Tahir Shah

I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.

The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.

We had the kind of conversations that only great friends can ever share. They were touched with magic.

To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path

The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.

Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.

In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.

Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.

Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.

Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.