The five things travel taught me: Journalist and author Andrew Darby

RITES

Journalist and nature writer Andrew Darby's book, Flight Lines, charts the discovery of extraordinary flights across the globe by migratory shorebirds and his personal odyssey of surviving metastatic lung cancer. See allenandunwin.com

AWE

To leave suburban Australia for the first time I rolled down the runway in a DC-10 as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon played on my Walkman. That night at a Bangkok transfer, a military man waved me back with his gun as I walked the wrong way down a corridor. I flew on through the dark in a crammed 707 to Athens, checked into a sketchy hotel room and went to sleep. Next morning I opened the curtains and there in front of me was the Parthenon, standing on the Acropolis. That was 40 years ago and the memory still excites me today.

TRUST

Yes, I was taken in by a huckster "guide" in Sri Lanka – but I was a naive target. I learned to trust French schoolboys at soccer-sans-language, and Japanese passers-by to hand me faithfully from one to the other, piloting me around Tokyo. I knew I would come to no harm with the villagers of China, delighted by the foreigner with the strange hair that their children could play with. Considering all that might have gone wrong, I have been a fortunate Candide.

HUMILITY

Standing on the white infinity of the Antarctic ice sheet, riding out a hurricane-force storm thousands of kilometres from land in the Southern Ocean, watching gold-haired grizzly bears occupy the Arctic tundra, swimming with curious minke whales – all of these moments have given me a sense of my place in the world, and it is very small. This makes our power to change the Earth all the more sobering. Any good doctor of politics must prescribe travel as a cure for self-interested politicians. Send every climate change-denier free of charge to be scolded by the Inuit.

CONNECTION