Taking drones on holidays: They're intrusive and annoying

The hike between Govetts Leap Lookout and Pulpit Rock near the town of Blackheath is one of many sublime bushwalks in the Blue Mountains. The hundred-metre cliffs that ring the valley at your feet bear witness to the ages, striped by sediment bands laid down when this was the bed of a Devonian sea 400 million years ago. The forest tinkles with the far-off sound of bellbirds, but when I get to Pulpit Rock a bunch of kids are flying a drone, sending it up and down the cliffs and 100 metres into the sky. It hums like a demonic wasp, it blinks, it soars, it swoops, and although it is a mere flea against the vast canvas of the mountains, like a flea it is impossible to ignore.

Drones are cheap as chips. A couple of hundred dollars gets you a drone with an HD camera. Make it four figures and you've got a drone with a stabilised, gimbal-mounted camera capable of shooting 4K video and delivering a live feed from a kilometre away. They're also simple to operate. All you need is a finger and a smartphone app in most cases and you're airborne.

There are plenty of legitimate uses for drones. Real estate photographers, farmers and engineers use them as work tools. Airbus uses drones to check its aircraft for scratches, dents and other fuselage damage. In skilled hands, the footage is incredible. A drone can take you over a surfer scooting through the belly of a pipelining wave or over the lava flow of an erupting volcano.

It's when the amateur videographer takes one travelling that drones are at their most intrusive, and annoying.

Over the past couple of years I've encountered a drone in Venice, ascending beside the bell tower in St Mark's Square, over a beach in Thailand and in remote parts of the Swiss Alps.

On a 2015 trip through the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan I spent a night camping beside the Darvaza Gas Crater, an oxygen sucking, 90-metre wide, coal-red fire monster that the locals know as the "gateway to hell". It was just before sunset when a posse of Spanish motorcycle riders drew up, with a support vehicle and a drone which followed them as they spent the next hour riding around the crater.

The trail bikes were bad enough but they paled alongside the drone which hovered and blinked in the darkening sky. The video would probably have been fantastic but for the half dozen of us watching from a nearby hill the drone shattered what should have been a weirdly serene experience.

Turkmenistan is a totalitarian regime only fractionally less paranoid than North Korea. Taking out a camera anywhere around the government buildings in Ashgabat, the capital, will attract the instant attention of someone in uniform. There is possibly no law in Turkmenistan that forbids the use of drones. In the same way there is probably no law that prevents you from knocking at the front door of wherever it is that Kim Jong-un calls home. There doesn't need to be. I prayed that the long and intrusive arm of Turkmenistan officialdom might infiltrate even the wastelands of the desert but next morning the Spanish riders departed in a trail of dust with their electronically tethered drone hovering obediently overhead.

It doesn't take too much nous to acknowledge that flying a drone over a city or any other densely populated area has a potential downside and most countries have laws that forbid such activity.