Stuck in Korea

I've still been contemplating this "horrible" boat ride. I know I said the matter was closed but it set me to thinking about my worst trips. Here's my top 5...

• 5. Train from Madras to Trivandrum, India, July 2000. My second day in India and I decided to get my arse to Kerala. A nice, large open plan sleeper carriage. Indians snore. 60 of them snoring in unison is deafening. It took ages to get to sleep. Then I woke up in the middle of the night to be greeted by the sight of some guy masturbating at me. The whole thing was topped off with an unpleasant experience in the toilet the next morning (rickety, wobbling train, small hole in the floor - I won't go into details, but I'm sure that any mental picture you can conjure up is nowhere near as nasty as reality).

• 4. Autorickshaws in India, Summer 2000. The drivers are drunk, stoned, and expected to make way for everything else on the road. They drive like nutters, whizzing round stationary cows and narrowly missing oncoming trucks who have no intention of changing direction. Every time I got into one in the cities was a near-death experience, and you were always acutely aware of the fact that your vehicle was blatantly going to come of second best if it collided with anything (including the animals). And yet I kept using them...

• 3. Flight from Rarotonga to Aitutaki, Cook Islands, Spring 2001. There's only one thing that makes a journey more nerve-racking than being made to stand in the waiting lounge as the hawaiian-shirted, flip-flop wearing airline staff size you and your luggage up and try to work out the loading arrangements that will avoid unbalancing the little plane that you're waiting to board. And that's noticing that the stewardess is looking very worried and leaning hard over to one side of the cabin during your flight. When the crew become nervous on a little plane, it's a little unsettling.

• 2. Flight from Phuket to Bangkok, Thailand, October 2000. Actually a very pleasant trip until the muppets that passed for pilots tried to land. We slammed onto the tarmac so hard I felt like a rugby scrum had just collapsed on me. People screamed. And then they slammed the throttle on full and took off again. Repeat 3 times until women and children are crying and mass fear-induced flatulence has broken out. The cabin crew couldn't even look us in the eye when we finally got off the plane.

• 1. Horse trek in Mongolia, July 2004. It was all going swimmingly til it started to rain. Then everything started to chafe downstairs, which meant that my balls took a pounding for the next few hours. Those saddles are really uncomfortable after a while. Next, as we made our way across a lovely flat plain, the lightning started up, blowing up trees about 100 metres away, which understandably made the horses a bit jittery. I can now define fear: sitting on top of a petrified horse with your feet in metal stirrups and realising that you are the tallest object for half a kilometre in any direction as lightning is obliterating the few trees nearby. It was striking 2-foot high srubs, for pete's sake.

Just thought I'd get that off my chest. Boat trips just don't make it into the top 5. I love boats.

I hate horses.