This book gives a short glimpse into the author’s colourful and adventurous life and beautifully describes his unusual journeys to remote and fascinating cultures. His reports, illustrated with 14 handsome maps and 150 high quality colour photographs, are varied in character. Some are very dramatic: he falls through the ice in Lake Baikal in Siberia, is attacked by a pack of dogs in Vanuatu in the Pacific, and is trapped on top of a derailed train in the Congolese jungle. Others are more descriptive and lyrical: he travels up the Amazon River, climbs sacred Mount Emei in western China, and sails down the Niger River to Timbuktu in Mali. He paints captivating pictures of the landscapes, the people and the civilisations he encounters, and at the same time places them in their cultural and historical context. The reader is lured into a sensory — but always realistic — world of foreign sights, sounds and smells. His journeys reflect his desire, both in his life and his travels, to take risks, explore his limits, and go ‘beyond’.