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Seemingly engulfed by the metropolis, Patan nonetheless best preserves the ambience of a medieval city, with a minimum of artifice. Temples or traditional Newari brick houses with elaborately carved eaves, doorways and window boxes appear at every turn, even away from the main square. Men and women appear dwarfed by the loads on their backs. People pause to clasp hands in prayer as they pass yet another shrine, walking down the street. Sometimes a single gateway facing into a narrow street opens into the courtyard enclosing a back-street temple.

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Enderby Island teems with albatross, assorted penguins, petrels, parakeets, gulls, shags and skuas, and its treeless meadows are ablaze with distinctive flowering plants, particularly the subantarctic megaherbs like Bulbinella, with its striking yellow flowers. These are the world’s southernmost plants, evolution pushed to its limits in this punishing environment.

An easy walk on Campbell Island climbs away from Perseverance Harbour, following a wooden boardwalk across hillsides carpeted with tussocks, to reach a high saddle. Many southern royal albatross, snow white, spread across the windswept slopes, hunkered down on their nests to mind an egg whilst their partner is out foraging.

One evening we pass two distant naval frigates travelling in convoy. New Zealand’s governor general, a cabinet minister and a gaggle of scientists are bound for Campbell Island to inaugurate a national bicentennial research program.

Not so fast, chaps. Next day, HMNZS Otago breaks down in “a remote subantarctic fiord” – yes, that’s Perseverance Harbour – and the dignitaries must await transfer to the escort frigate. It’s twenty seconds of fame for a lonely, austerely-beautiful corner of New Zealand’s southernmost islands.

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Stepping ashore at Sandy Bay, a windswept beach on this remote subantarctic island, we are the alien invaders, inspected and quizzed by fearless creatures which waddle up to greet us when not preoccupied with their own courtship and nesting rituals. Amidst these thousands of webbed feet lie dozens of corpulent elephant seals, strewn about like sacks of wadding, stretching and yawning as they moult.

At 54 degrees south latitude, a mere speck in the Southern Ocean, Macquarie lies halfway from Australia to the Antarctic continent, the only island on earth formed by rocks forced up from the ocean’s floor, and near-new in geological terms.

This is not the dry, icy expanse of the Antarctic continent – officially, it is Tasmanian territory – but it is a challenging and inhospitable outpost whose only human habitation is an Australian Antarctic research base.Visitors usually join an expedition cruise, often en route to Antarctic waters.

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Not only those who served – and their families – will gain from visiting this sprawling collection; so will anyone who lived through those tumultuous years from 1962 through to 1972. 

The Museum soon outgrew its first premises and ranges from documents – letters home, diaries, photos, maps and personal effects – to a Huey Cobra helicopter gunship, a Centurion tank and a Canberra bomber.  Especially poignant are the tributes received from the Vietnamese-Australian community.  And there’s even a café and a souvenir shop, so you can take home a teddy bear soldier or a model F4 Phantom fighter jet.  

At the station in downtown Trieste, we find ourselves a stone's throw from the Serbian Orthodox church, the old synagogue and much else to remind us that this was once a most cosmopolitan port, the only sea port for the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire, dismembered after the First World War.  Veteran travel writer Jan Morris enthuses over this somewhat cryptic city, not quite Italian, no longer Austro-Hungarian, and now tucked into a pocket of Italian territory almost encircled by Slovenia.

Trieste lacks the must-sees of other cities in northern Italy, in spite of a history extending back to Roman times, but in some ways that is part of its charm.  Launches bob at anchor in the Grand Canal whilst café patrons nibble cicheti appetisers and sip Campari spritzes on the nearby Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, an imposing town square laid out by Austrian town planners.

Image gallery online at www.pbase.com/travelgame/trieste

Don’t wait for the movie to reach a cinema near you… experience the reality now, with a spell of self-indulgence in a villa set amongst the emerald-green rice paddies around Ubud. In the village of Bentuyung one Australian couple owns Castello Jasper, a coolly-elegant four-bedroom villa boasting a 16-metre pool.

At Bentuyung, where the movie’s Balinese scenes were recently filmed, have pocketed the location fees and gone back to what they do best: rice farming and ritual. Your progress up the main street might be blocked by white-turbaned men and kebaya-clad women escorting the fearsome Barong into the temple.

Self-contained villa accommodation is leading Bali’s renaissance as a top-end destination. Spa treatments, shopping and fine dining all tempt visitors at a fraction of the costs back home, whilst villas provide privacy, exclusivity and independence. And those who would like to share a little love around, could consider supporting the stray dog refuge which has adopted the slogan Feed, Spay, Love. More images