You might find it in Hangzhou where it is picked, but not in any other place I've been. Lately, a package of green tea, usually Lung Ching Chai/Dragon Well Tea.

Q: What’s the one thing you never leave home without? But he travelled very little, saying 'It's a full-time job being a drug addict.' He was rather a timid traveller but an energetic writer, a paradoxical soul. Did he influence your approach to travel at all? Q: 'You are a trigger happy little bastard,' Hunter S Thompson once wrote affectionately to you. I wrote about this in The Pillars of Hercules.

I hunkered down in Tirana, rolling my eyes. Also, the hillsides covered with bomb shelters – every person in Albania had a place in a bomb shelter. And the free press was filled with photographs of naked women, forbidden under the Hoxha/Shehu regime. 'When the government fell, people were so excited they smashed all the windows,' I was told. Of the great number rattling around in my mind, I think I'd nominate Albania, circa 1994, where I arrived on a ferry from Bari, Italy, to find a barely recognisable country people pleading for money or food, broken roads, sinister meals and broken windows. Q: What’s the most bizarre place you’ve been? They await a new conqueror, unfortunately. Many parts of Africa have become forgotten, or overlooked. Many of these places are still so dangerous that no-one visits.

Still its emptiness and its isolation: the wild spaces, the great isolation in places like the Congo. What's one of your favourite qualities about Africa? Q: In Figures in a Landscape , memorable Africa essays include Malawi, Zimbabwe and Graham Greene's relationship with the continent. After 100 hours in Tibet, I knew it was time to leave.Anthony Bourdain on food, travel and politics.And those of us who are writers observing these changes always have something new to write about. Africa has changed, and so have I, and so has the world, but in a way that is how we live our lives, charting our progress. I suppose leaving home in late 1963 to travel to Africa to teach, and finding in Nyasaland (later Malawi) everything I hoped for: good people who became friends, a new language to learn, a lovely landscape, a liberating sense of solitude and a great deal to discover. Q: What's the trip that made you fall in love with the world?

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux