Where on Earth am I? Confusions of a Travelling Man,

It is therefore always nice to read a travel memoir penned by someone who truly seems to appreciate the astonishing opportunity laid before him or her and who has the talent and the wit to make the most of the opportunity.

Jug Suraiya, winner of the Pacific Area Travel Association gold medal for travel writing, is just such a travel writer, and his travel memoir Where on Earth am I? makes for delightful reading.

The memoir takes the form of twenty-six essays, some barely a couple of hundred words long, about twenty-six memorable places Suraiya has visited together with the charming Bunny, who I take to be his wife (or girlfriend) and photographer. It's a perfect read because it allows the reader to dip in and out of it, reading as little or as much as one wants each time.

The first ten essays cover journeys in India from Nagaland and Jilling to Goa and Kashmir. The first thing I noted was that Suraiya had an excellent choice of destination -- almost all the places he has chosen to visit and write about in this memoir are places that I would love to go myself.

But the best thing about Suraiya's writing is Suraiya himself. He comes across as a good-natured and humorous traveller and we are happy to be allowed to come along for the ride. It really feels as though we are his travelling companions as he shares his confusion and wonder at the lands through which he travels, and it is the agreeableness of his companionship that is the book's best feature. It might be interesting to read about the beauty and culture of faraway places -- but who wants to go anywhere with someone who is no fun?

The book is filled with his amusing and off-beat observations and hilarious transcriptions of his attempts to communicate with the locals wherever he might find himself. The joke is most often on Suraiya and his ability to laugh at himself makes for fun reading.

But he is not just a comedian -- his insights into cultures and mores and his ability to capture the essence of a place in a few moving sentences explain why he is an award-winning writer. With a few strokes of his pen he can bring a place to life with an immediacy that makes you yearn to go there yourself.

He has sixteen chapters on destinations outside of India that cover sixteen destinations that are on every traveller's wished-for itinerary. We follow him and Bunny from Bali to Havana to Rio to Acupulco to the plateaus of Tibet to the plains of the Serengeti.

It is an unforgettable whirlwind of a tour that leaves one breathless and a little envious, but it's not everyone who can write as charmingly and insightfully as Suraiya.

I'll leave you with just one example of his unforgettable prose. His piece entitled 'Cuba Libre' begins:

'If cities were people, Havana would be Don Quixote. Ragged knight errant, driven by hopeless chivalry to tilt against the windmills of his madness, riding a broken-down nag, forever in love with the raddled seductress of revolution. If cities were music, Havana would be jazz played on a scratched record, the needle of time skittering across the grooves of past and present in random riffs...'

and ends:

'Stuck like a jaunty cigar in the mouth of the Caribbean, Cuba continues to confront the US Goliath. Come on, hombre. Make my day. Mano a mano. For sheer machismo, it's an unparalleled act. Forty-three years on, Fidel's revolucion is on its last legs. But like Hemingway's Old Man it remains a testament to an unyielding truth: I can be destroyed; but I can never be defeated.

In the amber afterglow of dusk, I take a last walk along the Malecon and raise a toast to Cuba libre: Salud to its pride, its passion, its poverty. Salud to the revolucion. To its glorious triumph. And to its even more magnificent tragedy.’

That's what I'm talking about. If I could write like that I'd be travelling the world on someone else's rupeetoo. If you want more, you'll have to read the book. Believe me, it'll be well worth it.

Zafar Sobhan is assistant editor, The Daily Star.