If there’s an ‘old town’ section in a city, you can be sure I’ll make a beeline for it. I’ll happily spend an hour, or a day, getting lost in a maze of lanes too small for anything larger than a donkey. The further off the tourist trail, the better.
The vivid blue of the lower part of the walls in the Kasbah des Oudaias in Rabat is a treat for the eyes; a calm contrast to the dazzling white above. (Rabat, Morocco, 2003)
What's behind that brass-studded door?
I love, love, LOVE those moments when you’re in another country and it hits you: “I’M IN PARIS!” – or New York, or on a glacier, or 35,000 feet above Turkey and making a phone call from my plane seat, or….
I adore the goosebumps I get when in front of me, for the first time, is something so iconic, it feels totally unreal. It looks just like it does in all those photos! Whether my travel companions find my excitement and enthusiasm endearing or annoying, I don’t know – but I hope I never lose it. My stomach is feeling all squirmy just thinking about these moments, right now 
The first of many images in this category: Cairo, Egypt, 2010.
Glimpsing the Pyramids for the first time. I'M IN CAIRO!
I detested history as a subject at school and gave it up as soon as I could. Never saw the point of knowing in which year things happened (plus we had to study the Afrikaner Groot Trek every year – yawn). It’s corny to say that history comes alive when you visit historical places, but it’s true. Few places on earth must be as moving to visit as the former concentration camps (now museums) in Germany.
Lifeless yet deeply moving.
Dachau was a moving, sobering stop on a coach-camping-sightseeing-and-drinking tour of Europe in 1996 – and the kind of place everyone should visit once in their lifetime in order to comprehend the human capacity for inhumanity. On a similar tour the following year we stopped at Auschwitz, where I stayed in the car park. Visiting a second concentration camp was just too much – learning that history lesson once was enough.
I’ll never forget the atmosphere at Dachau. Tangibly awful: such sadness, such evil. Strangely, there is almost no life there. Not a bird, not an ant. Only ghosts. (Dachau, Germany, 1996)
You can almost feel the stillness.
Have you noticed how different the light is in different parts of the world? The clear but often blinding glare in the southern Mediterranean; the filtered greyness of the UK; the warmth in the light in Africa. Although more subdued than Capri’s usual bella luce, the light on this November evening set off the ripples around the island’s imposing Faraglioni perfectly. (Italy, 2003)
Now if it was a *sandy* beach, it'd be just perfect!
Is it the light? Variations in depth? Or differences in water temperature? Whatever caused this part of the Aegean Sea off Rhodes to be striped in shades of blue, it’s breathtaking! (Greece – 2002)
I just can't get my head around the practicalities of this...
Like many travellers, I collect photos of interesting signs. Considering how much my cats hate their Frontline application every month, I can only imagine how they’d react to needles! (USA, 2004)
I lived in the UK for nearly nine years and in my head, I always see it in black and white. Very little colour adjustment had to be done to this photograph. The old, bare tree and pub’s sagging roof make me think they’ve been friends forever. (England, 2010)
English summers FTW! Brrrr.