I don’t know why the age of 29 was chosen. But funnily enough, that was how old I was when I set off on my big around the world adventure following the equator.

One of the projects GoLibre have curated is an eBook called Travel Means Freedom. GoLibre claim it’s the first travel book written by a community. In this case, a community of  111 travellers from all over the world. Each one providing a full of excitement, humour, life-changing experiences or all of the above. It costs $4.99 and 59% of that goes straight to charity water.org.

David sent me a copy of the book to have a look at. And as you can imagine, with 111 contributors, there’s something for everyone. Not all of it is good, but that’s the case with any anthology.

Those of you who are aspiring writers should check it out. And maybe get involved with GoLibre. David tells me that this is the first of many projects like this that they’ve got planned.

Worse case scenario? You’ve got yourself something to read for a couple of weeks and donated $2.94 to a worthy cause.

I had a stack on my Vespa the other day. I was going around a corner at Leatherhead and my bike slid right from under me. I don’t know what happened. I was picking myself up off the ground by the time I realised anything had happened. I suspect there was some diesel on the road or something.

Luckily there weren’t any cars directly behind me, so I was able to pick up my bike and keep going. I’d added a few scratches to the left hand side of the bike and my left hand, and trashed my new handlebar muffs, but I seemed OK. Until I got to the Wanderlust offices, took my jacket off and discovered my shirt was soaked with blood. Just a cut, it turned out. But it looked dramatic. Especially after I’d just assured everyone that I was fine and the crash was nothing, really.

I’ve been riding like a learner ever since, sitting very upright and not leaning into corners quite as much as I used to. I have learnt to respect the awesome power of the ET2. And realised how lucky I’ve been that this has been my first prang.

It’s also given me the opportunity to drag out one of my favourite photos from the trip that became Vroom with a View. It was from a scooter crash I came upon in Milan. And the rider is yabbering on his mobile phone even as the ambulance guy and the police try to attend to him.

Now that’s the essence of being Italian!

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I’m always loath to dish out advice. There is no secret formula to getting published. And every author has a different story. All I try to do is give people the benefit of the things I learned along the way that I wish I’d known when I was starting out. And give them a bit of hope. Not the snake oil kind of hope, but rather one of a more realistic kind. It can happen. And more often than not, because of hard work and perseverance.

That’s why I was really pleased to get an email from Shamus Sillar this week. Shamus attended a travel writing workshop I presented at the Byron Bay Writers Festival back in in 2003. He’d been living in China and was toying around with a book about his experiences there. I remember thinking at the time he was one of the few attending I thought might actually get somewhere.

Well, nothing came of the China book. But Shamus stuck at it and early this year another book he wrote, Sicily, It’s Not Quite Tuscany, was released. It’s been getting pretty good reviews so you should probably check it out.

I’m not sure how much help my workshop was way back when. But Shamus’s email certainly made me feel less of a snake oil salesman!

I suspect the year appeared to zoom by  because it was so eventful. One minute I’m blagging my daughter onto the end of a closed queue to meet Rapunzel from Tangled at Euro Disneyland, the next I’m on a gallery crawl in Prishtina with some of Kosovo’s most exciting new artists. And that’s not to mention a crazy absinthe-fuelled evening in a Bohemian castle with the guys from The Adventurists. Or a ride deep into the Accursed Mountains in a London Black cab. Or appearing on a TV chat show in Kenya, based in the back of a matatu.

A difficult task, to be sure, but I’ve made an attempt to collate my highlights of 2011. I suspect if I put my mind to it, I could quite easily come up with another eight or so.

1. My Associate Web Editor gig at Wanderlust magazine

A part-time gig that gives me time to do my other stuff – and allows me to interview some of my all-time heroes like P J O’Rourke? What’s not to like?!

2. Finally visiting my 100th country

It was a long time coming. And there were a few false dawns. (A trip to Iraq cancelled because of a certain Icelandic ash cloud, being the most disappointing). But in July I was finally able to tick my 100th country visited. Luxembourg. I couldn’t go hardcore, so I went lame.

3. Pulp at the Brixton Academy

Reputedly their last ever gig in London and suitably epic. If my mate Richard hadn’t had his phone nicked in the moshpit it would have been nigh on perfect.

4. The Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi

One of the Hay Festival family of international literature festivals, Storymoja was a real blast. The Kenyans were super enthusiastic, I made some great new friends (Samir Dave, Neil Shah, Ben Okri, Neil Hennessy et al) and re-aquainted myself with Nairobi’s notorious nightlife at the Black Diamond in Westlands. I also learned something about myself – according to this interview, I studied Medieval Sciences at university.

5. The Mongol Rally

Well, a little bit of it, anyway. I was ‘embedded’ with team Genghis Carnage on the first leg from London to Prague. Enough time to visit my 100th country, sleep in a Belgian cornfield and see men dressed as harem girls drinking absinthe in a medieval Czech castle. I must do the whole thing one day!

6. Watching St George win the World Club Challenge

Typical. The team I’ve supported all my life hasn’t won a premiership for 30 years and they go and do it while I’m living in London. Thankfully, as the premiers in Australia they came over to play the UK Super League winners, Wigan, in the World Club Challenge. They won. And I got to go back to Wigan, one of my favourite places in the UK.

7. Kosovo

I visited Europe’s newest country as part of Wanderlust’s Under £250 challenge and had an absolute awesome time. It was real ‘old skool’ trip, the perfect mix of incredible hospitality, affordable prices and unexpected adventures. When I arrived at an old kulla in Junik, for example, I was plied with free beers and some guys at the next table pulled out some traditional two-string and three-string guitars and started playing old Albanian folk songs. Keep an eye out for ebook about my adventures called The Blackbird of Dardania, coming out soon.

8. Dinner at the 805 with Ben Okri

Ben’s partner Rosemary Clunie invited me to a private viewing of her new exhibition at the Menier Gallery. And afterwards we all bundled into a cab and headed up 805 Old Kent Road, a fantastic Nigerian restaurant hidden behind etched glass windows. Not only was the food superb, I felt like I’d walked on to the set of a Nollywood movie. Brilliant.

What were your highlights?

I love it. But I can see how it could divide opinion.

What do you think?

You’ll find more images here on Vespa’s Facebook page.

You may have noticed from my Facebook pages and my Twitter feed that I’m currently in Kosovo.

I’m doing the trip as part of Wanderlust magazine’s ’25 for £250′ promotion.

The idea is to have a great adventure for under £250, including airfares. I got a great deal to Skopje with Wizz Air. And I’ve been have a low cost whale of a time in one of the world’s newest countries since Thursday.

It’s my last night and I’m in Prizren. So far I’ve been on a gallery crawl in Prishtina, crossed the Serbian barricade in Mitrovica and spent the night deep in the Accursed Mountains. Last night I stumbled upon an impromptu evening of traditional Albanian music in a Kulla in Junik and this morning I was served raki with my breakfast!

There’s still £30 in the kitty. And I’m getting a lift to Skopje with a Kosovar guy living in London I met on the plane coming over. Might just let my hair down and see the Baba Stars at Mypub.

Not that it will cost me much. Beer is only 50 cents a bottle.

I was new to this whole Apps thing, so I joined the throngs gathered beneath the monitors to double check the departure time. The train was on the board, but the platform hadn’t been assigned yet. On a whim I decided to wander out to Platform 8.

The train was already there. After confirming with the cleaners that it was indeed the 10.25 to Bristol Temple Meads, I clambered on board and claimed a forward facing seat with it’s own power outlet. It was another five minutes before the hordes who had gathered under the monitor boards descended, stuffing their bags on the overhead racks and casting dirty looks at me for securing such a coveted spot.

I thought of that moment this morning when I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died. The device that he had envisaged, had pushed through, developed and changed the way I travelled. It moulded and influenced my journey in ways that I hadn’t imagined. I’m not sure that I had a better trip. But I had a different one.

Later on that same trip my iPhone got me a free place to stay on the Isle of Arran. I’d idly noted on Facebook that I was feeling green on a particularly rough ferry crossing. Almost immediately I was pinged a message from a friend in Australia. He had a nephew working at a resort on Arran and had just texted him to expect me. I got free digs in the staff quarters and went very, very close to winning my first ever pub quiz. My iPhone nearly played a part there too, but I valiantly fought off the urge to nip off to the toilets to Google the answer to a particularly tricky question. I ended up losing by one point, to a man who marked his own answers.

My iPhone proved invaluable throughout the rest of my trip around the UK. I used the map app for directions to the archives in Bristol where I was able to confirm my family’s convict past. I booked a Ryanair flight out of Glasgow Prestwick, where Elvis Presley briefly stepped on British soil and my grandfather landed as a navigator in the Second World War. And whenever I got homesick I could flick through an album of photos of my daughter I’d loaded before I’d left home.

More recently, I downloaded the Footprint Guide to Nairobi, instantly shaving 650g off the weight of my carry-on luggage. Which saved me a considerable amount of money when Ethiopian Airlines cracked down on hand luggage and my bag came in just under their draconian seven kilo limit.

Not all of Steve Jobs’ products have had a positive effect on the way I travel. While I appreciate being able to travel with most of my music collection in my pocket – calling up some obscure Ethiopian jazz track should the whim possess me – I also miss an old pre-departure ritual of trawling through LPs and CDs and making tapes of the albums and tracks I decided were essential for that particular journey. I’d always make ten tapes. It was all the space I could spare. And I’d always be sick and tired of them by the end of my journey. But each of those songs are indelibly linked to a particular time and place. You don’t get that when you have close to 10,000 songs on shuffle.

And don’t get me started about people using their iPads to take photos. It’s wrong and it’s sad and it has to stop now.

I worry too that we are becoming too dependent on our i-devices, planning and booking our journeys to the nth degree, and robbing ourselves of serendipitous discoveries and the simple joy of getting lost. That we spend far too much time staring at our 5 x 7 cm instead of looking up and soaking up the wonders of the real world around us.

The good news is that smart phones still come with an off switch. As Steve Jobs said himself in a commencement address to students at Stanford University in 2005, “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

But I tell you what. When a smart phone gets you a seat on a train with a power point it’s worth its weight in gold.

Even though it is said same smart phone’s crappy battery that makes you need the power point in the first place.

The whirligig of promotional duties continue here in Kenya. This morning I was up at 6am to appear on one of Nairobi’s more unusual talk shows. One set in a matatu.

Basically, a brightly coloured matatu, fitted out with cameras, drives out to the suburbs of Nairobi and the presenters try to convince punters to take a free ride into town. Then, on the way into town, the punters take part in a discussion about a topic for the day with a surprise guest before being dropped off at a convenient city centre location.

Today the topic was the reading culture in Kenya. And the surprise guest was me – in my capacity as a leading world expert of the reading habits of Nairobians. (I was regarded as something of an expert on True Love twenty years ago.)

It’s a great concept and I had a lot of fun. It was hard to convince people on board at first. They were naturally suspicious of a van circulating their suburb offering free rides. But once they got on board they got into the spirit of things. Even after being asked to take a solemn oath that Matatu TV could do what the hell they wanted to with the footage.

The general consensus seemed to be that there weren’t enough hours in the day and that books were expensive. And by the time kids finished school they were so sick of books they didn’t want to look at books again. Indeed, there’s a tradition here of having a book bonfire to celebrate finishing your studies. Which is all a bit Kristellnacht for my liking.

So, all round an informative, fun and surreal morning. The young rasta man was worth the price of admission alone!

Ben Okri and Hari Kunzru. Literary legends. Fellow Storymoja Hay Festival guests.

And I got them to pose with me next to a sign about public urination.

I guess that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Research has shown it’s not an ancient Chinese proverb after all but rather an ‘Orientalism’ made up in the 1800′s and legitimised when John F Kennedy used it in a speech in Cape Town.

Regardless, it sprang to mind over my first two days in Nairobi. My arrival coincided with a kidnapping, a murder and a pipeline explosion. Not to mention my flight over being diverted to Rome because one of the passengers took a turn.

It seems that I have been ‘cursed’ to travel in interesting times.

No change there, then.