John Gimlette's Voyages

Hardship has been a great innovator, forcing humans to make sport out of whatever they have.

The Afghans play a form of polo-cum-rugby with a dead sheep; in Stawell (Australia), I remember an annual running race (the 'Stawell Gift') where the prize was a pig; in rural England there are violent games with big 'wheels' of cheese and sides of bacon.

Only occasionally do writers describe their exotic encounters overseas. Although famously interested in prostitutes, writers like Leigh-Fermor (Greece), Leonard Woolf (Ceylon) and Burton (everywhere) never went into the detail. Nor did the great homesexual writers like Thesiger (Arabia) and Chatwin (West Africa).

Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) met in Naples and agreed to spend 10 billion euros over the next five years. This puts ESA into the big leaugue, just behind NASA but ahead of China.

This is all that remains of Fort Nassau, on the Berbice River, Guyana. Only one 18th century description of this building remains, from a Dutch traveller called Hartsinck.

In "Beschrijving van Guiana of de Wilde Kust", he’d described a structure 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, which had served as a church, a storehouse, the government, and the home of the ‘corp de guarde’.

The tragic death of Jacintha Saldanha in London yesterday (following the Australian radio Hoax) is a reminder how much we value our nurses. Londoners are deeply upset by this news. It's also a reminder that our nurses come from all over the world, making an invaluable contribution to the NHS.

You can find them all over the former British Empire; clean, sparse and functional. They don't even differ much from Kenya to Sri Lanka. You can wake up in Nkarta Bay (Malawi) and happily believe that you're in Bartica (Guyana), where this picture was taken.

Bartica is a typical specimen; utilitarian 1950s furniture, and run by two elderly la

This is the tomb of a Dutch planter at Peerboome (or 'Pear Tree') in Berbice, Guyana. The tombstone was probably made in Europe during the planter's life, with only the dates left blank.

On my last trip to Guyana, I went in search of an old sugar estate called Reynestein, which is described by a traveller called Dr Bollingbroke in 1799. It is now part of the super-estate, Wales. Back then, the good doctor had described the life of the Dutch planters; billiards, good coffee, the finest linen, floors scrubbed with citrus juice, farmland ‘like gardens’,

Here I am with the descendants of runaway slaves on Skin Island, in the River Marowijne, Suriname. These children, from the Paramaccaner group, are happy. Across the river in French Guiana, it's a different story.

This is the ranch store at Dadanawa (Guyana), near the fabled table-lands described in Conan Doyle's novel. It's the place to buy a stirrup, or a beer, or a single cigarette.