“Travel is about dispossession. It is about embracing loss. The act of embarking on travel is a spiritual act as much as anything, something that the most arresting travellers know. It was, for me, summed up in the description of Alexander Burnes entering Afghanistan – putting aside his familiar clothes, throwing away his bed, breaking his boxes, and being ready, as a bare, unaccommodated man, to make himself as nothing, and embrace whatever came with the road. It is that embrace – becoming one with the road – which is the travellers’ route of ascent.”