April 2004. Earth's mightiest river, near Iquitos, a jungle city of 400,000 with no road connection to the rest of the world. See also Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, filmed in the region. The Amazon is a busy superhighway, ships and boats pass up and down constantly, but much of the jungle around it remains utterly wild to this day - southeast Peru still has a few uncontacted Stone Age tribes, believe it or not.

October 2003. In honour of my return to California, this classic California shot from my Bay Trail set; a surfer descends into the wild Pacific. One of the very first decent digital pictures I ever took. I spent a day trying to surf once, in Australia. I don't have the right body type, alas, but I'd bet I'd love it if I did.

July 2003. This very famous poem was inspired by this very fallen statue, which Shelley saw and was struck by when he visited Egypt a century and a half before I came and saw it myself. As you can see he made use of his poetic license:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

October 2003. I lived in San Francisco in 1996-97 and came back seven years later to write my second published novel, The Blood Price. It's one of my very favourite cities, for all of its obvious beauty and slightly-less-obvious quirks. Here you can see the massive and iconic Golden Gate, so soundly built that it's probably the safest place to be the next time the San Andreas gives way. Note kite surfer and freighter ship.

(Reposted due to weird bug in previous version.)

October 2002. Have I mentioned yet just how much I love Australia? I probably have, but probably not sufficiently. It's raw and wild and comfy and civilized all at the same time, the people are fantastically friendly, and every day I ever spent there was a good one. At dawn on the day in question, I went for a nine-kilometre run around the jawdropping and curiously affecting monolith you see here, Uluru aka Ayers Rock; at sunset, I came back and took this picture. There are probably a hundred thousand pictures of Uluru every taken day, and you know what, it actually justifies all that attention. It sounds odd to say, I know, but it's much more than just a big rock.

December 2000. I did my open-water PADI dive course here; my first ocean dive was in the shallows of that jutting rock in the distance. Gorgeous scenery, stunning diving, laid-back vibe, longtail-boat public transit, full-moon and half-moon beach parties, lots of amenities and activities without too many tourists (unlike Phuket, which I fled after only one night) - Krabi was pretty paradisical, back in the day. I hope it still is.

May 2005. In honour of my article Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth being Slashdotted yesterday, I give you this picture, taken from inside a Blackhawk carrying me from Baghdad's Green Zone to LSA Anaconda. (I was there on assignment for WIRED magazine.)

May 1998. Market, Dogon country. What I remember most is that it was hot. Very, very hot. West Africa is the second hottest place in the world (after the Horn of Africa) and we got there in the midst of a thirty-year heat wave. It was 50C/120F in the shade every day for weeks. The three-day trek through Dogon Country - little villages carved into Mali's southern highlands, no power, no running water - was magical and all, but at the same time, sheesh, it was tough.

April 1997 - more than ten years ago, gulp. After my month in China I needed a vacation, so I impulse-purchased a ticket to Bali, Indonesia, and after a few days there hopped on a ferry to the neighbouring island of Lombok, which I much preferred to Bali - way more laid-back and interesting. Tetebatu was a little village in the highlands of the middle of Lombok, friendly and ridiculously green, as you can see. I liked it so much I gave it a central role in my first published novel.

March 2007 - ie last week - I spent four days in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (indeed, the poorest outside of Africa) visiting a friend of mine who works for Unicef. Port-au-Prince is a dangerous mess, full of peacekeepers who the locals don't like at all, but laid-back Jacmel, on the south coast, is a relaxed, tropical town that could be paradise.

If Haiti ever stabilizes it will be the adventure travel capital of the hemisphere; glorious beaches, good diving, mountains, terrific people, colonial-era ruins, smooth roads - what's not to like? I look forward to the day when there are "slum experience" hostels in Cité Soleil, as there are in South Africa's townships. But after only four days there I can tell you this much: that ain't gonna be anytime soon.