is for adventure, and “adventure travel” is an industry. People pay thousands of dollars to go off on package tours which range from overstuffed sports packages to lunatic danger-seeking expeditions. However, when I think of adventurers, I think of Livingstone and Marco Polo and Ibn Battouta, and none of them set out to have adventures.

is for backpacks, indispensable fashion accessories for independent travellers, who spend hundreds of dollars buying good quality gear to carry too much stuff from one bus to another. See also L.

is for culture, which exists everywhere people do, but there are still those who travel to the ends of the earth to find it. Americans seem particularly vulnerable to the culture disease, which is strange since many of their ancestors fled the old world to get away from the burden of too much old culture and too many old customs. C is also for Coca-Cola, which culture vultures love to hate but, like culture, one can find it almost everywhere. It’s reasonably tasty, usually cold and always safe to drink, unlike the water in many places.

is for drugs (the illegal recreational variety) and for dimwits and dependents and dealers, the only categories of people who carry them while travelling.

is for ego, a quality hated by many people and often harmful to your travel experiences. However, the people who have the most of it also seem to travel the most, last the longest at it, enjoy it more, and make friends everywhere. Is this a contradiction?

is for fleas and flies and other pests, authentic travel experiences which everybody detests, but which strangely produce the longest-lasting memories and some of the best travel stories. Personally, my most un-favourite insect is the Tsetse fly. It’s been top of the list since the two days when hundreds of them chased me across central Tanzania...

is for gear, of which there is no right amount. My normal load has shrunk with time from a pile in the back of a truck to a small lump in a day pack and I’ve been much happier for it. However, my collection of camera gear has quadrupled in size during the same period, and I’ve been happier for that as well.

is for hippies, who beat paths all the way across Asia in their quest to find sunny places where they could lay around and get high on cheap drugs and free love. If it weren’t for them and their web of cafes and cheap hotels, backpacking would be much more difficult nowadays. On the other hand, if it weren’t for them backpackers would surely find it easier to get along with Asians.

is for internet, the spread of which has allowed people to travel to exotic new destinations and still talk to all the same people they talked to at home.

is for jams, as in traffic jams. These afflict many of the most interesting places in the world, and can be a big hassle if you’re in traffic. However, you can often avoid them by not getting into traffic in the first place.

is for K-2 and Kinabalu and Kilimanjaro, simple but difficult options available when you get tired of crowds.

is for Lonely Planet, the backpackers’ bible. You can get one for just about any place on land. Both a guide and a membership token, it serves many purposes and gives independent travellers something to depend on everywhere they go.

is for malaria, which tourists spend millions of dollars and countless thousands of hours worrying about and fighting and preventing. If they spent a tenth as much effort and cash trying to stay out of traffic accidents, many more of them would return home every year.

is for needs, which everybody has and almost everybody over-estimates. People need air and food and water and shelter. To travel they need working limbs (although not necessarily their own). Everything more than this is optional, as one discovers after being robbed. It might even be good to be robbed, just to learn this invaluable lesson.

is for optimism, a desirable quality which too often seems to be taken to ridiculous extremes while travelling. Yes, people abound saying the world is too dangerous to travel and yes, they are usually wrong but yes, some places really are dangerous. Since 1992, I’ve counted about twenty tourists who died because of their overoptimism.

is for paranoia, an undesirable quality which seems to evolve naturally from carrying around too many worries while travelling. See N above and X below.

is for Quixotic, an adjective well applied to people who stir up shit for no good reason. I never do that, of course.

is for respect and for rip-offs. If you can’t show respect, you shouldn’t travel. On the other hand, if you behave respectfully all the time there are lots of people in the world waiting to take advantage of you. Balancing these two things seems to be a skill which takes endless refining.

is for simplicity, the key to success while travelling. If you don’t have many plans they can’t go too far wrong.

is for tourist, and for traveller, and for twit. The last of those three labels seems the best for people who worry so much about this silly point. It’s very simple; anyone who tours is a tourist and anyone who travels is a traveller. More comment than this is mis-said.

is for Utopia, which doesn’t exist anywhere but you might easily guess it did from the way some people rave about countries in which they’ve just arrived. Twenty years ago, over 900 people died in their Utopia in Jonestown, Guyana. There’s a lesson there worth remembering any time you’re tempted to ignore reality.

is for vomiting, another authentic travel experience along the same line as fleas and flies. Expect to do this at least a few times on any good trip, and remember “Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.”

hen in Rome, do as the Romans do. I think this advice has been almost universally accepted for at least a couple thousand years. Despite that, an amazing number of people seem not to take it.

is for xenophobia. Everywhere you go in the world, people think the rest of the world is a dangerous place. If these places were really dangerous, the people who live there wouldn’t be able to live there. Having said that, there are places people are leaving in large groups.

is for Yeti, a creature which has never been found and for which no solid evidence exists. However, it’s probably best not to say it doesn’t exist, because it provides us with excuses to go on long treks through beautiful mountain scenery.

is for zoos, which bear remarkable similarities to many popular tourist destinations. However, who are the animals and who are the visitors?