These travel reflections were all published as articles in the Observer newspaper over a sevenyear period Here and there I have restored some small cuts by the editor which had to be made if the piece was to fit the page but otherwise I have added very little The occasional outright howler has been corrected but only if it was a matter of detail which I should have got right in the first place Hindsight would have allowed further improvements but there would have been no end to the process In the second article about China for example it seemed likely at the time and for some time after that the Hong Kong dollar would hold up A year later it fell If I were to rewrite the piece so as to predict this fact it would become a claim to prescience or at any rate no longer a report written at that moment But like any other flying visitor in South East Asia or anywhere else I was there at that moment ignorant as to what would happen next and fully occupied with making the most elementary sense of what had happened already That has been the real story of mass jet travel the world opening up to people who have no qualifications for exploring it except the price of a ticket But I have never been able to believe that all my fellow travellers were quite blind Even a postcard can be written with a purpose