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To the south of Baghdad lies the reed marshes between the deltas of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. This watery realm was first brought to the attention of the world by the fascinating novels of the British-African explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

Early one Saturday morning, when the stars had already disappeared back into the pearly dawn sky, I went to the Alawi al-Hilla bus station, hoping to find a taxi driver who would bring me north to the city of Mosul, and into the heart of Kurdistan.

Even for me, New Zealand was far away. The Southern Alps stretched like a backbone along the southern island, carrying me closer and closer to my new home in Dunedin, the second last stop before Antarctica.

Istanbul has served as the capital of four empires over sixteen centuries—the Roman Empire (330–395), the Byzantine Empire (395–1204 and 1261–1453), the Latin Empire (1204–1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922).

Santorini is an island in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km (120 mi) southeast from Greece's mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago which bears the same name and is the remnant of a volcanic caldera.

Dr Patrick Treacy recounts a famous night twenty years ago in Berlin, when both communism and the Berlin Wall collapsed from the Irish Medical Times Nov 2009

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is spreading across the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa is inhabited by just over 12% of the world's population and is estimated to have more than 60% of the AIDS-infected population.

The Grand Trunk Road is one of South Asia's oldest and longest major roads. For several centuries, it has linked the eastern and western regions of the Indian subcontinent, running from Bengal, across north India, into Peshawar in Pakistan.

The Marsh Arabs (Arabic: عرب الأهوار‎) or Maʻdān are inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates marshlands in the south and east of Iraq. Many tribes were displaced and the wetlands destroyed by Saddam Hussein after the 1991 uprisings in Iraq.

Santorini (Greek: Σαντορίνη) is a small, circular group of volcanic islands located in the southern Aegean Sea, 200 km southeast of Greece. It is also known as Thera (or Thira, Greek Θήρα [ˈθira]). These are the authour's memories