At three in the morning, Jodhpur, like most Indian cities has a creepy, almost medieval quality to it. Along unlit streets lined with squalid rows of shacks, fires burn with small groups of people huddling together trying to stay warm. Nearby, cows mill about, while shadowy, destitute figures...

IN HIS POEM, "Mandalay," Rudyard Kipling alludes to the joy of travel in colonial Burma. Though the roads today are rather worse for wear, traveling in Burma - present-day Myanmar - can still be a joyful experience. It just takes the right attitude.

It was mid-November, nearly two weeks since I had started pedaling east from the shores of the Indian Ocean on a solo bicycle trip across Australia...

The closer I got to Caiguna, the closer I came to the unfortunate conclusion that it may not have been such a great idea to take this trip.

As a hired Bengali driver and I looked on in expressionless wonderment at the ruckus raised over a collision between a water buffalo and a blue pickup truck, I noticed a faint metallic pinging in the distance.

With the occasional rat scurrying across my feet, I watched as temple priests laid out bowls of grain, sugar and milk for the rats to eat. 

What was left was a treacherous path that in places took travelers under cascading waterfalls and through shifting, leech infested mud. A few days before two people had been killed after losing their footing along the way.

Although broken by hundreds of rivers, occasional cities and small ramshackle hamlets along the rail line, Siberia gives you the distinct feeling that to somehow tumble off the train would simply be a drier version of falling off a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Once, while riding on a cyclo through the streets of Hue, I had the driver stop so I could trade seats with him. You would have thought he was the grand marshal of a parade as he sat in the passenger seat and waved to people along the road.

Peering over the edge of a short wooden gangplank leading off a high suspension bridge, I mustered as much spit from my cotton dry mouth as I could and watched it drift slowly down past the sheer walls of the gaping canyon I was preparing to hurl myself into.

At 14,691 feet, it is only half as high as Everest, and it doesn’t even begin to approach the same league of difficulty as K2. Yet, the Matterhorn attracts climbers with its powerful character and notoriety, silently daring them as it towers majestically into the ether of the Swiss Alps.