South Africa: 2019

A true spur of the moment trip. I grabbed my bike and my camera. The next day I wandered the streets as darkness fell and the light and decoration of the intra muros came to prominence.

Mountain peaks, colours and textures from the French, Swiss and Italian Alps, mostly from la Route Blanche the Simplon Pass.

Another of those places that has to be seen with your own eyes. Every nook and cranny is filled with detail that even a gallery of a thousand photographs could not hope to capture. So many moments where you turn a corner and say 'hang on that's a...'

I love epic train journeys, and three days straight-through from the north to the south of Australia in backpacker class certainly sounds epic. That is until the reality of the 5am New Years Day hangover start time, the small seat which is now your bed, the lack of stops to get off and explore and that the Australian bush is near unchanging until you near the coasts! Great experience overall. Just split it up with a break in the middle if you can, unlike me that fit it between flights.

A Soviet era Nuclear Missile base with four silos buried deep in the woods in a quiet part of Lithuania. Now converted into a museum. Frankly this place left me with a haunted feeling, knowing within half an hour of a call destruction could be sent to one of many targets. Seeing these marked upon maps still on display somehow made it even more real.

When travelling, there are places you visit not for beauty or culture, but to educate and remind yourself of our capacity for intolerable cruelty to one another - and to reaffirm why it must never be allowed to happen again. Robben Island, home to many political prisoners under the Apartheid government, is one such place.

I wonder how much Beijing has changed since I was there. There had been rapid development which made parts unrecognisable from the scenes in '80 Days Around the World' what would have been filmed around 20 years before I visited. Coming up on 15 years since then, how different is it now?

A late afternoon walk around the Estonian city of Tartu.

I went to Macau for a day trip during a longer trip to Hong Kong. An insanely crowded and densely packed place with as many contrasts as buildings. Colonial buildings jostle with temples. Apartment blocks with mega casinos. A single day was not enough to even begin to scratch the surface.

By day the Jemaa el-Fnaa is a bustling market with traders, and entertainers seeing a coin or two from the visitors. By night it transforms into a huge open air food court. Brightly lit against the night, with a myriad of scents from the cooking meats and spices.