La Mode Clothing Shop

My name is Andrew, and I have spent the better part of my adult life being the world’s most enthusiastic, yet economically useless, souvenir hunter. My travels weren't about seeing landmarks; they were about falling in love with things. Deep, profound, "I-will-never-love-anything-this-much-again" love.

I remember sitting in a Delhi chai shop, watching other travellers stumble in, flushed with victory, clutching receipts for huge, cumbersome boxes they were shipping home. They’d bought entire marble tabletops, stacks of tapestries, life-sized brass peacocks. I sipped my sweet, chai and thought, “What a dreadful hassle.” It never once occurred to me that I, too, should buy the things I adored.

In a bustling market in Marrakech, I once clutched a hand-woven cotton mat to my chest, tears in my eyes, whispering to the artisan, “You have not just made a mat; you have woven the very soul of the Atlas Mountains.” He nodded patiently, waiting for me to buy it. I did not. I took a dramatic photo of it, sighed about the impermanence of beauty, and left. That mat haunts my dreams.

I was the king of the singular, sentimental, and ultimately tragic purchase. In Tehran in the 80s, I found myself in a carpet shop where the owner was desperate for American dollars. I could have bought a king's ransom in exquisite Persian rugs for a song. What did I do? I bought one. A single, beautiful carpet. I gave it to my mother. A lovely gesture, sure, but I left a fortune in craftsmanship on that floor for the lack of a larger suitcase and a shred of mercantile instinct.

Later, after an arduous trek into the mountains of Darjeeling, I found a family weaving magnificent Tibetan carpets. They were dirt cheap. I could have funded their children's education for a year. I bought one. Just one. I gave it to a friend as a housewarming gift. He loved it. He also, apparently, loved the company of moths, who devoured it with the relish of a gourmand at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I had trekked for days to provide a feast for insects.

The breaking point, or rather the making point, was my daughter, Silje. She inherited my travel bug, but mercifully, also a fully functioning prefrontal cortex.

She watched me sigh over a photo of that moth-eaten carpet.

“Let me get this straight,” she said, sipping her coffee. “You find amazing things handmade by talented artisans. You have an emotional connection to them. You then… buy one, or none, and give them away to be devoured by pests. You are a philanthropist of regret.”

“You simplify a complex artistic dilemma,” I replied.

“It’s not a dilemma, Pappa. It’s a failure to capitalize on beauty. It’s a tragedy in three acts: discovery, admiration, and abandonment.”

She saw not a lifetime of regret, but a business plan. A very specific, slightly neurotic business plan.

“Right,” she said, closing the laptop lid on the moth-eaten carpet with finality. “We start a shop. For all the things you loved and left. For all the people who, like you, watched those boxes in Delhi and thought ‘what a hassle,’ and are now kicking themselves.”

And so, La Mode Clothing was born. Now, instead of just wistfully describing the “vibrant threads of an intricately woven shirt” I saw in Guatemala, we actually sell it. Instead of trying to mail a solid teak coffee table from Bali piece-by-piece in padded envelopes (a dark period I don’t like to talk about), we use a reliable shipping partner. We embrace the hassle so you don't have to.

Silje handles the shops, the logistics, and stopping me from trying to pay for things with interpretive dance. I handle the “quest,” which is just a fancy word for me finally buying all the beautiful things I want, but now with a credit card and a mission.

Driven by my own history of regret, we’ve even launched our “Request a Rescue” service. If someone messages us, saying, “I had the most amazing wooden bowl in a little shop in Helsinki ten years ago and I’ve thought about it every day since!” Challenge accepted. If I’m in Finland I will find that bowl, and become a souvenir-seeking superhero.

There was a time before ATMs. Before mobile banking. Before you could tap your phone and watch money disappear into the ether. A time when travellers carried wads of cash, travellers cheques, and a whole lot of hope.

It was the good old days. And the good old days, I learned, were full of opportunities.

I was in Lahore Pakistan, running low on funds, when a man approached me on the street. He had the kind of face that said "I know something you don't know."

"You want to sell your travellers cheques?" he asked.

I blinked. Travellers cheques were meant to be cashed at banks. Not sold to strangers on street corners. This was clearly dodgy. But I was a crafty old fox, even back then, and I had a plan.

"Maybe," I said. "But not today."

The catch, I assumed, was that I wouldn’t be able to get new ones after I'd sold them. They'd been signed, stamped, or somehow marked as used. Selling them would be like selling a ticket that had already been punched. But I had an idea.

I went to the Amex bank. It was a little frightening—banks in foreign countries always are. The guards. The queues. The feeling that you're one wrong form away from being deported. But I was on a mission.

I reported my checks were stolen, and had a letter from the police station. They gave me new travellers cheques. Clean. Unused. Unmarked. Then I returned to my hotel, locked them in my room, and waited.

Sure enough, the man reappeared. As if he'd been watching my every move. As if he had a sixth sense for tourists with fresh paper in their pockets.

"You ready now?" he asked.

"Let's talk."

He bought the old cheques. The ones I'd already reported missing. The ones that were, by any reasonable standard, worthless.

I pocketed the cash. He pocketed the cheques. We both walked away happy. And I still had the new ones in the hotel.

Now, I'm not saying I was a genius. I'm saying the system was built for people who didn't think. And I thought.

Delhi was a different story. Word on the traveller grapevine was that refugees at a certain camp were buying passports. Desperate people who needed papers. I had a passport. I wasn't using it at that exact moment. Could I sell it? Replace it at the embassy? It seemed like a foolproof plan.

Another tourist and I decided to investigate. We went to the camp. We walked around, looking for buyers. We tried to make eye contact with people who might be in the market for a British passport.

But we quickly realised something: how exactly do you find people who want to buy passports? You can't exactly walk up to someone and whisper, "Psst. You wanna buy a passport?"

It was awkward. We spoke to a few people. They gave us strange looks. One man told us to come back later. We decided later wasn't going to happen. We left. The passport stayed with me. No arrests were made. No transactions were completed.

It was a noble failure. Or a lucky escape. I'm still not sure which.

One thing I've always done, and continue to do to this day, is travel with cash. Good old-fashioned physical currency. Not for the romance of it. Because in many countries, cash is still king.

Colombo Sri Lanka, was a particularly good earner. I usually took £50 notes with me. Crisp. Clean. Easy to exchange. The rates were good. Sometimes very good. You'd walk into a money changer, hand over a note, and get back a thick wad of rupees that felt like winning a small lottery.

India and Sri Lanka were great for cash. Iran too. But not all countries have good exchange rates. You learn quickly which ones reward the paper and which ones punish it.

In the old days, selling old electronics was a reliable hustle. A Walkman. A radio. A camera. Anything with a brand name. The locals wanted it, and they paid well for it.

I sold a few things. Nothing scandalous. A used cassette player here. An old watch there. Enough to fund a few extra nights in a decent hotel.

Today, you can still sell old phones. But the margins are thinner. Everyone has a phone. Everyone knows the value. The golden age of electronics hustling is over.

Travelling in the old days was a different experience. You had to be resourceful. You had to be clever. You had to be willing to walk into an Amex bank and then walk straight out again with a fistful of paper that might or might not be useful.

Would I recommend any of these strategies today? Probably not. The world is more regulated. Banks are more suspicious. And the fine line between "creative finance" and "borderline fraud" is a lot thinner.

But I still take cash. I still keep my eyes open. And I still remember the time I sold worthless travellers cheques to a man who probably knew they were worthless, but paid for them anyway.

Those were the days.

WARNING

Never do business with a money exchanger if a guide has taken you there. If a guide leads you to an exchange shop, you're paying for his commission. The rate will be worse. The fees will be hidden. And you'll walk out with less than you should have.

It was 1986. The Cold War was still cold. America had just bombed Libya. And I was sitting on a coach at the Turkish-Iranian border, clutching a Sony Walkman like it was a holy relic.

Inside my bag I had many cassettes including Miles Davis, James Brown and Propaganda.

I had no idea they were about to become my passport to trouble.

The Iranian soldiers boarded our coach with the efficiency of men who had done this a thousand times. One of them pointed at me. "Your cassettes."

I pulled a few out. Miles Davis, James Brown and Propaganda. The soldier examined them. He had no idea who these people were, but something told him they were dangerous.

"These are music," I said. "Just music."

He looked at me. He looked at the cassettes. The entire coach was silent. Then he shook his head, muttered something in Farsi, and let me keep them. Music was banned in Iran

What I didn't tell him was that my music was exactly the kind of thing that would have blown his mind. Miles Davis. Electric jazz. James Brown. "Living in America." At a time when America had just bombed Libya. And Propaganda. A German synth-pop album about power and revolution. If he'd actually listened, I'd still be in an Iranian prison.

A few weeks later, in Quetta, Pakistan, I tested Miles Davis on some new friends. Three local brothers, all hospitable, all curious.

The oldest brother brought out the pipe. I brought out my Walkman.

"Listen to this," I said, handing him the headphones.

I pressed play. Miles Davis started. Electric jazz. Horns swirling. Synths buzzing. I watched his face. His eyes went bloodshot. His expression changed slowly, like a sunrise—but in the direction of confusion.

He listened for a full minute. Then he pulled off the headphones, shook his head, and handed them back.

"What is this?" he asked.

"It's jazz. Electric jazz."

He shook his head again. The younger brothers tried. They looked equally baffled. No tabla. No sitar. No familiar rhythms. Just sounds. Beautiful, chaotic, utterly foreign sounds.

I learned something that day. Music isn't universal. The feeling behind it can be. But the form—the sound, the style, the context—that's cultural. That's specific. That's you.

I finally made it to India. It took me 3 months overland through France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

In Delhi, I stayed at a cheap travellers hotel in Connaught Place. One of the travellers in our dormitory had a large cassette player (to sell, at this time India had strict import rules, we would sell our Walkmans, cameras and music boxes)—a proper music box. People took turns playing their tapes.

Dire Straits was popular among travellers. Easy listening. Familiar. Comfortable.

I decided it was time for something different. I put on Propaganda. "A Secret Wish." German electro-pop. Synths. Beats. Vocals that sounded like they were recorded in a bunker.

The room went quiet. I watched their faces. Confusion. Intrigue. Then nodding. Then approval. It actually went down very well.

It was the opposite of the Pakistani brothers' reaction. In Quetta, Miles Davis was too foreign. In Delhi, Propaganda was just foreign enough.

But not all experiments succeeded.

In Dahab, Egypt, I tried New Order and Joy Division. "Heart and Soul." "Decades." "Atmosphere." "In a Lonely Place."

The music was too dark. Too introspective for the bright Egyptian sun. People shifted uncomfortably. Conversations faltered. Someone asked if I had anything more "upbeat."

I learned that context matters. A song that works in a Delhi dormitory might not work in a Dahab café.

In Calcutta, I was searching for something specific. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The Qawwali singer. I wanted "Allah Hoo."

I found a small cassette shop in a narrow lane. Traditional Muslim man behind the counter. "Do you have Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? Allah Hoo?"

"No," he said. "Sorry. I don't have Qawwali."

I was about to leave. Then he spoke again. "But I have jazz. Miles Davis. You want Miles Davis?"

I blinked. I was in Calcutta, looking for Qawwali, and he was offering me Miles Davis.

I laughed. "You have Miles Davis. But not Nusrat."

He shrugged. "Miles Davis sells. Qawwali, not so much. Tourists want Miles. Locals want Bollywood."

I bought the Wayne Shorter “Phantom Navigator” cassette. Not because I needed another cassette. But because the moment was too perfect to pass up.

Much later, in Kovalam, I discovered something unexpected. I was into an Indian singer called Himesh Reshammiya. I loved the remix of "Tera Suroor."

My Indian girlfriend's children had never heard these songs. They are southern Indians, too disconnected from mainstream Hindi Bollywood.

They asked for the CD. I gave it to them.

Here I was, a foreigner, introducing Indians to Indian music. The music of their own country. The songs they should have grown up with, but somehow missed.

Music connects us. But it also reveals how different we are. The gaps. The cultural distances.

In Iran, I almost got arrested for music I couldn't even play. In Pakistan, I confused three brothers with electric jazz. In Delhi, I surprised a dormitory with German electro-pop. In Egypt, I killed the mood with Joy Division. In Calcutta, I walked out with Wayne Shorter instead of Nusrat. And in Kovalam, I gave children back their own culture.

The cassette seller in Calcutta taught me that music is commerce as much as art. What sells tells you something about what people want. Miles Davis in Pakistan was never going to land. But Propaganda in Delhi worked because it was strange enough to be interesting. Joy Division in Dahab failed because the setting was wrong. Himesh in Kovalam worked because it was never about me—it was about reconnecting people to their own culture.

And sometimes, when you play your music for someone who doesn't get it, what you're really doing is showing them where you're from. And hoping they'll show you where they're from in return.

I still have those cassettes somewhere. The Walkman is long gone, but the memories remain. Miles Davis. James Brown. Propaganda. New Order. Joy Division. Himesh. Nusrat, even though I never found him in Calcutta.

Over the years, I kept returning to Kovalam like a loyal drunk to his favourite bar. The beach was lovely, sure. But the real draw was the people. Not the tourists who came and went like the tide. The regulars. The characters. The ones who left you with a story you'd never dare tell your mother.

Let me introduce you to a few.

I met Paddy many times over the years. He was a character in the grand Irish tradition: he liked a drink. Not unusual. But his relationship with alcohol was… let's call it "enthusiastic."

One season, his wife had organised their son's wedding in Germany. The day they were due to depart, I popped round to their hotel to say goodbye. I was greeted at the door by his wife, who was not smiling. In fact, she looked very unhappy.

"Go in," she said, pointing a shaking finger toward the room. "And see the state of Paddy."

I walked in. There he was, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking like he'd gone twelve rounds with a concrete wall. Two black eyes. Bruises across his cheeks. His nose slightly off-centre.

"What happened to you?" I asked.

He mumbled something about the night before. Apparently, he'd gone out, had a few too many, and decided to share his honest opinion of India with a group of locals. They, in turn, shared their honest opinion of him. With their fists.

His wife stood in the doorway, arms crossed, radiating the kind of cold fury that only decades of marriage can produce. "The wedding is tomorrow," she said. "In Germany. He's supposed to be giving a speech."

Paddy looked at me with his one good eye. "Don't suppose you know a good makeup artist?"

I did not. He gave the speech looking like a battered boxer. Lets be honest, his appearance was not shock to his family.

Another Kovalam regular was a Greek guy who had somehow become an expert on cannabis. Not a dealer, exactly. More like a wandering botanist with a very specific passion.

One afternoon, I saw him crossing the beach toward the hotels, walking with the determined shuffle of a man on a mission. He spotted me.

"Hi, how you doing?" I said.

He didn't answer with pleasantries. He just pressed something into my hand. It looked like a cigarette butt. A sad, tiny, unassuming little thing.

"Smoke this," he said. Then he walked away.

The hotel worker who was with me looked at the little butt, then at me. We shrugged. We lit it.

God, it was strong.

We sat in the room for two hours, completely incapable of movement. Not sleepy. Just… melted. If someone had offered us one lakh rupees to stand up, we would have apologised and declined.

When the Greek was finally leaving Kovalam at the end of the season, he gave me a parting gift.

I met a couple of Israelis on the beach. Friendly, relaxed, clearly experienced. I told them about the Greek's parting gift. And asked them to roll a joint.

They put so much in I had to laugh to myself . But they were the experts, so I kept quiet. When they handed it to me, I waved it away. "It's okay, it's for you."

They shrugged and lit up.

Three hours later, I came back down the beach. They were sitting in exactly the same spot. Exactly. Right in the blazing midday sun. Unmoving. Unblinking. Their eyes were open, but nobody was home.

"You okay?" I asked.

One of them slowly turned his head. It took about forty-five seconds. He smiled. "Yes," he said. "Just... thinking."

I left them there. By sunset, they'd moved approximately two metres. Toward the shade. A personal victory.

Let me move the scene to Tangalla, Sri Lanka. A place where the waves crash hard and the memories crash harder.

One season, a group of English lads decided they were going to break the local record for arrack whiskey consumption. The hotel staff, to their credit, took this very seriously. They were ready with water, towels, and a lot of moral support. When the lads began to wobble, the staff physically walked them around the grounds to "burn off the effects" and keep the attempt alive.

The record wasn't broken. But the next morning was the funniest thing I've ever seen.

The beach at Tangalla is steep. The waves don't gently lap; they hurl themselves onto the sand like they're personally offended. The lads decided, in their infinite wisdom, that taking on these waves would be the perfect way to sober up.

One of them waded in. He stood there, knee-deep, as a monster wave approached. You could see the indecision on his face: ride it? dive under? run?

He did none of those things. The wave picked him up, spun him like a ragdoll, and threw him back onto the beach like a piece of driftwood. He lay there in the sand, gasping, while his mates howled with laughter.

He never went in the ocean again. For the rest of the trip, he sat on the beach, and watched the others from a safe distance.

One day, when the tide was out, I noticed the reef was exposed. On a whim, I strung a piece of net between two coral heads. The locals laughed. "Crazy tourist," they said. I laughed too. It was just a silly experiment.

The next morning, the tide went out again. I walked down to check my ridiculous net.

There was a three-foot shark caught in it. I stared. The shark stared back. Neither of us had planned this.

That evening, everyone at the hotel ate shark steaks. I became a local legend for about twenty-four hours. It's not every day a tourist accidentally catches a predator with a piece of string and sheer dumb luck.

The hotel, Tangalla had a resident pet monkey. It lived chained up behind the rooms, charming guests with its tiny hands and cheeky personality. There was only one problem: the monkey was terrified of other monkeys.

If a wild troop wandered down from the trees, this little creature would shriek, hide behind the nearest tourist, and refuse to come out until the "intruders" had left. It was the most absurd thing I've ever seen – a monkey who needed therapy for monkey-related trauma.

One of the hotel staff, a young man eager to impress, decided to pick up a lion fish that had washed into a rock pool. Now, for those who don't know: lion fish have venomous spines. They are not for cuddling.

He learned this the hard way. The sting was immediate and spectacular. He spent the next several hours with his hand in a bucket of cold water, cursing his own curiosity in three languages. He survived. His pride did not.

I can't leave out the rather fat tourist who sat down on a toilet in one of the rooms and, well... the toilet didn't survive. There was a crack, a groan, and then a crash. He emerged from the bathroom looking like a man who had witnessed a war crime. The staff, to their eternal credit, handled it with absolute professionalism. They simply brought in a new toilet and pretended nothing had happened.

I went back to Tangalla after the tsunami. But it wasn't the same. The beach was still beautiful. The waves still crashed. But some of the old characters had moved on. The monkey was gone, as was the hotel.

The memories, though? They flood back every time I close my eyes. The shark.the monkey. The English lad getting thrown by a wave. The lion fish. The toilet.

I don't believe in coincidences. Not really. But when a 72-foot-tall Hindu monkey god keeps appearing on your travels, you start to wonder.

It began in the north. After a rickshaw tour around the islands above Jaffna—a landscape so empty it made the moon look crowded—we were heading back to the city. I'd already been to the southernmost tip of India, where I'd been chased by what looked like an entire village of children. The north of Sri Lanka, by contrast, seemed to have no children at all. No people at all, really. Just salt flats, silence, and the occasional fisherman staring at the horizon like he'd given up on conversation.

Then, in the middle of nowhere, we stopped. There it was: a statue of Hanuman. Not a small shrine tucked behind a tree. A proper statement. Seventy-two feet of loyal, devoted, monkey-faced deity staring across the town like he was waiting for someone to arrive.

"Seventy-two feet," I said to my driver. "That's..." I did the math in my head. "Twenty-two metres?"

He nodded, as if this were perfectly normal. "Hanuman is everywhere here," he said.

I laughed. I didn't know how right he was.

As usual Nuwara Eliya was cold. Damp. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and makes you grateful for bad tourist attractions. So when a taxi driver offered to take me to an old temple outside town, I agreed. Why not? Spread a little cash. See a thing. Get out of the drizzle.

We drove up into the hills. The driver pointed at a mountain. "Look," he said.

I looked. A natural weathered mountain. Rocky, grey, the kind of geological formation geologists probably have names for. Then I saw it. The face. Not a rock formation that looked a bit like a face if you squinted. An actual face. Hanuman. Unmistakable. A natural rock formation that had somehow arranged itself into the profile of a monkey god gazing across the valley.

I stared. "That's..." I couldn't find the words.

"Yes," said the driver, as if this were also perfectly normal.

Back in Colombo, a week later. I was sitting with a Sri Lankan friend, recounting my strange sightings. "Hanuman keeps appearing," I said. "First a statue in Jaffna. Then a mountain in the hill country. It's like he's following me."

My friend listened patiently. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring. A small metal Hanuman. Exactly like the one I owned back home.

I blinked. "That's the same key ring."

He shrugged. "Maybe you're not the only one he follows."

Now, I know what you're thinking. Coincidence. Selective attention. Seeing what you want to see. And you're probably right. But here's the thing: Hanuman is known for his qualities. Loyalty. Patience. Humility. Courage. And I like to think—perhaps foolishly—that I share some of those.

Loyal? I've returned to the same Moroccan city for twenty years. Patient? I've spent hours haggling for silk bedding I didn't need. Humble? I once let a snake bite me and didn't even complain to the waiter. Courage? I travelled overland from London to India via Iran in the 1980s. That counts for something.

So maybe Hanuman wasn't following me. Maybe I was just noticing him because, in some small way, he was already there.

Or maybe—just maybe—the monkey god was keeping an eye on a traveller who kept wandering into places he probably shouldn't have been.

Let me start by saying this: I know the world is a big place. I know that every city has its good and bad. I know that often, the problem isn't the place—it's the traveller. But sometimes, a place gets under your skin for all the wrong reasons. And sometimes, you just have to admit it.

So here it is. A confession. A list of places I didn't love. And why, despite my better judgment, I still harbour a tiny grudge.

My first trip to Tangiers, I was green. Properly green. I'd been to Canada as a kid, Amsterdam a few times, France, Spain. But Morocco was the first place that felt completely, utterly different. The language, the smell, the chaos. My friend Martin and I sat in our hotel room that first night, laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all.

We'd been dragged to shops by touts who smelled fresh meat. Not knowing how to behave, we simply stood up, declared "No way am I buying a carpet," and practically sprinted out of the shop. All we wanted was a smoke. We got the smoke. But we were so gullible we bought enough to last us to India and back.

The second time I visited Tangiers, I was alone. I'd actually planned a quiet break in Spain—a rest from fatherhood, courtesy of my wife. But Spain bored me. So I hopped on a ferry and returned to the chaos. The touts were still there, but I had a plan: buy a train ticket to Fez and leave. Simple. The only real problem came when plain-clothed police searched me for drugs instead of telling the touts to leave me alone. Confirmed my view: Tangiers wasn't for me.

Then I came back with my wife and children. Third time. And it was different. It was Ramadan, so the pace was slower, the atmosphere more relaxed. We took breakfast in the new town. A friendly local had showed me a restaurant that was open. One tout clung on, but I lost him while searching for Arabic singer CDs a friend had requested. When he demanded money, I said, "Why? You left me. I did it myself."

My wife knew I'd handled it. I was the hero. My confidence returned. And now? Tangiers is my favourite Moroccan city after Agadir. I actually love it. So maybe I was wrong about Tangiers. Maybe I just needed to grow up.

Varanasi. The touts there are a special breed. I ended up in a huge row with one unlucky fellow who was trying to get me to change money. I handed him a 500 rupee note and said, "Change that." He became angry. "Tourists like you make me sick," he said.

"I didn't speak to you," I replied. "You spoke to me."

Childish? Absolutely. True? Also absolutely. I left the next day. I have never returned. I do not plan to. Some grudges are worth keeping.

I don't know if I was unlucky. But Athens ripped me off. I went to a bar. A local girl sat next to me. I bought her a drink. A very, very expensive drink. I soon gathered she was a "party girl." After a few more very expensive drinks, I suggested she come with me and leave the place.

One of the Greek men stepped forward. "No. She cannot leave with you."

I was thrown out. What a rip-off. I know I can't blame all of Greece for one bad bar. But I do. And I haven't been back.

In Thailand, Phra Nang Beach. We arrived by longboat. It was stunning. The little cove was paradise. Then we walked up the hillside. The amount of restaurants and hotels was unbelievable. We kept walking to the top and down the other side. I have never been so disappointed. Not the place. The tourism. The overdevelopment. The feeling that paradise had been paved over.

I know you can't blame everybody for the bad experiences. But I do. I harbour grudges. If I returned to these places, I'm sure my view would change—just like it did with Tangiers. But the world is so big, and returning to places I didn't enjoy is not top of my list.

They say travel broadens the mind. For me, it's also broadened the palate—sometimes willingly, sometimes by ambush, and once by a man who snatched a giant bug out of the air and tossed it into a frying pan before I could protest. But let's start at the beginning.

On a student trip to France, eight of us piled into a white transit van with dreams of cheap wine and cheaper campsites. Those dreams were dashed just outside Bordeaux, in a small village called Cavignac, when the van gave up the ghost. The local villagers took pity on us stranded students, and by Monday night, after the van was finally fixed, they decided to send us off properly.

They made us snails. Escargot. Garlicky, buttery, and honestly? Delicious. Washed down with Ricard, the aniseed kick of pastis warming our student souls. I've eaten snails many times since, but never with the same mix of gratitude and mild terror as that first time.

Sri Lanka, a few years later, in Hikkaduwa when it was still a sleepy fishing village, not the tourist hub it is today. I was staying in a small guesthouse, and the wife asked me if I liked calamari.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I've never tried it."

Her eyes lit up with the gleam of a culinary missionary. She made me a spicy version that evening—tender rings of squid in a fragrant curry of coconut and chilli. I said yes, it was very tasty.

She took that as a commission. Every single day after that, I was served calamari. Breakfast? Calamari. Lunch? Calamari. Dinner? You guessed it. By the end of my stay, I had developed what I can only describe as a calamari aversion. I haven't eaten it since. Funny how that works.

The same thing happened with salmon in Norway. I ate so much beautiful, fresh, grilled salmon that I now treat it like an ex-lover: fond memories, no desire to reunite.

One thing I have eaten only once, and will never eat again, is raw buffalo. I was in the Himalayas, on the India-Nepal border, attending a wedding. The locals were generous, the celebrations were joyful, and somewhere in the festivities, I was presented with raw buffalo meat. I ate it. I even washed it down with the strong local spirit they kept pressing into my hand. Let me tell you, no amount of spirit makes raw buffalo taste like anything other than raw buffalo.

France again, another trip, I tried horse meat. Perfectly good, perfectly edible. But once was enough.

Sri Lanka again, another culinary discovery. I was offered jackfruit curry, nothing strange about that. But they also made me a curry from the giant seeds. Tasty, earthy, surprisingly good. The kind of thing you'd never find on a restaurant menu.

Then there was Northern Thailand, just outside Chiang Mai. I was sitting with the guesthouse owner one evening, enjoying the cool air, when a giant bug flew past—a whirring, buzzing monster of the insect world. Without missing a beat, the owner struck it out of the air, grabbed it, tossed it into a frying pan, and presented it to me.

"It's good," he said.

It was. Crispy. Good texture. Dipped in a chilli mix, it was genuinely tasty. Not something I'd order at a restaurant, but when a man catches a bug and cooks it for you, you eat it.

And finally, Morocco. I was walking through a local market when I noticed camel hooves dangling at the butcher's stall. Intrigued? Compelled? I had no choice but to try camel meat. It was a bit fatty, but not bad. Not bad at all.

So there you have it. Snails, calamari (too much calamari), raw buffalo, horse, jackfruit seeds, giant fried bug, and camel. I've eaten my way across continents, sometimes with delight, sometimes with regret, and once with a man who weaponised a frying pan against an unsuspecting insect.

For whatever reason—and let's be honest, it was probably a bad one—I decided to take the bus from Calcutta to Darjeeling instead of the famous toy train. The winding mountain railway is world-famous for its views. The bus, however, was famous for something else entirely: watching locals hang off the sides like human barnacles as we careened up the mountain roads. I was not let down.

The views were spectacular. The Himalayas rose in the distance, tea plantations carpeted the hillsides, and through the window, I had a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth: Indian men casually dangling from doorways, gripping roof rails, and generally treating a 3,000-metre ascent as if it were a gentle Sunday stroll. By the time we reached Darjeeling, I'd already had my money's worth.

Darjeeling was like every new place I'd visited in India—completely different from the last. Here, the Tibetans were everywhere. Their food, their fashion, their prayer flags fluttering in the mountain air. It felt less like India and more like a little slice of Lhasa transported into the clouds.

I spent my first day wandering through the Tibetan craft shops, where I learned a few secrets. The older the highland sheep wool gets, I was told, the more the fibres open up and the softer the carpet becomes. But here's the kicker—you have to brush them. Not hoover. Brush. Important distinction. The same with thangkas, those stunning silk paintings: the older they are, the more they're worth. Age adds value.

If I was going to invest in this ancient craftsmanship, I decided to go straight to the source. The Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre was about a 45-minute walk from town, and it was worth every step. I watched women working with natural dyes, bundles of wool stacked high, carpets taking shape on massive looms. It was romantic, honestly. The dedication, the tradition, the sheer Tibetanness of it all.

I bought a rug. Of course I bought a rug. It was a dragon—so beautiful, so different from the carpets of Morocco and Iran. Thicker, softer, more... Himalayan. I also bought a thangka, painted on silk with natural pigments, stunning in every detail. The prices were fixed, they said, but I didn't argue. They were cheap. The small rug was $100, the thangka $15—this was the 90s, remember—and I think they may have let me have both for a hundred anyway. The important thing wasn't the price. It was knowing that my money helped keep a tradition alive, supported a community, and earned me a place in the cosmic karma of craft appreciation.

I still have the thangka. It hangs at the top of my stairs, the first thing people see when they head to the bathroom. It's a conversation starter, a piece of Himalayan soul on my wall.

The rug, however, met a tragic end.

I gave it to a friend. A gift of beauty, warmth, and centuries of Tibetan weaving tradition. He did not understand what he'd been given. The moths, however, understood perfectly. They feasted. They celebrated. They held a week-long banquet on my beautiful dragon rug until nothing was left but memories and a fine layer of dust.

Tehran, 1988. The Iran-Iraq war was still fresh in the memory. The headlines screamed of hostages and geopolitics. And me? I was on a coach from Turkey, a naive 20-something with a Sony Walkman, a backpack full of optimism, and absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

The border at Bazargan was my first reality check. Iranian soldiers boarded our coach, their eyes scanning for contraband. Everyone nervously emptied their bags. Then one of them pointed at me. "Your cassettes."

My cassettes. These weren't just tapes. This was Miles Davis, You’re Under Arrest (true). This was Propaganda's 'Duel'—essential listening for any self-respecting 80s traveller. There was no way on earth they were taking them.

I clutched my Walkman like a shield. The soldier stared. I stared back. The entire coach held its breath. And then, to the sound of muffled snorts and suppressed giggles from my fellow passengers, the soldier shrugged, gestured for me to follow him, and marched me off the bus.

I was led to a small hut. Inside, a coal-fired brazier glowed warm against the mountain chill. A group of soldiers sat around it, drinking tea. They gestured for me to sit. One of them, through broken English, asked the question: "You like Thatcher? Reagan?"

Ah. This was a test. I knew my answer. "No," I said firmly. "Not at all."

Their faces broke into wide grins. Tea was poured. They wanted to know about England, about music, about why a young man would visit their country alone during such times. We chatted like old friends until a shout from outside announced the coach was ready to leave. They shook my hand warmly. "Go with safety, friend."

When I climbed back aboard, the coach erupted. Clapping. Cheering. Whistling. They thought I'd been interrogated, grilled, possibly waterboarded. They had no idea I'd just had the warmest welcome of my entire trip.

Tehran was a city of contradictions. A fellow passenger from the coach, a kind local, insisted on helping me find a hotel. After we dumped my bag, he drove me around the city, proudly pointing out landmarks. Then he stopped the car, grinned, and said, "Look! McDonalds!"

I squinted at what he was pointing at. It wasn't McDonalds. It was a three-arched concrete statue, vaguely resembling the famous golden arches. He laughed. "McIran," he explained. A piece of 1970s social satire, critiquing Americanisation, that had somehow survived the revolution. It was the most Tehran thing I'd ever seen.

Everywhere I walked, the revolution was present. Army lorries sat parked on street corners, their windscreens adorned with pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini—festooned with tinsel, like a bizarre Christmas display. Soldiers watched from every corner, but they never interfered. "Don't worry," my new friend assured me. "They don't speak English. They're just... watching."

In a carpet shop on Ferdowsi Square, I made one of the greatest mistakes of my life. The carpets were beautiful. The prices, paid in dollars, were almost embarrassingly cheap. I bought one. Just one. And had it shipped home. To this day, I kick myself. I should have filled a container.

Leaving Tehran was an education in itself. I flagged a taxi for the coach station, unaware of the local custom of shared taxis. A fully veiled woman climbed into the back seat. Then, to my astonishment, she spoke. In perfect English. "Where are you from?"

Her name was Goli. She was educated, curious, and utterly warm. She gave me her address and insisted I visit if I ever returned. In that moment, I understood something profound: the Iranian people and their government were two very different things.

The long coach journey to the Pakistani border was a blur of dust and heat. At one stop, I made a cultural blunder. It was scorching, so I'd stripped down to an Adidas sports vest—perfectly normal back home. Several men approached me and, without malice, slapped my bare arms. Not hard, but firmly. A gentle reminder: modesty matters here. I quickly found a shirt.

The food at these roadside stops was simple but good—rice, a red onion, a piece of kebab meat. The toilets, however, were a different story. A hole in the ground and a bucket of water. Let's just say my technique needed work.

When I finally reached the border with Pakistan, I thought I'd seen it all. I was wrong. Pakistan was another level of culture shock entirely—but that, as they say, is another story.

Looking back, that trip taught me more than any guidebook could have. Iran in 1988 wasn't the monolith the news portrayed. It was a land of warm tea, unexpected friendships, and people who, despite everything, were curious about the world and delighted that someone was curious about them. They called me brave for coming alone. But really, I was just lucky enough to see past the headlines.

There's a reason I'm glad social media didn't exist in the 1980s. Sure, I enjoy a well-edited travel reel as much as the next person. But if smartphones and TikTok had been around during my student days, the evidence of our worst holiday disaster would be forever archived online. Instead, it's just a story we tell at dinner parties—one that still makes us wince.

It began with a beautiful illusion: a friend's uncle had a house in the Italian countryside outside Venice, and we were welcome to stay. Endless pasta, cheap wine, la dolce vita on a backpacker's budget. What could go wrong?

The answer arrived in bottles of homemade grappa from a village near Rimini. The details are hazy, but I remember a balcony, a low stone wall, and my friend Claude attempting to navigate both after one too many sips. He didn't make it. The wall held firm; Claude did not. He tumbled into the entrance of an underground car park, and somewhere in that fall, his spleen took the hit. We didn't know that yet. All we knew was that we helped him inside and collapsed into bed.

Here's where the modern content creator would have struck gold. Sirens. Flashing lights. Paramedics wheeling Claude away on a stretcher. And my other friend and me? Dead asleep. Not a stir. Not a glance out the window. We slept through the entire emergency like we'd taken sedatives.

Morning arrived with sunshine and a troubling question from the breakfast table: "Where's Claude?"

The uncle didn't look up from his coffee. "Ospebdal," he said, and the word landed like a slap. The aunt's silence was somehow worse. In broken Italian, we pieced together the scene we'd missed: the ambulance, the neighbours, the shame. By noon, our bags were packed and waiting by the door. We'd worn out our welcome in under 48 hours.

Homeless in the Italian countryside, we discoverd a forgotten hotel voucher buried in our travel documents. That's how we ended up in Rimini—not by choice, but by necessity. It was gaudy, tourist-choked, and absolutely perfect for two idiots who needed to lie low.

We eventually made it to the hospital, grapes in hand, ready to play the role of concerned friends. Of course, Claude's uncle was already there. The look he gave us could have curdled milk. We stood in the doorway like guilty schoolchildren while he made it abundantly clear, without saying much at all, that we were the architects of this disaster.

Leaving the hospital felt like a scene from a Fellini film. The uncle had gathered what appeared to be the entire extended family on the pavement. They gestured. They shouted. They cursed us in rapid Italian as we power-walked away, heads down, trying to look sorry while also desperately wanting to disappear.

Claude's father arrived the next day, calm in a way that felt unsettling. We stuck to our story: we remembered nothing. Our logic was simple: only complete idiots would keep showing up at the hospital if they'd actually pushed their friend off a wall. Flawed? Sure. But it worked.

With Claude recovering, we faced our final challenge: the hotel bill. When we casually asked the receptionist how much we owed, expecting it to be covered, we learned the truth. It was not covered. And we had absolutely no money left.

What followed was a masterpiece of amateur subterfuge. First, we tossed our bags out the first-floor window into some bushes. Then we strolled through the lobby with our most innocent "crazy tourist" grins, waved at the clerk, and announced we were just popping out for a limoncello before our flight. "Back soon!"

We were not.

We grabbed our bags from the shrubs and power-walked toward the airport shuttle stop. A resort driver saw us and called out, "Why aren't you waiting at your hotel?" Without missing a beat, we yelled back, "Just eager to get to the airport!" He shrugged.

Then came the twist. The shuttle's first stop was, of course, our hotel. As we pulled into the driveway, we slid down in our seats, pulling hats over our faces, pretending to nap. We heard the clerk call our names through the open door. Silence. The door closed. The bus moved on.

We didn't breathe properly until the plane left the ground.

That's the beauty of the pre-digital era. No vlog exists of our escape. No footage of Claude's fall. No photo of the uncle's withering glare. Just a memory—embellished, softened, and retold so many times it feels almost like fiction. But it happened. And it taught us something about travel, friendship, and the importance of staying awake when the ambulance arrives.

The roar came first. A sound older than countries, a ceaseless white thunder that was my introduction to a world beyond my own. Niagara Falls, 1973. I was eleven, and the vibration in the pavement traveled up through my shoes, into my bones. The mist was a baptism. This, I thought, was the beginning of everything.

It was. But the first true lesson of travel is that awe has a shadow.

"Pop over to the Detroit Zoo," my aunt said, as if continents were puddles to hop. The American border guard who stopped us did not see a car full of picnickers. He saw a breach. His words, cool and clipped, landed in the back seat where I sat: "Illegal aliens." The term was science-fiction, monstrous. In that charged silence, I felt it—the terrifying power of a line on a map, the fragility of "welcome." My mother's voice, tight with a fear I'd never heard, wove a story of wrong turns and innocent error. We were released, not with a welcome, but with a warning. The mirror showed a receding checkpoint, a gate slammed shut on a boy's simple idea of the world. We were turned back. The adventure had its first, indelible scar.

Canada, then, became a grand, sun-drenched stage for a series of small, personal dramas. My uncle's Ford Mustang became a chrome bullet on the highway, the speedometer needle trembling at 100 km/h—a lawful velocity that felt like treason against gravity. A simple Frisbee, launched with innocent force, became a white blur of fate that found my aunt's temple with a sickening thwack as she carried salvation in the form of ice pops. The joyous afternoon froze, a silent tableau of shock and melting treats.

Then, the lake. Lake Ontario, a vast, placid blue that lied. On my lilo, I was king of a gentle world—until the water beneath changed its mind. A silent, muscular current took hold. My frantic paddling was a joke against a force that wanted to pull me into the deep, open throat of the lake. The shore didn't recede; it abandoned me. The rescue was not gentle; it was a violent yank from the abyss, a gasp of air that tasted like panic and luck. The lake had shown me it could take as easily as it could reflect the sun.

Yet, in the spaces between these brushes with consequence, magic was being forged. I learned the sacred, satisfying crack of a baseball meeting a bat. My hand was swallowed by the oiled leather of a catcher's mitt, a smell of effort and earth. Evenings were rituals of transformation, spearing marshmallows onto sticks and holding them over fire until they bloomed into gooey, blackened stars. I collected felt pennants—Toronto, Niagara, Ontario—not as souvenirs, but as captured fragments of a new reality, bright trophies to pin against the familiar walls of home.

The final curtain fell at the airport. And there he stood: a Mountie. A figure not of this time, in his scarlet serge, a stark, upright brushstroke of authority and myth against the grey terminal chaos. He was the embodiment of the land itself—stern, picturesque, unforgettable. He offered a slight, solemn nod. I stared, my rolled-up pennants in my backpack, already becoming relics.

We travel for the beauty, the culture, the exotic thrill. But sometimes, I suspect, Nature gets bored. It sees another sunburnt tourist with a selfie stick and thinks, "Ah, a new plaything." She doesn't send postcards; she sends invoices, and they're often paid in blood, sweat, and sheer humiliation.

Take my own lesson in Kerala. I was enjoying a blissful dinner by a paddy field, arm dangling idly over a wall. A local snake, apparently taking offence to my casual posture, decided to give me a sharp critique. I spent the next few hours not savoring curry, but in a frantic taxi tour of local "doctors," one of whom prescribed a magical stone. The stone, sadly, did not cure the feeling of being an idiot.

My education in Sri Lanka continued. In the stunning, misty hills of Nuwara Eliya, a fellow traveler and I discovered the potent delights of local arrack. Feeling at one with the emerald landscape, we decided a siesta on the lush greens of the golf course was the height of sophistication. We awoke not refreshed, but as a free buffet for a community of leeches, who had conducted a silent, slimy blood drive while we slept. The Lonely Planet Guide Book was strangely silent on this particular form of communion with nature.

Then there was Ko Chang in Thailand, an island paradise with a dark side. I found a pristine, empty stretch of beach, a perfect sanctuary. Too perfect, as I discovered hours later. The locals had wisely ceded that territory to squadrons of microscopic sand flies. I didn't just get a tan; I got a weeks-long, maddening itch that made me look like a dog with fleas practicing interpretive dance.

The island itself seemed to whisper warnings. Once, trekking back from the beach, I found a clear puddle to rinse my sandy feet. Just as my toes hovered over the water, two baby snakes popped their heads up as if to say, "This is our spa, thank you." I chose gritty toes over a potential new bite mark.

Sometimes, you're just a bystander to Nature's comedy. At the majestic Taj Mahal, a place of sublime love, I witnessed a squirrel decide a fellow tourist was its new tree. It scurried up her leg. She shrieked. The squirrel, startled and terrified, performed the only act of defiance it could in the moment—it anointed her. The sublime gave way to the ridiculous, and the line between awe and "ew" was forever blurred.

Let’s talk about the traveler’s initiation ritual: The Great Airport Rip-Off. You know the one. You stumble off a plane, your soul still in the airplane seat, and you’re immediately expected to engage in high-stakes financial combat with a taxi mafia. It’s like being forced to play poker before you’ve learned the rules of the game.

For years, I approached this like a nervous knight entering a dragon’s den. I’d practiced my “I know what I’m doing” face in the mirror. It made me look like I was trying to remember my own PIN. I’d haggle over a taxi fare like it was a hostage negotiation, only to later realize I’d still paid the “Silly Foreigner Surcharge,” which apparently includes a mandatory, confusing tour of the city.

Then, I cracked the code. It wasn’t a phrase. It wasn’t a glare. It was a beverage.

My strategy for navigating fresh chaos is now embarrassingly simple: I go for a coffee. Not a quick, panicked espresso shot. A slow, sit-down, “I-have-nowhere-better-to-be” coffee. I become a piece of airport furniture.

Take my grand return to Marrakesh after 30 years. I’d heard the horror stories. The taxi sharks at Menara Airport were legendary, their meters allegedly powered by tourists’ tears. Old Me would have girded my loins and charged into battle.

New Me? New Me waddled past the shouting scrum, found the saddest-looking plastic chair in the arrivals hall, and ordered a coffee. I sat. I sipped. I watched the beautiful, sweaty ballet of people being spectacularly ripped off. I was so visibly at peace that a nice man at the next table started chatting. He wasn’t a tout. He was just… a guy. “You know,” he said, nodding like a wise owl, “if you just want the train station, there’s a bus. Right over there. In the car park. 15 dirham. Return ticket.” He might as well have handed me a secret map.

I boarded the bus. It was clean, cool, and contained seven people. Seven! The taxi queue looked like a scene from a disaster movie. I felt like I’d discovered a secret level in the video game of travel.

This “Caffeinated Zen” method has never failed me. In Colombo, after the official taxi desk quoted me a price suitable for moving a small royal family, I had a coffee. A friendly cleaner, seeing my relaxed (read: zonked) aura, casually mentioned, “The rickshaw stand is just around the corner. Out of sight. Better price.” It was like getting a cheat code.

It works for taxis, too. In Agadir, after the flight herd had stampeded, I approached a driver. “Excuse me,” I asked, with the serene tone of someone who has just had a very nice latte, “is there a bus to Souk Inezgane?” He looked at me like I’d asked for a unicorn. “No bus!” he declared. “Oh,” I said, sipping from my invisible cup of calm. “That’s odd. How do people get there, then?” A flicker of doubt crossed his face. He was no longer seeing Sucker #407. He was seeing a weird, calm person who possibly knew something. The price he offered next was… almost human.

The Coffee Principle applies everywhere:

When looking for a place to eat: See a restaurant with a menu in six languages and pictures of the food? Walk on. Find the place where locals are shoveling something delicious from unmarked bowls. Point, smile, enjoy your mystery stew. If you sit with a coffee first, the waiter often just brings you what everyone else is having to save time.

Shopping, of course: The magic phrase isn’t “That’s too much!” It’s “I’m just looking, thanks.” Said with a coffee-drinker’s detachment, it’s a force field. The seller senses your total lack of purchasing urgency and usually decides you’re not worth the cardiovascular effort of a hard sell.

With Touts: “No thank you, I’m fine.” Repeat gently, like a mantra for a meditation app. They get bored. You keep your sanity. Everyone wins.

Remember you are not a moth. You don’t have to fly into the first “HOTEL” sign. Today, of course, we have phones. But even without, walking two streets away from the station often leads to a place where the owner calls you “my friend” and the price doesn’t require a second mortgage.

And the ultimate modern hack? Just make your own dinner. Renting a place with a kitchen isn’t just economical; it’s a triumphant declaration that you will not be paying €18 for a plate of sad pasta tonight. A trip to a local market becomes your own personal episode of a cooking show, just with more pointing and confused smiling.

I travel to get away from it all. This is the lie I tell myself, and my wallet, every single time.

The truth is, I’m a collector of unexpected, often inconvenient, déjà vu. My greatest talent isn’t navigating metro systems or ordering street food without incident. It’s my uncanny ability to stand in the most exotic locations on Earth and mutter, “Huh. This feels a bit like Croydon.”

Take Beirut. A city of such layered, heart-wrenching history it should come with its own sombre documentary soundtrack. I spent a morning in awe before the magnificent blue-domed Muhammad Al-Amin Mosque, feeling profoundly cultured. I crossed the road.

Suddenly, the soundtrack switched to accordion music. I was in Paris. Cobbled streets, fussy little trees, buildings with ornate iron balconies, the smell of strong coffee and Gauloises (though that might have been my imagination). I panicked. Had my flight connection been more literal than I thought? I checked my phone. Still Beirut. I’d travelled 2,500 miles and five minutes later, I’d been teleported another 1,500. My brain short-circuited. I ordered a croissant just to stabilise.

This is what makes Beirut special: contrast as a way of life. Down on the Corniche, I found the pool clubs. Vast, shimmering aquamarine rectangles overlooking the Mediterranean, populated by the impossibly glamorous. It was achingly familiar. Not the glamour—the pool itself. It was the Lido. My childhood’s communal swimming baths in Portsmouth, but with a strict “Members Only” sign and cocktails costing more than my first car. The locals, I was told, made do with the rocky beach next door. A perfectly good sandy beach was a few kilometres away, but it was, apparently, “not cool.” I felt a surge of hometown pride. We’ve been ignoring perfectly good things in favour of worse, more fashionable ones for centuries. Some truths are universal.

My condition worsened. In Pondicherry, India, I was braced for a full sensory assault. And then I turned down a boulevard. Whitewashed colonial villas with yellow shutters, bakeries selling baguettes. France. Not a hint of it, all of it. I half-expected a mime artist. Tunis gave me the same feeling—wide boulevards, café culture, a startlingly Gallic shrug from a waiter. I’d gone to North Africa and ended up in the Mediterranean’s greatest hits album.

But if you really want to leave the planet, you go to Matmata, Tunisia. You stand in a hole in the ground—a traditional troglodyte dwelling—and the universe folds. You are no longer in Tunisia. You are on Tatooine. You half-expect to see a moisture vaporator and a nervous C-3PO. You fight the overwhelming, childish urge to say, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” to the confused guide. You have been transported not just geographically, but galactically. All without a spaceship. Just a beaten-up shared taxi.

Sometimes, the transportation is purely atmospheric. Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka’s hill country: mist, drizzle, rose gardens, and a damp, chilly gloom that seeps into your bones. It’s England. Glorious, sodden, 3pm-in-October England. I found myself craving a terrible cup of tea and a complaint about the weather. I was served a fantastic cup of Ceylon tea and had to complain internally, which felt wrong.

It makes you question the whole enterprise. I remember London’s Chinatown in the 80s, a genuine portal before globalisation made every city have one. It was a thrill. Now, I seek out the Danish countryside in spring, with its thatched cottages, and think, “Ah, just like the Cotswolds.” I fly to the other side of the world to have thoughts my grandmother could have had in her garden.

So, why did I leave in the first place?

Jet lag does something peculiar to perception. It leaves your soul dragging a few continents behind your body, raw and wide open. And in that state, you stop seeing landmarks and start seeing patterns. The pattern I kept tripping over, from the electric swamp of Bangkok to the sun-baked plains of Tamil Nadu, was the shift work of the sacred. It never clocks out.

You see it best where it seems most absurd. Take Patpong. After a night drowned in neon and a surreal, ringside view of two bar girls settling a professional disagreement with their fists, we reeled onto Khao San Road at dawn. We were monuments to poor life choices, eating greasy noodles as a form of archaeological restoration.

That’s when the shift change happened. The women from the bars, still shimmering in last night’s sequins, hair tangled from dance floors and drama, were now calmly placing sticky rice and parcels of food into the alms bowls of passing monks. The orange robes against the disco tops. The bowed, shaven heads beside smudged eyeliner. It wasn’t a contradiction; it was a handover. The night’ economy of transaction had ended; the morning’s economy of merit began. The sacred didn’t judge the profane. It simply waited for its assigned shift.

India taught me this economy is loud, contractual, and auspicious. Watching the Hijras move shop to shop was to see a divine direct debit in action. A community of transgender women would arrive with claps and song, and the shopkeeper, without a hint of annoyance, would hand over cash. It wasn’t charity; it was a payment. Payment for their potent blessings at weddings and births, and insurance against their feared curses. Here, faith was a line item in the daily accounts, a necessary transaction to keep the wheels of fortune greased.

In Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, the sacred owned the clock. You’d be mid-haggle for a sack of lentils when the call would pierce the market din. The muezzin’s voice would flow from the mosque. And instantly, the world stopped. The shopkeeper would give a slight, apologetic nod, drape a cloth over his scales, and click a padlock shut. The entire bazaar would evaporate. For twenty minutes, you were a ghost in a silent city, holding useless money. Then, as if a paused tape had been played, the locks clicked, the cloths were lifted, and the haggling resumed precisely on the last syllable. Time wasn’t linear; it was a series of deep, collective breaths taken in unison.

Sipping my tea, these memories collided with one from my own Norway, not so long ago. The "Holy Saturday" silence. Shops would shutter firmly at 1 p.m., and a thick, Protestant quiet would blanket the town until Monday. The priority, however, was telling: the pubs stayed open. We had our devotions, too—to communion of a different kind, to the private pint and public fellowship. We’d just stopped calling it grace. We’d tidied our sacred away, scheduled it into oblivion.

The revelation wasn't that religion is stronger there. It's that it is unmanaged. It’s not a separate building or day. It’s in the shift pattern. It’s in the ledger. It’s in the locked padlock and the opened palm. In the West, we’ve put the sacred in a soundproofed room with strict visiting hours. We’re baffled when we stumble upon it running a bustling, 24-hour operation in an alleyway, at a market stall, in the tired, generous hands of a girl at dawn.

Let’s get one thing straight: if you try to haggle in Marrakesh, you are not engaging in a timeless cultural tradition. You are participating in a theatre where you have already been cast as The Wallet. The shopkeepers there are Jedi Masters of tourism. They can sense a bargain-hunter from three alleys away, and their opening price includes not just the item, but a pension for their cousin’s goat. I don’t bother. It’s like bringing a butter knife to a dragon fight.

No, for the true connoisseur of the deal, you must go to Agadir. “Agadir?” I hear you scoff. “The package-holiday beach town?” Precisely. Its genius lies in its split personality: Souk El Had for the tourists, and Souk Inezgane, a sprawling, glorious chaos, for everyone else. This is where the real game is played.

My greatest victory there began not with a trinket, but with a torso. I wanted a mannequin. A proper, size 16 mannequin. In England, they’re all carved from anxiety and toothpicks. This was not a personal statement, merely a fact. I needed curves.

I found the mannequin district—a surreal alley of headless, limbless bodies. Immediately, I was ambushed. A man I’ll call The General took charge. “My friend! You want beautiful lady! Very strong! Good price for you!”

We began the dance. His opening price was enough to buy a small, actual car. My counter-offer made him clutch his heart as if I’d insulted his grandmother’s honour. We volleyed. We parried. We reached a stalemate. The air grew tense. He knew I knew it was absurd; I knew he knew I wouldn’t budge. The discussion wasn’t just stuck, it was fossilizing.

Tip One: Time is your secret weapon.When the dance becomes a dirge, leave. The souk has a rhythm, and desperation has a smell. I smiled, said “Insha’Allah” (which in haggling contexts means “Not a chance, mate”), and melted into the crowd.

I returned two hours later. The scene was transformed. The General was gone. The shop was shuttered. It was just me and a street of silent, headless women. So I loitered, looking as conspicuously patient as a person can while staring at headless torsos.

Then, magic happened. Two Moroccan shopkeepers arrived. They wanted male mannequins. A young boy, left in charge, scurried out. A brief, quiet discussion. Cash changed hands. The boy scribbled the price on a box. My eyes, with the zoom-lens focus of a hawk, locked onto it. It was… almost exactly my final offer from earlier! The General hadn’t been outraged; he’d been out-manoeuvred. He couldn’t sell at the real price to a tourist without losing face, or his margin.

I pounced. The boy, thrilled with a no-drama sale, happily sold me my “beautiful lady” for the box price. My walk of triumph through Souk Inezgane, cradling a full-figured, limbless dummy on the bus, is a highlight of my personal history. I had not just bought a mannequin; I had won a war of attrition by using the most powerful weapon in the souk: observation.

Tip Two: Conversation is currency.Often, I haggle for things I don’t even want, just to practice. I’ll chat with a bored shopkeeper about football, the heat, his cousin in Rotterdam. It builds rapport, the invisible discount.

I once admired the sheer djellabas men wore. “I want something like that, but as a shirt,” I said. “Impossible! Nobody sells this!” they cried. This is Souk for “What a fantastic idea we’ve just had.”

Minutes later, I was being led to a fabric merchant deep in the local quarters—a man so delighted to see a tourist buying sheer chiffon he practically gave me the royal tour. I left with measurements taken and an order for three utterly original, embroidered sheer shirts. I’d haggled my way into a custom tailoring experience just by wanting something that “didn’t exist.”

Tip Three: The walls have ears, and use them. In touristy Souk El Had, I fancied some raffia shoes with a specific stitch. The first seller and I did a dramatic, full-throated tango over price. I walked away, the classic move. But the next shopkeeper, who’d heard every impassioned plea, was waiting. As I neared the gate an hour later, he appeared. My friend, for your price… because I like your face.” We sealed the deal. He’d used my own performance as a benchmark.

And my favourite tactic: The Numerical Baffle. You see a lovely vase. “How much for one?” The price is astronomical. You sigh. “That’s a shame. I don’t want one.”

He blinks. “…What?”

“I said I don’t want one.” You let the implication hang. His brain whirs. He doesn’t want one… which means… he wants MORE?

“How much for two?” you ask, casually.

His entire pricing structure collapses. He can’t just double the fantasy price, it’s obscene. The game resets. Now you’re haggling wholesale, from a position of implied volume. It’s psychological judo.

In the end, haggling in Morocco isn’t about cheapness. It’s about connection. It’s the shared script, the outrage, the handshake, the mint tea finally offered when a deal is struck. It’s about walking away with a story—and in my case, a headless, plus-size companion—having earned not just an object, but your place, however briefly, in the intricate, chaotic, and wonderfully human dance of the souk.

We in the West often speak of hospitality as offering a cup of sugar to a neighbour or having friends over for a dinner party. But my travels taught me that in much of the world, hospitality is not a social courtesy; it is a sacred, unwritten law. It is a force that mends broken vans and soothes weary souls, often arriving exactly when you need it most.

It was the 1980s, and adventure seemed a simple thing. With a group of fellow students from Goldsmiths College in South London, we piled into a van and pointed it towards France. Our youthful optimism, however, was no match for the aging engine, which gave a final, sputtering sigh just outside a small village called Cavignac.

We were stranded. But before panic could truly set in, a local man found us. He didn't just call for help; he became our shepherd, ferrying us to the village where the news of our plight spread. What happened next was my first lesson in this global code of conduct. The villagers didn't see us as stranded tourists; they saw us as guests. They opened their homes, giving us beds and warmth until our van could be repaired.

On our final evening, they threw us a goodbye meal. The centrepiece? Snails. To a group of London students, it was a bizarre and daring delicacy. We ate them with a mixture of trepidation and laughter. It is only now, years later, that I see the true value of that meal. It wasn't about the food; it was about the honour. They had shared with us what they believed was a feast, a send-off worthy of friends. Their generosity was as profound as it was unassuming.

This pattern, I would learn, was a global constant.

While walking in Algiers, Algeria, my travel companion and I met some locals who, with effortless grace, insisted on taking us for a meal and drinks. We had plenty of money, thanks to the forced currency exchange at the border, and we tried to pay. Our offer was met with a firm, almost offended, refusal. The message was clear: "You are in our home. You are our guests."

The lesson became even more poignant in Quetta, Pakistan. Traveling with some local men I'd met, I was struck by a craving for Western food and the familiar comfort of a "fancy" restaurant. I invited them to join me, but they refused. I thought little of it, assuming it was a matter of preference. When the bill came, I reached for my wallet, only to be stopped by their hands. They insisted on paying.

And then I saw it: the quiet, determined scramble as they pooled their resources, digging through their pockets to gather enough rupees to cover *my* meal. The guilt washed over me. I, with my relative wealth, had been their guest in every sense, and their pride and generosity left me humbled. They weren't just paying for a meal; they were upholding a duty.

This sacred rule of hosting knows no borders. In Chiang Rai, Thailand, I was with a group of fellow travellers enjoying an evening meal. As we asked for the bill, the waiter simply shook his head and gestured to a woman across the room. "She is paying," he said. We had never met her. She offered a gentle smile, paid our entire tab, and left without a word, a silent angel of generosity.