What's your earliest memory of travel?
The earliest indications that Basingstoke couldn’t hold me were childish urges to trace maps. At the age of about five, taking a roll of sellotape and a set of chunky felt tips, I stitched together 16 A3 pieces of yellow cardboard and spent a fortnight reproducing a map of the entire world, colour-coded into political blocs. Not a single peninsula or inlet was omitted. It wasn’t a school project, there was no reward. I did it ‘just because’, a philosophy I’ve tried to carry forward into my travelling methodology.

What's your most bizarre/amusing travelling experience?
The bizarre and amusing have become such a regular feature of life in small-town China that I’ve become rather desensitized to the specifics. That said, the week I spent riding around in a convoy of Buicks as part of government-sponsored tour of Inner Mongolia stands out. In order to cover the six trillion miles of barren grassland in the allotted eight days, our driver screamed along empty highways, using a rooftop megaphone to scatter any peasants impertinent enough to come within a mile of our vehicle. Communist Party protocol – allied with traditional Mongolian hospitality – led to us being treated to a boozy banquet at each and every meal. Rice wine obliteration was obligatory – twice a day. With drunkenness, tiredness and organizational incompetence raised to dangerous levels, something was bound to snap. It happened during the middle of a karaoke performance by the vice-major of Haila’er when the photo editor of a major Chinese magazine (which shall remain unnamed) tried to glass our group’s Communist Party supervisor. Never saw the chap again, funnily enough.

Which is the place you haven't been to yet but would most like to visit?
There are too many to mention. There isn’t a single country on earth I’d say I’ve done proper justice too, and there are some glaring omissions in the travel CV that I should fill before I get too ambitious (the Alps, the Amazon, the Pyramids are well up there). However, one spot I feel irresistibly drawn to is the Kamchatskiy Peninsula in Russia’s far east. Oddly enough, it was Inner Mongolia (above) which gave me the taste for dramatic open spaces, devoid of human presence. In a recent project, the great photographer Sebastian Salgado demonstrated that Kamchatskiy is just about the epitome of that kind of scene.

What's the best travel advice you've ever been given?
‘What’s the best place in the whole of China?’ I was talking to a waitress in an expat bar in Guangzhou, China, 24 hours after entering the country with no clue about what I was doing, or why I was doing it. Her reply: ‘Go to Zhaoqing’. I immediately pictured misty Shangri-La mountain peaks, soaring rice terraces and temples undiscovered by modern man. We took out a map of the country. ‘Where is it?’ I asked. She looked nervous, tracing an uncertain finger across the vast sweep of the Chinese hinterland, from the deserts of the northwest, to the forests of the northeast, down to the mountains of Tibet. In the end, I found it myself. It was her hometown, two hours down the road. Two days later, in Zhaoqing, I met the woman who would become my wife in a shopping mall food court. The rest, as they say…

How did you get involved in travel writing/photography?
After serving out an apprenticeship in news journalism in the regional British press, I took time out to see the world and realised that I could make a few pennies by flogging travel stories. Some time later, I twigged I could turn those pennies into mighty shillings by buying a decent camera and learning how to take photographs. It has to be conceded that my pursuit of the woman mentioned above did also force my hand, slightly.

When and why did you join the Guild?
I joined the Guild in February 2007, but not without a bit of a delay caused by the fact that the magazine I was working on when I made my initial membership application (a lovely leisure travel glossy by the name of Asia and Away) folded amid some nasty Shanghai corporate shenanigans.

How has the Guild been most helpful?
The Guild has been like a super-efficient agent who, one, doesn’t give me any backchat, and two, doesn’t require a living wage. I’ve never been particular adept at the self-promotion side of freelance work. The Guild, to my eternal gratitude, has allowed a handful of editors to find me, without me having to go a-grovelling.

What would be your tip to other writers on how to achieve new or more work?
As glib as it sounds, my advice is this: move to China. It worked for me.

Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, so what's the biggest travel blunder you've ever made?
I once missed a plane home from Okinawa two days before I was supposed to be reporting the British General Election for the Reading Chronicle newspaper. You could call it a blunder; I prefer: ‘catastrophically unlucky’. My alarm had stopped working after doing some trekking the previous day so I borrowed a friend’s clock. The battery on this (analogue) clock stopped working at 6.56am, four minutes before the alarm was due to go off. I woke up, marvelling at how my body clock always seemed to wake me up at the right time before a big day of travel. Granted, the sun seemed unusually high for that time of the morning, but I shrugged this off as a Pacific Ocean quirk, and went about packing in a leisurely fashion. On the drive to the airport, I stopped in at a petrol station, and any lingering fears I was late were assuaged by a large clock – which, in a cruel twist of fate, had stopped at exactly the same time as I assumed it currently to be. It was only after I got the airport that I realised my plane had taken off 30 minutes earlier. As I learned, if there’s one small island you don’t want to be stuck at during a British General Election, it’s Okinawa. I finally returned home three days later to find I had acquired the infectious skin disease, impetigo, en route.

Who, outside of your own family, would you most like to go travelling with and why?
US indie filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch – a man who appears drawn to dirty, anonymous back alleys and boring third-tier industrial cities even more than I am. We’d have a blast together.

Which travel destination has taken you most by surprise and why?
The Temples of Angkor. Having studied lots of Cold War history through school, and very little (OK, none) ancient Asian history, I knew all about Pol Pot, the Killing Fields and the hell on earth that was Cambodia, late 1970s, and very little about what came several hundred years before it. My vague impressions of Giza, Machu Picchu or Borobudur are based more on imagination, myth and legend, rather than any concrete knowledge of contemporary conditions. In stark contrast, I had only really dreamed Cambodia as a dangerous, blighted country. And then I came face to face with Angkor. It was mind blowing.

Three Desert Island Discs for your iPod?
First up, Four Tet’s ‘Pause’. I’m not normally into Electronica (and my stays in ‘trendy’ Shanghai have seen me develop a genuine hatred of Café Del Mar-inspired cocktail lounge tripe), but this album – ‘Everything is Alright’, in particular – just sounds like ‘travel’. Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ is pick number two, just because it’s so unbelievably good, and, finally, something by Welsh gangster rappers, Goldie Looking Chain. You wouldn’t go scuba diving without an oxygen tank, and – likewise - full immersion in a foreign culture requires some kind of survival apparatus which temporarily plugs you back into a familiar world. The ‘GLC’ provides just that link.

And a favourite book to pass the journey?
Phaic Tan. You talk about works of creative genius, you mention Shakespeare, Proust, Beckett. And then you end the list, simultaneously declaring ‘the end of literature’ with Phaic Tan, a spoof guidebook of such staggering brilliance that I could probably read it continuously until the day I die and guarantee that I would go to the grave with a glorious great smile of my face.