, this city, never ceases to throw up surprises - a new piece of street art, a cafe that’s suddenly become inundated with Chinese Instagrammers, a temple with a statue of Donald Duck eating a bowl of noodles (yes, really).

Other days, I’ll stay closer to home and cycle around the neighbourhood on narrow roads that zig-zag around rice fields, new housing developments and village shops. Outside their homes, people sell bananas or watermelons, or grill pork on charcoal.

There’s a swimming pool where I do laps in solitude under the blazing sun and a no-name restaurant where the owner greets me with a grin and asks if I want the usual: Thai omelette with chopped pork, fried kale and rice. His wife has a tiny ginger kitten she keeps on a leash. It’s called Ba Mee Geow, after the house specialty of noodle soup with pork and wantons.

I love this form of ultra-local slow tourism. Freed from time constraints and must-see lists, I wander on foot and a rusty mountain bike, slow enough to notice the details that would normally pass me by. Two minutes walk from the house, there’s a coffee shop, where the owner, Oh, knows my name and order. It’s a popular place with young Thai musicians and I’ve met a couple of the regulars, including a man from Amsterdam who worked for 20 years as a cannabis dealer.

On the same road there’s a house where the owners sell fresh farm eggs, sticky rice and noodles from their front yard. A minute in the other direction is a newly-opened corner shop serving rotisserie chicken and spicy papaya salad. The bottles of Chang beer are a few baht more expensive than at 7-11, but the welcome is friendlier.

Some evenings we’ll wander down the road with tiffin boxes and collect a meal from one of the street stalls beside the river. There’s a lady who cooks nothing but pad Thai - with prices from less than £1. At another stall I ate yen ta fo, a dish of seafood and pork on flat noodles coloured pink with red bean curd. There are a dozen or more dishes I need to try. 

This way of life isn’t for everyone. I spend a lot of time alone. I met more people when I was staying at guest houses and I miss that. Weekends are more fun when Beth is off work and we go to jazz clubs, hike in the mountains or join her expat pals at pool parties. But I miss my friends at home and my family, especially my son, who lives in London, and my daughter, in her first year at university. 

Certainly, I don’t miss the British winter - the biting cold and the short days. But it’s not all wonderful here: although the sun shines from dawn to dusk, we are now into the “smoky season” in Northern Thailand when farmers burning crops help to create a persistent and unpleasant grey haze: the mountain disappears from view and, on particularly bad days, I can feel it in my eyes and throat. I’ve started wearing a mask again, this time to filter out harmful PM2.5 particles.

Still, I’ll be home soon with new things to complain about. After a short side trip to Vietnam, I fly home on the last day of winter. A week later the clocks go forward and the sun won’t set in London until 7.30pm. A good time to be home.

• If you follow me on social media, you’ll know I’m currently in Vietnam. I wrote this last week, but only just got around to publishing it.

Sometimes when you travel independently, you make bad decisions. You might pass by a place that would have left you with lifelong memories, hook up with the wrong group or just book a guest house in an unexciting part of town. I’ve done all the above and last week I really made a mess of a 10-day trip to Laos.

But I’ve learned a valuable lesson: not to be too hard on myself (and on others when they also get things wrong).

The thing is, I like to think of myself as a seasoned traveller, a meticulous planner, and a shrewd decision maker. I first travelled around South East Asia 30 years ago and here I am again, with my daughter now at university, on a six-week adventure with a return ticket to Bangkok, a backpack, a laptop and no fixed plans.

Between the early 1990s and now, I've made a living as a travel journalist and editor including 15 years at The Sunday Times. I will happily advise you on where to go on holiday next. I'm wary of the word expert, but others might call me one.

However, I really got it wrong in Laos. Here's what happened.

I was staying in a riverside town called Nong Khiaw, a five-hour bus ride north of the ancient capital Luang Prabang. The setting is spectacular, with limestone karsts soaring skywards in every direction. I’d treated myself to a room at one of the loveliest guest houses in town with a bungalow overlooking the water with sunset views. So far, so good.

I met an English couple around my age who told me about an idyllic weaving village called Sob Jam two hours up river by boat and I arranged to join a day trip there with a young French couple. It was glorious. The villagers were delightful, and I bought an armful of artfully-woven scarves.

On the way back to Nong Khiaw, we stopped for lunch at a slightly busier village Muong Ngoi. As I sat eating a fresh-baked baguette stuffed with grilled chicken and homemade mayonnaise, a group of young backpackers landed at the jetty and I idly thought: this would be a great place to spend a few days. There was a waterfall and caves within walking distance and you could go fishing on the Nam Ou river.

But I didn’t. Instead I returned to my comfortable bungalow, watched another sunset and next morning took that long bus ride back to Luang Prabang. The following day I’d head south on the train to Vang Vieng.

Partly I was keen to ride on the new China-Laos Railway, an extraordinary feat of engineering that looks set to transform travel through Laos, one of the poorest countries in South East Asia. One report estimates that once the border is reopened post Covid, 3 million Chinese people will cross it each year, potentially turning sleepy Laos into a new tourist hot spot.

And though I’m not a fully paid-up rail geek, I do love a train trip to somewhere I’ve never been before. And I’d never been to Vang Vieng, which once had a reputation for being a raucous and unruly backpacker party town. That wouldn’t have been my kind of place aged 28, let alone 58.

But Vang Vieng had cleaned up its act. The government had imposed a curfew and cracked down on the tubing companies that offered revellers free shots of spirits and laminated menus of recreational drugs. More than a few young travellers had lost their lives.

On the truck transfer from the train station into Vang Vieng, I got chatting to a delightful young Finnish couple who’d just stayed five nights at Muong Ngoi, the lazy riverside village where I’d eaten the baguette and fantasised about staying on. They raved about it. Damn. I'd missed out.

Then we arrived in Vang Vieng. It was early evening, overcast. It wasn’t pretty. The main drag was a dusty road lined with ramshackle modern buildings, cheap restaurants, bars, flashing lights, shops renting scooters and - oddly - beach buggies.

My heart sank. This wasn’t my kind of place. I’d actually found my kind of place but had passed it up, like some tragic figure in a romantic novel who ignores the woman who’d be his perfect match in favour of the town floozy.

I resolved to make the most of it. Next morning I’d rent a cycle and explore the surrounding villages. I’d hike to one of the local viewpoints and perhaps treat myself to a hot air balloon ride. I got up at dawn, texted the French-run balloon company to ask if they had availability that day and went out for coffee.

As I sat with my Americano, the sky shuddered with thunder and a violent storm lashed the town. Rainwater gushed from drains and flooded the street. It would almost certainly clear up later but the roads and hiking trails might have turned to mud. The ballooners texted back: we’re fully booked.

What to do? Stick it out, travel onwards to the capital Vientiane - a city that few people had a good word to say about - or return again to Luang Prabang, a seductive little city of ancient temples and French cafes?

Back at my hotel, the receptionist said she could get me on that afternoon’s express train to Luang Prabang if I let her know before 10am. It was 9am and still raining. I gave it some thought but I already knew what I’d do: take the train. I’d seen almost nothing of Vang Vieng and already I was leaving.

To be honest, there was another significant factor at play. I’d met a lovely American woman who lives and works in Chiang Mai and we’d been on a few dates. We were both keen to meet up again and she was hosting a Thanksgiving party at her home. If I’d not gone to Vang Vieng I could have made it back, but I felt a kind of obligation to honour my intended itinerary, even though nothing was set in stone.

What’s more, she’d warned me I wouldn’t much like Vang Vieng. I ignored her advice and turned down her invite and now, returning to Luang Prabang on the day of the party, I felt doubly bad.

I could have stayed in Muong Ngoi, or flown back to Chiang Mai. Instead I’d taken a pointless, frustrating trip to a town that was never going to be my kind of place. What a chump.

And yet … don’t these things happen all the time on the road? It’s impossible to know how things will pan out. And despite foolishly thinking of myself as a wise and experienced traveller, the truth is that I hadn’t taken a long unstructured trip like this in more than 25 years. I was bound to be out of practice.

And I’m a different person now, with different tastes, different pain thresholds. And, as I’d occasionally discovered, it’s not always easy to strike up a conversation with a group of young backpackers when you’re the same age as their dads.

So I’ve decided to give myself a break. I won’t feel bad, or berate myself. I won’t regret the time lost, the money spent, the opportunities missed. After all, I really enjoyed the first part of my trip to Laos.

I’ll remember too that extended independent travel by its nature involves a lot of decision making on the fly. Even if you’re following the so-called "banana pancake trail", it’s a complex sequence of events with a lot of moving parts.

Maybe the key to an exciting life-changing trip is being open to making mistakes, as well as seizing on unexpected positive experiences.

It's like walking up to a crowded food stall where the food looks and smells good but there's no English menu and nobody speaks English. You could point at something and hope for the best, or you could keep walking and find a restaurant serving all the usual tourist fare. If you roll the dice, you won’t always win.

I’ll think about that the next time I’m tempted to tell someone: “Oh you didn’t go there, you really missed out!” Or think worse of a fellow traveller because they’re wheeling a large hard-sided suitcase down an unmade pavement.

Perhaps learning to be kinder to yourself is the first step in being kinder to others.

P.S. I’m back in Chiang Mai now, staying at my friend’s house. She forgave me too.

The thought returned to me recently when I was lucky enough to stay at The Sarojin, a dreamy hotel in the heavily-forested region of Khao Lak in southern Thailand. The hotel looks every bit as good as its PR imagery, with contemporary Asian architecture set amongst coconut palms, sea lilies and bird of paradise plants. But what struck me was that it also sounds and smells wonderful.

My favourite time of day on a tropical beach is just after dusk, when the animals come out to play: the cicadas, the frogs, the birds, and who knows what other creatures hidden away in the undergrowth. A cicada can reportedly make as much noise as a motorbike (but without the pollution).

On my first visit to Khao Lak, a couple of decades ago, I took a canoe safari in Khao Sok National Park and my one remaining single clear memory of that day is a sound - the sound of bamboo cracking and creaking as we paddled slowly beneath it. That sound, explained my guide, is the bamboo growing. It grows so fast, you can hear it. 

Sometimes, as we fumble for our phones to take a photo, we’re barely conscious of the input we’re getting from our “other” senses. The sweet smell of the frangipani and the pandan leaves. The distant slap of waves on sea. Yet these are the things that add up to make experiences magical. A smell, as we all know, can instantly take us back to a childhood memory.

As a species we’ve always prioritised vision over sound, smell, touch and taste. It’s been the key to our surviving and thriving. But modern technology has pushed us further and further down this single track - first with photography, then cinema, television and the web, and finally to the point where each of us carries around a small computer that has access to almost every image known to mankind.

Want to know what the next beach looks like, or a village in the Amazon rainforest? Just get out your phone. 

The big game-changer, of course, was Instagram (then TikTok, then whatever comes next). Once we were encouraged to upload our photos and share them with everyone else, the hegemony of vision over the other senses was complete. Who cares how a place smells, or sounds, or feels? You can’t share that. 

The dominance of the image has also affected the way we meet romantic partners. Online dating profiles are all about the images (some users barely bother to read the words, I’m told). But you can’t smell a person, or hear the tenor of their voice, and in real life this can turn out to be a clincher, or a deal breaker.  

Has taste suffered too in the age of social media? In the rush to post photos of our meals, there’s a temptation to favour food that is pretty on the plate. It may even change what we choose to eat - a dish looks better in a photograph when it’s deconstructed into its various parts, so in the future we may think less of stews or messy noodle dishes because they aren’t as photogenic as sushi rolls or acai bowls.  

Smells and sounds aren’t always good news. Noisy construction work next to your hotel, or a backed-up drain can quickly impair your enjoyment of a trip. I have an app on my phone that tells me the air quality reading of cities around the world. As a result, I may never go back to New Delhi or Beijing.

I may be what Elaine Aron, the psychologist, calls a Highly Sensitive Person. She found that a significant proportion of any population has a hard-wired personality trait that makes them more bothered by loud noises, bright lights, strong smells and even itchy clothing. 

True or not, I do know that I’ve changed as I’ve aged, in ways that are measurable. I’ve become more sensitive to caffeine, for example, and my body’s ability to process large quantities of alcohol has almost entirely vanished. Midlife hangovers are brutal.

I’m pretty certain that ambient noise bothers me more than it used to. The buzz of traffic, aircraft overhead, a loud conversation at the next table all seem to worm their way into my brain in a way that wouldn’t have bothered a younger me. 

But it’s not all bad news. I also believe I’ve become more sensitive to the everyday beauty that surrounds us. I will stop to gaze at tree trunks, smell flowers, inhale the sea air. I’m happy to walk more slowly, and I notice more. This may be the one mitigating advantage of getting older.

I’m not suggesting we all leave our phones at home and live in the moment (whatever that’s supposed to mean). But those of us who are lucky enough to enjoy the sense of sight could sometimes try to engage a little more with our other senses. You could, for example, just walk down a street and try to identify as many sounds or smells as you can. Occasionally you might even close your eyes.

The truck broke down before we reached Tha Ton and, as black smoke rose from the engine compartment, the passengers spilled out onto the side of the dirt road. Among us was a German man, a Canadian couple, a Thai teenage girl and K.

The Thai girl was carrying a boom box and I fished a cassette from my daypack and we listened to some indie tunes, laughing and swapping stories and, right there, I found myself falling. 

The bus was soon repaired, the journey resumed, and we arrived at Tha Ton, found a guest house with clean rooms and five of us arranged to meet that evening for dinner. We ended the night at a bar with live music, drinking whisky and coke around a bonfire. Within 48 hours, K and I were a couple.

I know all the details of that day - and the next day’s boat trip along the River Kok to Chiang Rai - because I kept a journal, which I have open before me now. If I’m honest, without those diary entries I’d be struggling to tell this story. Some details I remember vividly - the boat ride, K’s smile, our first drunken kiss - but many details are lost in time. I didn’t actually remember the truck breaking down, the Thai teenager with the boom box or the bar with the live music and the bonfire.

But here’s the thing about memory: now that I’ve studied my old journals and written - and rewritten - the paragraphs above, my recollection of that episode has been fleshed out. The new details are starting to solidify and become part of my long-term memory. Next time I think of that day, the broken-down truck will be there, and the bonfire. 

We know from experience that memory can be selective, self-serving and unreliable. Most of us rely on photos to jog our memories of the past, and often the photo takes the place of the actual memory. Events in our lives - even momentous ones - become reduced over time to the photos that we keep. 

Writing a journal ought to be the surest way to commit details to memory, but that’s assuming a reliable narrator. What if the 27-year-old version of me was tempted to embellish, exaggerate or omit key details?

Recently, I started sorting through hundreds of old travel photos - prints, slides and negatives - and had some digitised. Among them were half a dozen images of K. Feeling wistful, and planning a return trip to Asia in my fifties, I tracked her down on LinkedIn and left a message: “Hi there, remember me?” 

A few days later, she replied to my message and we tentatively started to chat, sharing brief details of what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years. By chance, K was also in the process of sorting through and digitising her own photos of that trip. Would I like her to send me the photos? Yes please.

In its way, it had been a perfect holiday romance. For five weeks we spent almost every hour of every day in each other’s company and then, before we had time to get bored or argue, she had to fly home. We wrote long letters and enjoyed reunions in London, Amsterdam, The Hague and Berlin before the relationship petered out.

Scrolling through the scores of images now, I felt both nostalgia and a little bemusement. Over the years I had crystalised a series of memories of that trip into a fixed narrative: here was a photo of me at a beach hut at Koh Phangan, studiously writing my journal; there was one of K walking out of the sea, silhouetted by the low sun. I had my memories, my version of events.

But now I was presented with dozens of new images that frankly I didn’t remember. A whole new narrative. Here’s a photo of me sunbathing on a beach, my face pointed skywards, helping to form what would later be diagnosed as a basal cell carcinoma. What was I thinking?

But one particular photo stopped me in my tracks. I’m wearing jeans and a black-and-white striped football shirt, watching a Thai woman fill a rented motorbike with petrol from a makeshift pump. Had we rented the bike together or had K - holding the camera - rented her own bike? In my mind I had only once rented a motorbike in Thailand, before I met K, and it had terrified me. I had managed to get lost, found myself on a steep unmade road and lost control when a snake slithered across my path. 

But if we had ventured out again by bike - to where? - then what other episodes had I forgotten entirely? 

I headed back to my journals and found an entry that may have gone unread for three decades. My eyes strained to read the faded handwriting.  

According to my journal, we were in a small town called Sangkhlaburi near the Burmese border (what is it with border towns?). We had rented a 100cc Honda motorbike from the P Guest House (still going strong, according to Google) for the short journey to the border. 

Once at the border we handed over our cameras, signed a book and strolled into a Burmese village without getting our passports stamped. We bought sarongs and went to a cafe where we chatted with locals over Burmese doughnuts and sweet milk. I don’t actually remember any of this. Well, maybe some fragments, but the border guards had confiscated our cameras, so there was no photographic evidence. No pictures, no memories.

But K had photos of the border guards, huddled around a small pile of confiscated cameras, and a view across the river to the Burmese village. New memories. Or lost ones revived.

Re-reading those journals is both thrilling and embarrassing. It’s me, yet it’s not me. Sometimes I feel a bit scornful of my younger self, sometimes I feel a warm - almost paternal - affection. 

I thumbed forward to the point where K flew home. We had parted at a guest house near Khao Sarn Road in Bangkok where I stood on a balcony waving her off onto a waiting minibus. Either it hadn’t occurred to me to accompany her to the airport, or she had forbidden me. 

Alone, I spent the evening in our room, drinking whisky, listening to melancholy music and scribbling in my diary, my handwriting getting steadily untidier as I became increasingly drunk and maudlin. I clearly felt lonely but was I heartbroken, or just indulging in some youthful self-pity? It’s hard to say.

Next day I woke and pushed the beds apart, went for breakfast and met a new group of backpackers. Like me, they were planning to fly to Vietnam in a few days and we discussed visas and air fares. This next trip was to become the most thrilling experience of my life in travel. It seems there was little time to dwell on what had passed.

• All photos by K, reproduced with kind permission.

I always tried to engage these children in some playful chat before and after pointing a camera in their faces. So, in most cases, the images don’t just show a cute smile or a cheeky grin, but also recall a brief, but real, human connection.

Some of those photos date back to the early 1990s, three decades ago, and I look at the children’s images now and wonder what became of them. That 10-year-old girl might be a mother, perhaps a grandmother. Did she go to college and become a doctor or a lawyer? And that boy in rags. Did he get himself off the streets, or was he sucked into an all-too predictable life of crime, addiction, perhaps an early death? That’s a miserable thought.

I feel increasingly uneasy about photographing children now. Partly because almost everybody has a camera in their pocket. Travelling with a friend in the 1990s, we would take pictures of kids with a digital camera and show them the images on the screen. The children would squeal and roar in delight - it may have been the first time they’d seen an image of themselves. My friend took some wonderful photos of children clamouring around my camera for a view. We were happy to be giving them something in return, or so we thought. Though looking back now the deal doesn’t look so equitable.

Today, if you approach a child in a city in Asia or Latin America asking them to pose for a photo, you could be thought of as creepy, or worse. I imagine local people might think: “Don’t they have children and grandchildren of their own to photograph? How sad.”

Four years ago I travelled in Indonesia with my daughter who was then 14. At a restaurant in Bali the waiters and waitresses - who looked barely older than her - asked her for a group selfie and she was very happy to oblige. Then on the island of Flores she was stopped in the street on several occasions by teenage girls who asked to pose with her. I suppose they saw plenty of older Western tourists but not many their own age. The girls would end up taking each other’s portraits and enjoying a brief awkward chat.

I found this turning of the tables deeply satisfying. In the affluent West we often bemoan the ubiquity of mobile phones, but here was a technology that went some way to levelling the economic playing field and creating a mutual connection across cultures. And how strange for us to feel like the exotic creatures, now the object rather than the subject.

In 1992, in the Philippines, I stayed for four nights in a tiny mountain village called Batad, a two-hour hike from the nearest road and several driving days from the capital, Manila. Encircled by 2,000-year-old rice terraces, Batad was made up of a dozen or so houses, a Catholic church with a rusted tin roof and a single guest house. 

When I emerged from a path through the forest and first caught sight of the village, I was greeted by two bare-foot boys aged about six or seven. They told me they lived in Batad and would show me the way. When I asked to take their photograph, they could barely contain their glee.

Christina ran the guest house, a cheerful middle-aged woman who cooked all my meals and made small talk as we sat out on the terrace, watching the village children wash clothes on the rocks. There were three guest rooms, all occupied, so together we formed a cosy makeshift family. As darkness fell, the palm trees flickered with fireflies and we drank bottles of San Miguel beer.

Christina's daughter, Vivienne, was about eight or nine and cute as a button. After dinner she and two school friends sang us traditional Ifugao songs and performed simple dance routines by the light of a kerosene lamp. They threw in a couple of Western numbers - John Lennon's Imagine and Everything I Do (I Do it for You) by Bryan Adams, a hit at the time. As a reward, we bought them each a bottle of Coca-Cola. They could hardly have been more delighted. Nor could we.

Life in the village looked idyllic but it was hard. The women did almost all the work, planting and harvesting rice then pounding the grains from the husks using huge pestles and mortars. Christina’s husband was a drunk, sometimes legless before dusk. The last rice crop had been damaged by heavy rain and the trickle of money from this handful of tourists was proving valuable.

On my last day in Batad, I arranged to take a photo of Vivienne and her friends. They wore school uniform - a white cotton blouse and hand-woven tapis, similar to a sarong. One of the girls wears a hand-written badge that reads: “Most Helpful”. Another’s says: “Punctual”.

In 1995 the rice terraces of Batad were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and tourism grew steadily. According to an online guide there are now numerous places to stay and a jeepney will take you to within 15 minutes’ walk of the village. Most tourists stay just one night.

Looking now at this photo, I wonder how these three girls’ lives unfolded. Did they stay in the village, perhaps to open their own guest houses, or join the new global economy and find a different kind of wealth? Maybe one became a school teacher in a nearby town, another a singer in a Filipino cover band performing on a cruise ship somewhere. 

What would I wish for them? It’s impossible to say, other than happiness.

Sometimes in life you just get lucky and find yourself in the right place at the right time. It was January 1992 and I’d been travelling around Thailand. My girlfriend had flown home to Amsterdam and I was at a loose end, drinking coffee, reading a copy of the Bangkok Post.  I came across an article that said Vietnam had lifted its ban on independent travel: the communist government was now issuing 28-day visas and visitors could travel as they pleased, rather than being confined to official group tours. 

I paid a travel agent $150 for a one-way ticket to Saigon (several times today’s airfare) and $60 for a visa. Three days later I was on a half-full flight, surrounded mostly by Vietnamese men in suits, presumably party officials returning from shopping trips to Bangkok. I was seated next to Ken from Sweden, and we agreed to share a room.

We checked into a dilapidated Chinese hotel in the centre and strode out into the fading light to discover an elegant city of faded glamour and peeling paint fizzing with energy and excitement. Every square inch of pavement and road was jammed with people - cooking, slurping soup, buying, selling, shouting, laughing and, most of all, careering around on scooters, pushbikes and cyclos. By chance, we’d arrived on the evening before Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of Chinese New Year. As dusk fell, above the incessant beeping of horns, the fizz-bang of firecrackers broke out, the smell of cordite filling the sultry night air.

At the stroke of midnight, firecrackers strung from every doorway were lit and we were forced to stand in the middle of the road, fingers in ears, for a good 15 minutes. The fireworks continued through the night.

That week in Saigon was, and remains, the most thrilling experience of my travelling life. I don’t expect to witness anything like it again, but I’m just grateful I was there, at that moment in history when the Saigonese appeared to emerge from years under communism to embrace a hopeful new future, and stare - with mouths agog - at these newly-arrived, pale-skinned, big-nosed tourists

Some took us for Russians and glared. The first Vietnamese word we learned was Anh, meaning English, which caused smiles to break out everywhere. People invited us into their homes for coffee, fruit juice or bowls of pho. One man insisted on showing me his MGA sports car, which his father had bought in Hong Kong in 1960. A middle-aged woman operating a food cart winked at me and grinned: “No money, no honey”, perhaps a phrase she’d learned during the American war.

There were so few independent travellers in Saigon that we were soon all on speaking terms - or, at least, nodding terms. We’d meet up in small groups for drinks at the Majestic Hotel or breakfast at the ninth-floor restaurant of the Caravelle Hotel, served by waiters wearing white dinner suits. One evening we ate a lavish meal at the French restaurant, Maxims, where I ordered sole meunière and bananas flambé.

To pay the bills, we carried around fistfuls of 1,000 dong notes, like that scene in The Sopranos. It all seemed unreal: a week earlier we had been backpackers sleeping in hostels and flop houses; now we were living like VIPs.

Better still, we knew how lucky and privileged we were to be in this astonishing city at this unique moment in time. We talked about how other tourists would arrive, how the economy would adapt, how the Vietnamese people would slowly become less amazed by us, more jaded. How life would improve for them.

On New Year’s Day, we were debating the cost of a ride to Cholon with a group of cyclo drivers when a middle-aged man with a kind face came out of his house to translate. When we failed to agree on a price, he invited all four of us inside for tea, which quickly became lunch - a delicious bowl of noodles followed by watermelon - sitting around a large table with his wife, children, sister and brother-in-law.

Fluent in French and English, the father had been held captive for eleven years at an American-run prison island and now belonged to the people’s committee in charge of District 1. His brother-in-law, who spoke English with a beautiful accent, owned a building company that employed 50 men. In the New Year he planned to buy a $9,000 Toyota.

It was 4pm by the time we left, with a lengthy round of handshakes, smiles and New Year wishes. The photo I took of the family is one of the items I’d rescue from a burning house.

I wrote a dispatch about Saigon for the Financial Times which was published in the summer of 1992. It didn’t quite capture the sheer crazy exuberance and joyous chaos of the city, and it now seems embarrassingly gauche to have evoked the ghost of Graham Greene.

However, there are some pleasing details that anchor the city in that time: the women cycling to work in white hats and elbow-length lace gloves; the old men with slicked-back hair, three-button suits and berets; and the total absence of cars “except for a row of ancient Renault taxis painted pastel blue and, it seemed, parked permanently outside the Rex Hotel”.

At the same time, I was laughably ignorant of Vietnamese culture. I didn’t even know that the baguettes filled with pâté and vegetables were known as bánh mì, now a staple of global cuisine. I was ingenuous, naive. But as the great travel writer Pico Iyer wrote: “Wide eyes are, if nothing else, quite open.”

Here’s the FT piece reproduced in full. Please note: I wasn’t responsible for writing that headline.

Old descriptions still fit Saigon

From the roof terrace of the Rex Hotel in Saigon, you can see the twin spires of Notre Dame. The red-brick cathedral is almost an identical twin of its sister in Paris except that it stands in the centre of a huge roundabout. Hundreds of bicycles, mopeds and trishaws swarm around it and down Dong Khoi Street towards the Hotel de Ville, a grand reminder of the city's colonial past with its ornate, pastel yellow facade and green shutters. 

Saigon seems to have changed little in the last 40 years. The elegance and vigour described in Graham Greene's 1950s novel, The Quiet American, are still there. Two wars, a US trade embargo and 17 years of failed communism have left it almost untouched by the horrors of modern city life. 

The old descriptions - Paris of the East, Vienna of the Orient - still ring true: women cycle to work in white hats and elbow-length lace gloves; old men with slicked-back hair, three-button suits and berets drink gritty coffee at makeshift pavement cafes. Young girls wash dishes in the gutters while their mothers sell Russian vodka and American cigarettes under the shade of old parachutes. 

Overcrowded buses, some built in the 1940s and converted to run on charcoal-burning stoves, clatter down wide boulevards past faded French courtyards. Ironically, it is the very lack of western investment that has made Saigon such a delight for tourists fed up with the pollution and filth of many Asian cities. 

In spite of a population of 4million, Saigon does not have Bangkok's fumes or Manila's street crime. Nor is it piled high with ugly office buildings like Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. When the French film director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, was searching for locations for The Lover, he wanted to recreate the Saigon of the 1920s. He could find only one city that still retained the atmosphere of that era - Saigon itself. 

Now, as foreign investors move in, the socialist republic is opening its doors to a new wave of tourists. For several years, westerners have been allowed to visit Vietnam only in well-organised parties chaperoned by heavy-handed guides and translators. Last November, it was announced that with a 28-day visa they could explore the country virtually at will. Most who paid the £40 for a visa passed through Saigon. 

In spite of Hanoi's position as the political capital, Saigon is the undisputed centre of commerce and tourism. Where the north is cold and austere, Saigon is colourful, full of enterprise and vitality. Its people are too busy for dogma, refusing even to call it by its official name, Ho Chi Minh City. 

Outside the Museum of American War Crimes, a man in faded denims peddles Viet Cong medals and battered Zippo lighters engraved by homesick GIs. Every few yards along the streets, women have set up tiny stalls selling litre bottles of petrol siphoned from government cars. Each vehicle is piled high with passengers. Three to a bicycle is typical; I once spotted a 90cc Honda groaning under the weight of six people: mum, dad and four children. 

There are almost no cars in Saigon except for a row of ancient Renault taxis painted pastel blue and, it seems, parked permanently outside the Rex. The Saigonese are charming and exuberant, and they are everywhere: laughing, shouting, waving, hustling, buying and selling. Many will invite tourists into their homes to share bowls of pho, the meat and noodle soup eaten at breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Vietnam is said to have hundreds of different dishes, many of which are served with a French accent. On the streets it is possible to dine on fresh baguettes filled with chicken pâté and vegetables for less than 20p. 

All of Vietnam is cheap. Change a US dollar and you walk away with 10,000-12,000 dong, depending on the fluctuating exchange rate. Change $100 and you need a small rucksack to carry the notes. 

Two hours' drive from Saigon, at Cu Chi, a one-armed war veteran guided me, for a small fee, along a stretch of the Viet Cong tunnels, an unforgettable experience but not for the claustrophobic. Cu Chi can be combined with a trip to the Holy See of the Cao Dai at Tay Ninh, a magnificently garish church whose pillars are entwined with huge painted snakes and where men and women enter through different doors and walk up and down the aisles in opposite directions. 

At noon, hundreds of priests in white smocks and black skull caps file into the great temple to sing prayers. Visitors can watch from a balcony where a group of musicians scratch out haunting harmonies on ancient two-string instruments clenched between their feet.

Caodaism, founded in the 1920s, is a colourful fusion of Buddhism, Catholicism and Confucianism but its members also worship Victor Hugo, Shakespeare and Lenin. At one point, Graham Greene was so enchanted with it that he considered joining. But then maybe he went back to the Rex, sat on the roof terrace with G&T, and had second thoughts. 

All photos are by the author, taken in 1992. You may also enjoy this collection of images at Saigoneer.com taken around the same time.

A teenage girl with wide eyes and pierced nose was being led by one arm down to the holy lake. A bearded sadhu with a bare chest pressed flowers, sweets and a few grains of rice into her hand. "This is the ancient puja ceremony," he said, thumbing a red dot onto her forehead. 

"It's so cool," said the girl, who was called Caroline and was spending a year in India before her first term at Oxford. "Repeat after me," said the holy man. "I pray for health, happiness and success and I make a donation of 100 rupees." Caroline woke briefly from the spell. "100! How about 50?" The man suggested 60. "That's cool," she replied, with a wide smile. 

Pushkar is a small, pretty town built around an oasis on the edge of a desert in Rajastan. According to Hindu legend the god Brahma dropped a lotus flower there and a lake sprang up at the spot. For more than 3,000 years, devotees have travelled from across India to worship at some of its 400 temples. 

Around 90 per cent of Pushkar's 11,000-strong population is connected with the priesthood; the other 10 per cent appear to work in the tourist trade. Some people, like Caroline's friend, dabble in both. 

Pushkar's tranquility, idyllic setting and air of authentic spirituality have made it a popular pit-stop on the Indian tourist circuit. Many visitors find it an antidote to the chaos of the big cities and stay for weeks at cheap backstreet guest houses. As a result, unsuspecting Pushkar has become a hippy hangout. 

Along the narrow main street, dodging cows and bicycles and holy men and beggar-women, stroll Europe's drop-outs in tie-dye trousers and embroidered waistcoats. Following them from shop doorways come familiar whispers. "Hello friend. good hash, change money. buy something."

Because Pushkar is a holy place, alcohol, meat and even eggs are banned, and signs warn foreigners against kissing in public. Yet almost anything else seems possible: you can get a shave and a massage in five languages. buy uncut rubies and chocolate biscuits, drink milkshakes and eat Chinese and swap your copy of Midnight's Children for a dog-eared City of Joy, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One shop front promised: "Ear and Nose Hole Possible Here."

At 6am it was still dark as dozens of temple bells rang to summon the faithful to icy dips in the lake. Pilgrims, shivering and fully-clothed, bathed at the white-washed ghats lining the shore. At the top of a steep hill overlooking the town there is a 2,000-year-old temple where a sad-looking priest swathed in saffron gave me a cup of steaming tea as we watched the sunrise together. 

Through my telephoto lens he studied the squat buildings below, clustered around the tiny square of water. Then he asked how much the camera cost:  "More than 10 English pounds?" 

Distant drums pounded as the rising heat brought the desert to life. Monkeys appeared and parrots, then great vultures launched themselves into the air with a single flap of their wings, circled slowly and returned to their branches to wait. 

On the path back into town a small boy was herding goats as a pair of wild peacocks danced through the dust. At Sanjay's Rooftop Restaurant there were fairy lights above the door: too late for Diwali, too early for Christmas. Over a breakfast of porridge and honey toast I listened to two dazed German hippies argue about how much dope they had smoked the previous evening, until their slurred protestations were drowned out by a screeching tape playing one, seemingly interminable song: "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare ..." 

Outside, a sadhu with long white beard and ashtray specs, as skinny as a dog, was washing himself under a banyan tree. He reached with a bar of soap into the depths of his loin cloth and a hippy girl in beads and sandals averted her eyes. 

By mid-morning the first pilgrims had arrived: Indian families on day trips from Delhi and Jaipur clutching packed lunches and drinks flasks. As they hurried from one holy place to another dressed in ill-fitting suits and Sunday-best saris, they threw bemused glances at the brightly-coloured hippies. 

At the red-spired temple dedicated to Brahma, beside a sign saying "Donate For Cows", a smartly-dressed young man clutched my hand and said: "Give me your address and we will be best friends." Disarmed, I obliged, although I am still waiting for him to write. 

The temple floor was carved with memorial stones and, beside the names of the dead, the marble was inlaid with silver rupees bearing the heads of George V and Edward VII, reminders of an earlier western presence. 

For one week in November, Pushkar bursts into life and colour when its annual camel fair attracts up to 200,000 villagers from across Rajastan. Prices at hotels and restaurants soar and the barefoot budget travellers move out to make way for well-heeled tourists and film crews from Tokyo, Paris and New York. 

When the dust has settled and tariffs have fallen back to earth, the hippies return to find the same bars blaring out the same old Rolling Stones records, the shops selling the same Kashmiri carpets - possibly silk, possibly not. 

Those who linger in Pushkar perhaps know it is not the "real India" - no single place could encapsulate the seething sub-continent - but this desert oasis is closer to their dreams of India than the heaving, polluted cities that surround it.

And everyone's a winner in such a glittering collision of cultures. The grinning Indians provide colour and chicanery, blessings and badly-made clothes. In return, the west sends its great unwashed - gangly youths with tattoos and matted hair who exchange hard currencies for a piece of potted mysticism and cheap, worthless bangles and beads. 

At the Palace Hotel, a former home of the Maharaja of Kishangarh and now, at £5 a night, the most expensive place to stay in Pushkar, guests were taking their positions for cocktail hour. We sat on the lawn in wicker chairs to watch the sun dip behind far-away hills turning they sky pink and gold. 

Expert advice was offered as to the exact moment to take photographs ("Now, man! This is it, perfect, take the thing!"). The sound of temple bells drifted on the evening breeze and, in the parched section of the lake, schoolboys played cricket with a home-made bat. 

Later I returned to Sanjay's Rooftop Restaurant. The same tape was playing. "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare." Only this time the shrill, insistent tones seemed strangely soothing. I ordered a banana milkshake. 

This article was originally published in the Financial Times in 1994. Copyright: Mark Hodson.

Photos: Pushkar Lake by Patrick Dawson. Creative Commons licence: CC by 2.0. Other images by the author.

You'd be daft to try that excursion now that Algeria has closed its borders, but between the desert to the south and the towering Atlas mountains to the north lies some of the country's most glorious scenery. It is a region sufficiently remote to deter most tour groups, yet the roads are paved and in fairly good repair - no small consideration when you are driving a Fiat Uno with a slow puncture and a dodgy starter motor.

I rose before dawn and headed south from Zagora for a glimpse of the first real dunes of the Sahara. Within minutes, my plans had turned to dust. As a sulphurous sun erupted over the distant hills, a storm blew up, sending swirling patterns of sand across the road. It was a magnificent sight but I didn't fancy my chances in the Fiat, so I did a three-point turn and headed back, stopping en route to pick up a couple of hitchhikers.

Giving a ride - une place - to strangers is a way of life in these parts, where you could wait half a lifetime for a public bus. My passengers were on their way to the Sunday souk in Zagora and the two men showered me with thanks as they shook sand from their turbans and piled wooden crates stuffed with fresh dates onto the back seat. Every grand taxi that had passed had been full, they said. Was I also going to the souk? Well, I thought, why not?

It was not yet 8am when we arrived and the place was teeming: Tuareg men wrapped in flowing blue robes; farmers under floppy straw hats; sub-Saharan Africans wearing skull caps and plastic sunglasses; black-clad Berber women with tattooed chins. An enclosure the size of a polo field had been set aside as a parking lot, and already it was almost full with horses and donkeys.

Next door, blacksmiths had set up their tents, and a man sold bales of feed for the animals. In the mutton market, tribesmen and nomads were trying to find buyers for their goats and sheep as small crowds gathered to watch the haggling. A man in western clothes sat beside a low picnic table on which he had laid out hundreds of individual human teeth. He answered each of my questions with a giggle and a shake of his shoulders. Yes, he was a dentist. Yes, he removed teeth. The cost? Let's say 20 dirhams. That's about £1.50.

A teenager sat on the chair and was given a brief examination, then an injection to his gum. The dentist tipped back the patient's head, flexed a pair of pliers and, as an excited audience edged in for a better view, wrenched out three rotten teeth. The lad neither flinched nor shed a tear; he simply blinked several times and spat some blood on to the dusty ground. A goat scampered past, and I looked back at the man with the pliers. He was still laughing. Never again will I moan about dentists' bills back home.

The drive north from Zagora to Ouarzazate is achingly beautiful. The road follows the floor of the Draa Valley, a lush green ribbon laid across a landscape of arid, sun-baked rock. Once infested with crocodiles, the river is now no more than a dribble, but an ingenious system of irrigation channels allows it to support hundreds of acres of fields planted with date palms.

I passed dozens of villages, one after another, each too small for a mention on the Michelin map. The architecture reflects ancient feuds between Arabs and Berbers in the valley and many families still live in fortified kasbahs, their high pise walls built with the same dusky pink earth that makes the mountains blush rouge at sunset. Some buildings lay abandoned and, thanks to a combination of time and elements, were crumbling back into the ground from whence they came.

Life in the villages is almost biblical in its simplicity. Baskets of dates and newly-cut corn were carried on the heads of women or the backs of donkeys. Children fetched pails of water from wells while men lounged in the shade of canopies woven from palm fronds. Every time I stopped the car to stare at scenery, half a dozen laughing children would emerge from open doorways, shouting: “Monsieur! Bonjour! Un dirham! Un stylo!”

The river dries up at Agdz and the road bucks and twists up bleak grey mountains of rubble that look like giant slag heaps. I stopped the car in the middle of nowhere to pick up a hitcher called Sadiq, who said he had spent the night in the hills with a nomad. In lieu of payment, he offered me a cup of tea which I drank on a pile of cushions above his brother's antiques shop in Ouarzazate.

Sadig politely refrained from trying to sell me anything, but his brother had no qualms: “Just look around, I think you are a man who likes to look at old things, see this, real camel bone.”

A right turn at Ouarzazate takes you into another gorgeous valley, the Dades, known in guidebooks as the Valley of a Thousand Kasbahs. I drove along it for a few miles until I saw what looked like a mirage: tall fountains of water cascading onto bright emerald-green lawns. I stared for several seconds before I realised what it was - a golf course. The extravagance is breathtaking, but I was told the king enjoys a game of golf when he is in these parts and Moroccans are indulgent hosts, particularly when their guests are royalty.

I stopped at one of the tallest kasbahs and a young man called Muhammed showed me around inside, whispering warnings about the floorboards that might give way under my weight. Muhammed said his family had lived in the kasbah for two centuries and moved out in the 1970s, but that many neighbours still inhabited similar structures, sleeping on the second floor while their goats wandered around downstairs.

We ate a handful of dates, then strolled through cool, shady palm groves where Muhammed pointed out his family's olive and almond trees. I spotted three pretty young women in white jellabas, and they looked up and waved. Cousins, said Muhammed, so I tried to look respectful.

I stopped for lunch at El Kelaa M’Gouna, the centre of Morocco's rose-growing region. The village supplies many florists and perfume houses of Paris, and every other shop sells small bottles of rose essence (it is said that half a ton of petals is required to extract just one pint). I bought some from a man called Haseem who asked whether I was heading for the Dades Gorge. “You must see it,” he swooned theatrically. “Very, very lovely.”

The route to the gorge was lined with ksour and kasbahs standing atop steep hills. The walls of the valley rose steadily, almost enveloping the road, and the layers of rock changed colour so dramatically that a whole village might be red and the next brown. When the paved road finally ran out, I suffered another crisis of confidence, turned the car around and - as if by magic - chanced upon another hitchhiker. Again, the favour was returned with tea, this time in a lounge above a hotel, as a cool breeze ruffled the leaves of the overhanging poplar trees.

As I got up to leave, my new friend explained that his younger brother needed a lift down the road, and would I mind …? “No problem,” I said, and another Muhammed jumped into the passenger seat, gushing a thousand thank-yous.

The lad was so grateful that he even did up his seatbelt when he saw me attach mine, although he quietly released it a couple of minutes later, perhaps because my driving was so painfully slow.

After a couple of minutes, Muhammed gave a little cry and said: “Stop! Please, my cousin! He needs a lift, just to the next village.” It seemed rotten to refuse, so we put the fellow in the back seat and set off again. Then, two minutes later Muhammed spotted another cousin. “Please, he is going to the market to buy vegetables.” This time I drove on, pointing out that I had not come to Morocco to set up a free taxi service, and Muhammed apologised profusely.

I filled the ensuing silence with gentle inquiries about his family, which led, inevitably, to the question of how many cousins he had. “I have two,” he said proudly, “and one of them is at university.” Then, realising the discrepancy in his arithmetic, he added: “The last man was not really my cousin. But I know him.”

After a five-hour drive over rugged hills I arrived at the ancient regional capital of Taroudant just as dusk approached. The sun burned low in a cloudless sky and the tall city walls glowed deep coral pink. It was the busiest time of day - the shops still open, the cafes were filling up, and the narrow dusty streets were thronging. Mopeds buzzed and whined, and elderly Peugeot taxis with yellow headlights growled as they tried to clear a path through crowds of people: small boys hawking cigarettes; women strolling in elegant jellabas of yellow or indigo, long tasselled hoods swaying gently across their backs; two men on bicycles, riding side by side, sharing a joke, each with an arm around the other's shoulder.

The air was thick with dust and diesel and the smells of mint, wood smoke, roast peanuts and coriander. On a wall beside a doorway I saw a buzzer and a glass case containing four pairs of false teeth. Another dentist.

I was followed down a side street by a small boy who had just a single line in hustle: “Monsieur, monsieur! Un dirham! Monsieur!” I turned away, shook my head and lengthened my stride but still he followed with his plaintive mantra, skipping along and pointing at the sound of coins clinking in my trouser pocket.

I turned around to shoo him away, and he slipped on a cake of donkey dung and almost fell on his face. I laughed - rather too loudly, perhaps - then gave him five dirhams as a hasty penance. His eyes lit up like desert stars. So, if you get to Taroudant and you find yourself pestered by a little boy with cheeky hair and a curly smile who slips and slides in carefully-arranged piles of donkey droppings, you will know who to blame. I can only apologise.

• Originally published in The Sunday Times, London. Copyright: Mark Hodson 1996. This is the first time the article has appeared online. I removed one four-word phrase, which I found horribly gauche, but otherwise it’s unchanged.

As this news sank in, I felt the blood drain from my head. One of the doctor’s assistants helped me to a couch where I lay down, a thousand thoughts racing through my mind.

I was in the Philippines, learning to dive on the island of Cebu, on what should have been a year-long backpacking trip. It was 1992 and I was 27 years old. I had been away from home for almost five months, working briefly on a newspaper in Hong Kong then travelling around Thailand and Vietnam. 

It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a side trip to the Philippines, a troubled country that had delighted, confounded and sometimes scared me. The people could not have been more warm and welcoming with their relentless cheerfulness and generosity, but it was hard to avoid encounters with poverty and the constant muted threat of violence. 

As I lay staring at the ceiling of a hospital consulting room, I tried to focus on the eye specialist as he breezily explained my prognosis. While I waited for surgery, he told me, I should take precautions not to allow my retina to become completely detached, as this could result in permanent blindness. “Sex is totally out of the question I’m afraid,” he grinned and winked at me. “Can you live without sex for two weeks?”

I’m sorry. Did I hear that right?

I stared grimly back at his chubby smiling face, and he turned to his two young female assistants. “How about you two? Could you live without sex for two weeks?” They giggled demurely, apparently unsurprised by his inappropriate behaviour.

A more serious conversation followed, and he offered to carry out the operation himself. I thought: No way on God’s Earth is this goon going to cut my face apart with a scalpel.

“Er, could I maybe fly back to London for the surgery?”, I asked.

He thought about it for a moment, then agreed. “But don’t delay. And no bumpy road journeys.” Also, he added, I should sleep on my left side.

The bus ride back from Cebu City to my guest house in the tiny resort of Moalboal would have taken about two hours, over badly-made roads. It was out of the question. Most of my possessions were there, but I did have my passport, money and a camera with me, plus the clothes I was wearing: a T-shirt, shorts and trainers.

At a travel agent, I booked a flight to the capital Manila leaving that afternoon, and an onward ticket home. I phoned my parents then walked to the bus station where - luckily - I found a young Swedish traveller heading to Moalboal. I gave him a written note for my dive instructor and some money to pay for my room. I didn’t know if he would do as I’d asked, or just keep the money, but I had little choice. 

I did a quick mental inventory of everything I would leave behind: camera equipment, my journal, clothes, toiletries, rucksack. Not much in the big scheme of things. I had time to eat lunch and visit a department store where I bought a shirt, underwear and a pair of long trousers.

I was in a state of shock: dazed but pumped with adrenaline, laser-focussed and strangely calm. More than anything, I knew I didn’t want to undergo eye surgery in a country where barely anything worked. In the past two weeks I had experienced multiple power cuts (known locally as “brown-outs”), two bus breakdowns and an earthquake that left thousands of people homeless. I yearned for the boring stability of a developed Western country.

The previous evening, I had been revelling in the freedom and autonomy of solo travel. I was drinking beer at a beachfront bar with a group of people I’d known just a few days, watching the sun set, eating seafood. I mentioned in passing that after dark I couldn't see too well in my right eye, like a shadow was falling across my vision. One of my fellow dive students, an Irish nurse, moved a finger across the front of my face to test my sight. “You should get that checked out,” she said.

“Yes, I will, maybe when I get back to Manila.”

“No, I mean soon. Tomorrow.”

That’s when I felt the first pang of fear. I left my room at the guest house for the bus stop the next morning and made the unusual decision to take all my money and my passport with me. If I was mentally preparing for the worst, I wasn’t consciously aware of it.

It was a short flight from Cebu City to Manila. My flight to London was in the morning so I took a taxi to a hostel where I’d stayed before. I ate dinner and settled down to sleep, on my left side.

Next day, when my taxi arrived at Manila airport, something looked wrong. Hundreds of people were milling about, outside the terminal building. I went inside and found a huge boisterous crowd of people and heard a public announcement: the air traffic controllers had gone on strike and no flights were expected to leave that day. 

I joined a queue to use a pay phone and decided to call my travel insurance company. Medical emergencies were covered in my policy, and surely this qualified. Finally, I got through and - above the noise in the terminal - explained my predicament. The person I spoke to was calm and assertive. “We’ll sort it out. Write down this number and call me back in an hour.” 

I called back, exactly an hour later. “We’ve arranged for you to have the operation at the Chinese General Hospital in Manila. It’s a private hospital. Take a taxi there now. They’re expecting you.”

Relief surged through me. Finally I no longer had to decide what to do next. I was somebody else’s responsibility.

I don’t remember too much about my stay in hospital. I was there for a week, in my own room, with nothing to read, no writing materials, not even a TV. It was by far the loneliest time of my life. The nurses were friendly, when they appeared, but the food was pitiful.

In the Philippines when someone is admitted to hospital, a close relative will usually stay with them, sleeping in an adjacent bed, delivering all their meals, chatting, keeping up their spirits. As a result, the food served by the hospital is rarely eaten, so money isn’t wasted on it. 

I had a spare bed in my room, but nobody to sleep in it. “You have no companion?” one of the nurses asked, with a pained expression.

Meals arrived but they were unappetising. Breakfast might be a stale bread roll, a sausage and a piece of fruit. Dinner was exactly the same, probably the same food recycled. A nurse took pity on me and offered to buy me groceries before her next shift. I gave her money and she brought a bag full of Coca-Cola bottles, crisps and biscuits. Junk food has never made me happier.

The surgeon visited on the second day to explain the operation which, he said, would take about five hours. The chances of a successful outcome were very high.

Next morning I was lying on a trolley in a corridor, woozy with opiates, when the whole hospital was thrown into darkness. The whirring of machines stopped. Another brown-out. Fortunately, I was too drugged up to care, and an emergency generator soon kicked in. Then I was taken into a room to meet the anaesthetist.

There was no pain after the operation. I wore an eye patch and felt a little sick from the anaesthetic. The food looked less appealing than ever. I lay in bed for hours, maybe days, then sat up, then slowly paced the room. Nurses occasionally appeared, and the surgeon visited once to say the operation had been a success. I didn’t think to ask when I could leave. I had no energy. I felt as if I’d fallen to the bottom of a deep well, in a dark, cold and lonely place. I’d lost a lot of weight.

It was perhaps the only time in my life that I’d experienced the depths of depression, yet before I left the Philippines, one thing happened that filled me again with joy and hope. After arranging my discharge from hospital, the insurance company booked me a room at the Ambassador Hotel for one night before my flight to London. At check-in, I gave my name and the receptionist said “Ah, just a moment”, went into a back room and returned with … my rucksack.

I stared in disbelief. It was most definitely mine, but how had it got here? Clearly, the Swedish traveller had given my note to Geoff, the dive instructor, and paid my bill at the guest house. But how had they known I’d be here? Who’d shipped the bag, and who’d paid the bill? I’d told the divers in Moalboal I was going to Cebu City for a check-up, so presumably they had phoned the hospital. Had the sex-obsessed eye doctor tracked me down to Manila? Perhaps he wasn’t such a fool after all. I felt overcome with gratitude but, to this day, I still don’t know how this miracle was pulled off.

When I landed in London, my parents met me at the airport and I stayed at their house for a month or two, slowly recovering my confidence and enthusiasm for life, and putting some weight back on. I saw an eye specialist who said the surgeon in Manila had done a “pretty good job”. The silicone buckle, which held together the back of my retina, gave me bouts of double vision for a few weeks, but it settled in and it’s still there now, 30 years later.

The consultant in London examined my other eye and found some holes around the edge of the retina. To avoid that one becoming detached, I underwent a second operation to have a band fitted around the eye. We decided the damage to both eyes had probably been caused by a mountain bike accident three months before I left for Asia, which left me with concussion. It would have been exacerbated by long bumpy bus journeys in the Philippines.

The surgery didn’t dent my passion for travel and the following winter I found myself staying on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica on another five-month backpacking trip. I wrote a postcard to the surgeon in London, describing all the things I could see as I sat on the beach, and thanking him. I couldn’t thank the surgeon in Manila - I didn’t find out his name.

I wish those feelings of awe and gratitude - the knowledge that if I’d been born a few decades earlier I should have been blind by now - had lodged themselves within me. But like all emotions - terror, joy and every point in between - they fade in time. 

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