What's your earliest memory of travel?
Watching enviously as my grandparents packed their trunks for the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, and helping them stick on their "Wanted on Voyage" labels for the passage to New York.

How did you get involved with travel professionally?
I became addicted to travel while backpacking from Istanbul to Kathmandu in 1973. In Kabul, fellow travellers on the hippy trail became my first patients, as a young medical student, fuelling a lifelong fascination with tropical and travel-related diseases. My first book on Travel Medicine was published in 1986.

When did you join the Guild and what's the best thing about it?
2004. I love browsing through the handbook, and seeing what the real travel experts get up to.

What's your best travel experience?
I love travelling on water: boats on the Amazon, the Zambezi, the Nile. Best was the boat to Timbuktu, drifting slowly for days on the Niger, as a student without a care in the world.

What's your most bizarre?
Wrestling with a snake in the dark, in the rain forests of Mount Cameroon, and screaming for help so loudly that a team of boy scouts was sent out to "rescue". The cause of the snake attack proved to be a sweatshirt that I had tied around my waist, and that had fallen to my ankles.

What do you never leave home without?
My medical kit, of course!

What's the best thing about being professionally involved in travel?
Meeting and spending time with other people who love travel. (The downside is not being able to go with them.)

What is the place you haven't been to yet which you would most like to visit?
The islands of the South Pacific, if I ever get enough time to go.

Who or what would you like to be in the next life?
A time traveller.

Whom do you most admire?
My teachers, over the years.

Future plans and ambitions?
1. A new edition of my book 2. Spending more time with my children, and perhaps one day travelling the world with them, when they are old enough to appreciate it

Richard Dawood This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

August 2006