"Through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity."

"Foras Road has a sordid reputation. Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution."

"Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist."

"A little imagination goes a long way in Fes."

"As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code."

"One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene."

"During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide."

"In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists."

"On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust."

"Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat pee, no doubt from the adrenalin. However hard you wash, it won't come off. It smothers you, as your muscles become frozen with acid and your mind paralysed by despair."

"The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation."

"But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested."

"The first few hours in the cell were quite stimulating. I'd never been in a prison cell before and was quite enjoying the experience."

"My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind."

"Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship."

"The porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end."

"A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it."

"I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it."

"The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways."

"The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up."

"An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems."

"Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth."

"Stories are not like the real world, they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside."

"At the last moment, the fish and I exchange a troubled glance. The murrel seems to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I am in no position to start justifying the unusual treatment. What comes next is a new experience for both the fish and me."

"When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth."

"The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture."

"Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead."

"There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information."

"I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas."

"The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own."

"Exploration is a dirty game."

"There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest."

"In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense."

"If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure."

"Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed."

"Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else."

"Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one's head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open."

"For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories."

"Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible."

"The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!"

"Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?"

"The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence."

"As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection."

"Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi."

"Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight."

"A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist."

"Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal."

"Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it."

"Inscribed on it was a verse from the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mystic. Reading the words aloud I prepared for a most amazing journey:The sages who have compassed sea and land,Their secret to search out and understand,My mind misgives me if they ever solveThe scheme on which the universe is planned."

"In India everything has a use and a value."