There are certain foods that just taste better after dark. Not because they’re particularly sophisticated. Usually the opposite. I’m talking about the food eaten standing under fluorescent lights at one in the morning. Food handed through windows by men whose names you never learn. Food eaten drunk, exhausted, lost, sunburnt, heartbroken or some combination of the above. I’ve eaten in good restaurants while travelling. I’ve deliberately sought out famous dishes and places peo

“Something spicy.” I was still fairly early into my trip, in Ubud on one of those tourist day tours, when I realised Indonesia hadn't really delivered on one of my expectations. I'd come expecting chilli. Proper chilli. Yet somehow, despite being in Indonesia, I hadn't eaten anything particularly spicy. So when the guy asked what I wanted, I told him exactly that. Something spicy. He gave me tangkleng kambing. It was a rocket. My lips were burning, sweat was pouring off me an

“Dude, we gotta go. It’s not safe here.” A guide had come back to find me in a bar underneath a coach station in Bratislava. I’d started the evening on a Halloween pub crawl, but somewhere along the way I’d stopped doing the crawl part and stayed behind drinking shots of something vaguely like gin with a group of Slovak men. They spoke no English, I spoke no Slovak, and neither side seemed particularly bothered by this arrangement. I was enjoying myself enough that I hadn't e

I went to Ecuador knowing about the gangs, murders and television-station attack. On my first night in Quito, I lay awake listening to sirens and wondered whether everyone who had warned me not to go had been right. CBS News Report on News Broadcast take over Then I met Ecuador. Not the country I'd watched on the news. The people who actually lived there. And those are two very different things. Everyone Had Told Me Ecuador Was Dangerous By the time I travelled to Ecuador in

I'd made it all the way to London before realising my passport was still back in the Midlands. There are mistakes you can solve with money and mistakes you can't. Fortunately, this was the first kind, although my credit card probably wished otherwise. I'd just got off the train at Paddington. I got straight back on one heading in the opposite direction, collected my passport and started doing the maths. There was no chance I was getting back across London and out to Stansted

“India is not for beginners.” Someone told me that later in Jaipur when I explained how my first few hours in the country had gone. By then, it was funny. It wasn't funny at three or four in the morning when I was standing in a basement somewhere in Delhi, surrounded by men trying to sell me things I didn't want while another man came down the stairs carrying a cricket bat. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'd wanted to visit India for years. Both of my parents had travelled

Three days in Ecuador's cloud forest taught me that owning a 70–200mm lens doesn't make you a wildlife photographer, howler monkeys don't care about your itinerary, and “mi perro no es peligroso” is apparently not enough to get a street dog into a hostel. I went to Mindo because I wanted a taste of the Amazon without actually going to the Amazon. I'd just finished the volunteering part of my time in Ecuador and was starting the adventure side of the trip, but I needed to retu

Two weeks volunteering with children in Quito gave me access to a side of Ecuador I would probably never have experienced as a tourist. It also left me deeply uncomfortable with an industry that can turn helping people into something travellers buy. On my first morning volunteering in Quito, I was given some fairly straightforward advice: don't take my phone, don't carry money I wasn't prepared to lose and, whatever happened, don't lose Jordy. Jordy was an Ecuadorian universi