A photograph of Islas Ballestos, Peru.

Tour leader Jenny Pullman reaches Petra, where she attempts to find a note left under a rock in a cave on an earlier visit to the Rose City by her mother.

A photograph of Nong Kioaw, Laos.

Its early January 2011, the Middle East is quiet, signs of unrest are rumoured but nothing that is not part of normal life in this ancient land. We head off from Egypt to Jordan via Israel excited about the few days we will spend exploring the ancient world of Petra, the weightlessness of the Dead Sea and the emptiness of the Wadi Rum desert.

A photograph of La Pa, Bolivia.

A photograph of Savannakhet, Laos.

Nowhere else in Turkey, indeed the world, have I been mistaken as a kindred spirit by an avid Demis Roussos fan and granted pride of place in his restaurant, in front of the TV showing non stop Demis Roussos videos.

I wanted to return to Olympos before we had left. We’d been lured there by the idea of living for a few days in a treehouse and though the comfortable reality of this didn’t match the primitive expectation we both fell for Olympos.

Turkey’s most popular beer is named after Ephesus. I only mention this because, after an expensive week in Istanbul, my informal accountant had started clamping down on unnecessary spending and beer seems to have been misfiled.