New Zealand

View over Lake Wanaka from Treble Cone.

I looked down from the plane across the magnificent Southern Alps cutting a rift along the length of New Zealand’s South Island and thought, I’m going to enjoy this country.

Hitching the Australian outback

Driving through the middle of nowhere.

I could still feel the humidity in the air when I arrived at 4am in Darwin, Australia, reminding me that Asia had only been a short flight away. I knew I had to escape further to the south. In Bishkek I had met a travel writer, Jamie Maslin, who was hitching his way from Tasmania to England and his tales inspired me to attempt at least part of his journey in reverse. And so it was I went straight out on to the Stuart Highway, the only road heading south through the centre of this huge, empty country.

A little bit of Indonesia

The ash cloud from Krakatoa.

I knew that Indonesia is big and has a lot of islands, but I hadn’t realised quite how long it would take me to traverse just a few of those islands, and how long I would be sitting on hot buses chugging their way through mounds of volcanic ash.

China (and Hong Kong and Macau)

Hong Kong

I left Lhasa on the two-day train bound for Chengdu, the highest train in the world. Tibet had left me without a proper Chinese visa – the ‘punishment’ for entering Tibet is to grant visitors less than three weeks in China, including Tibet. So it was going to have to be a quick skip through!

Tibet

The high, bleak landscape of Tibet.

From Nepal, there aren’t many places one can get to overland. I’d come from India, so Tibet it had to be – that land of snow I’d heard and read so much about but didn’t understand, at an average of some 4500m above sea level. After all the talk with polite refugees in Dharamsala and Nepal, the hype surrounding the Dalai Lama and the ferocity of Chinese official opinion, I had to see it for myself.