Ecuador

In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary Shelley and Byron’s current squeeze Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, they both impulsively decided to commission the building of boats in order to explore the gulf of La Spezia. While Shelley, in deference to his friend, named his Don Juan (the boat in which he would perish, aged 29, the following year), Byron christened his The Bolivar,in honour of Simon Bolivar, who was then attempting to liberate South America from the Spanish. No stranger to noble causes, Byron would eventually go off to support the Greek War of Independence, dying ignominiously, aged

Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful organisms on Earth. Yet for anyone who has never seen one in the flesh, it is difficult to convey the psychological effects of a first encounter. For beauty is only half the hummingbird story. Their impact is doubled somehow by the minuscule size of the creatures. How could anything so small, you wonder, embody so much life force? Even in ordinary flight the wings beat at 80 times a second, and in certain display modes this can rise to 200. The old name — ‘humbird’ — better expresses the electric

Thirty-two years ago the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage in dugout canoes and boarding a Quito-bound steam train through the Andes, run by the estimable Empresa de Ferrocarriles Ecuatorianos. Their journey had its moments: at one stage both parties were to be found at 13,000 feet, crusted with ice and huddled overnight from the gales inside a pair of plastic rubbish bags; they then