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with a family in Berlin before the wall came down.

I left school knowing the only thing I wanted to do was travel. My university degree was chosen on the fundamental requirement that it would grant me a paid-for year abroad: based in Karlsruhe, I found friends who formed a band & took me on their home-town-tour around the country ~ and used the Easter break to see Italy, Switzerland and a bit more of Austria.

Plans to find a job that would get me even further round the world foundered on the real-life need to earn a living...and so now I am bound by leave entitlements and the ability to pay my way. But still...it's a poor year that doesn't get me away from home.

Wanderlust isn't an illness, it is a joy! But make no mistake; it is also a very real NEED that cannot be satisfied second-hand.

The vista of snow-covered peaks that comes into view after you've climbed and scrambled up a rock-strewn hillside is something you feel you've earned. At the same time it has a literally stunning effect that you will never experience seeing it on film. I'll freely admit to actually saying "Wow" and "Gosh" in these circumstances. The fact is, that when you experience the scale of the planet.or when it throws you a surprise reward for effort like thisthere really aren't any words.

If you travel to economically poorer countries (Nepal, Bhutan, Cuba, in my case) you are brought up against your own upbringing. You are forced to question your beliefs. Your interactions with the landscape, with the townscapes, with the people, with the politics and with the culture, cannot help but have you question what is really valuable. Get away from the resorts in these countries and meet people in their own homes, see how the live for real, without the camera turned on them, and you will discover their pleasures and their pain. You will come across those whose poverty makes you question our quest for affluence given the joy they take in their lives and their work; and also those whose anger at not having what you have that will force you to think again. Above all, it will make you grateful for being able to turn on a tap and get clean, drinkable water.or to hit a switch and get light, entertainment or information.

Travel to repressed nations and you come up against our taken-for-granted freedoms taken away.

Of course we "know" all of these things intellectually, but that is not the same as experiencing them for ourselves. Our lives are so wide, so full of opportunity, that we have to move among

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