WHEN I WOULD THINK, WELL THIS IS WHAT I’VE COME TO SEE AND THE PHYSICAL, AND AT TIMES THE PSYCHOLOGICAL, DEMANDS OF THE EFFORT TO GET HERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN WORTH IT.

The sight of the Grande Recife as our flight from Sydney approached Noumea, capital of the Pacific island of New Caledonia. The year was 1960 and it was my first holiday outside Australia so you can imagine my excitement! I spent days snorkelling in the great lagoon.

The foggy evening as I waited in the Star Ferry pier in Hong Kong for the night ferry to Macau. It was 1969 and the night was heavy with a sense of adventure. I stayed in the old   Hotel Bella Vista and played roulette in the floating casino, the only casino at the time.

The awesome sight of Cheops, the great pyramid, when I drew back the curtains of my room at the Mena House Oberoi Hotel in Giza was one of the great moments of my travels. Egypt itself is special. I have been there at least half a dozen times.

The mysterious scratching sound made by the giant leaves of the coco-de-mer rubbing together in the Vallee de Mai on Praslin. On a visit to the Seychelles in the late 19th century, General Charles Gordon declared if there be a Garden of Eden on earth, it is here.

On my 39^th birthday in Peshawar, in the North West Frontier of Pakistan, I boarded the legendary Khyber Mail for a fascinating journey up the Khyber Pass. I was the only woman passenger with hundreds of tribesmen going home for the Muslim festival of eid ul fitr.

The sight of the soaring dunes, originally known as the Wahiba Sands, took my breath away when I visited them from Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. The Bedouin woman in the photo had left her tent to bring in a stray goat for the night.

I cannot leave out the moment I was introduced to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth when I covered the British royal tour of the Arab states in 1979. Here she is meeting the sheikhs in Abu Dhabi. I was the only woman photographer on the tiring 17 day trip.

Even though I used to pass it several times a week when I lived in London, the sight of Westminster Abbey, constructed more than two centuries before Captain Cook discovered Australia, always sent a frisson of excitement down my spine.

This was the end of the road in Morocco when I had driven from Tangiers as far south in the Sahara as I could go. I mentioned this remote café in the book I was writing on Morocco. That’s my little car parked outside. I drove it more than 2,500 miles.