Asia and Middle East

Singapore for a soft landing, India if you want to be shaken from the moment you leave the airport. I walked out of New Delhi at half past one in the morning: it was still 38 degrees, and the day would climb towards 47. Every sense saturates at once, smells, colours, car horns, and that first shock is told in arriving in northern India. Singapore plays another tune: over 30 degrees as well, 56 per cent humidity, showers almost every day that rarely last more than an hour, and four official languages, English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, on top of which sits Singlish. The air-conditioned version is in my Singapore city days.

The golden triangle, Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. In Agra, the Taj Mahal was raised by emperor Shah Jahan for his queen, who died in childbirth with her fourteenth child, or her ninth according to other sources. Up to thirty-five kinds of precious stone went into the inlay, and a single carved flower can hold more than sixty separate pieces, a detail I look at closely in a first taste of India. I visited it in a sari, five and a half metres of cloth by one metre ten, wrapped in ten minutes flat by a young woman from the hotel. In Jaipur, founded in 1727 on a grid of nine squares, the Palace of Winds, the Hawa Mahal, lines up 61 loggias and 953 niches. The rest of the country carries on in my northern Indian stories.

Muscat, and it is my starting point too. The city has its own story, which I subtitled a city walk in the anti-Dubai, and it is on foot that it crosses in Muscat on foot, quarter by quarter. The rest of the sultanate falls into four settings: the inland castles and their timekeeping, the east coast and its shoreline walk, the escapes into the Hajar mountain range, and finally the natural wonders, between green wadi and moving sand. The Wahiba Sands alone cover about 12,500 square kilometres, with dunes rising to 250 metres. You go from sea to desert inside the same day. The whole country opens from my Omani travel stories.

In Mustang, the Tibetan enclave of the north. Access needs a special permit, granted to two thousand visitors only, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. Getting there works like an airlock: seven hours on a so-called tourist bus between Kathmandu and Pokhara, then a twenty-five minute flight in an eighteen-seat Fokker, from 820 metres of altitude to 2,800, before the first steps of the climb to the land of dzos. You collect the permit at Kagbeni, follow the Kali Gandaki river that rises in Tibet, pass the red cliffs of Dakhmar, and walk five hours to Chele. Prayer wheels are turned clockwise. The country as a whole is in my Nepalese travel notebooks.

Gardens by the Bay, Marina Bay Sands, then Arab Street. Gardens by the Bay, opened at the end of June 2012, covers more than a hundred hectares and gathers around 200,000 plants from every continent; eighteen supertrees of 25 to 50 metres are linked by a walkway suspended 25 metres above the ground, and eleven of them need no power supply. Facing them, the three towers of Marina Bay Sands, 57 storeys opened in 2010, carry a SkyPark at 225 metres, and that whole waterfront sits in the bay and its supertrees. Then you come back down: the Sultan Mosque dates from 1825, the Sri Veeramakaliamman temple from 1885. Order a kopi, not a coffee. The quarters are walked in Arab Street, Little India and Chinatown.

Yes, in Fujian, and you can sleep there. The oldest tulous are more than 1,200 years old, and a single one of these round buildings can house over six hundred people. Unesco listed them in 2008. Standing in the middle of the courtyard, you feel as though you were on a village square rather than in a corridor. It was there, inside the Zhengcheng Lou, that Jiang Jianlin showed me the tea ceremony of Fujian. Around it, the village of Peitian spreads over 13.4 square kilometres, with about thirty buildings, twenty-one ancestral temples, six schools and two commemorative arches, among passion fruit, giant bamboo and banana trees. The whole country is in China, from Fujian to Shanghai.

Mustang, if you can take the altitude. Up there everything slows: Nepalese horses, small and stocky, remain the safest way to move, dzos pass on the tracks, and villagers raise long-haired goats while growing rice, buckwheat, wheat, barley and potatoes, at the pace kept by Mustang country at walking speed. At Ghar Gompa, presented as the oldest Buddhist monastery in the country, I counted chortens with my eyes and never reached the end of them. I was there in October, during the harvest. The Sultanate of Oman offers another kind of quiet, a mineral one, with its castles set above the palm groves, in the forts of the Omani interior.