Simultaneously French and R?ionese, they are the planet's most ethnically mixed population. But its most celebrated date is 1848 when the Second French Republic abolished slavery. La R?ion rejoiced, readopting its old name, but who would sweat in the plantations? Workers from Africa, Madagascar, China, India and Ceylon, all importing their customs and beliefs, added to the melting pot that had bubbled from the start.Today people boast of their personal cocktails of religions and genes. Captured by the British, it reverted to France post-Waterloo. In 1642 the first French settlers of the uninhabited island known as Mascarin - no tropical diseases, pleasant year-round climate - thought they had found Paradise.

Christened Ile de Bourbon, it became a unique laboratory for spices - supremely the vanilla that permeates still its culture and cuisine The island also grew sugar cane. It needed slaves.The island was renamed La R?ion at the French Revolution Napoleon felt later that Bonaparte rang better. Perfectly round, the tropical island resembles a pirate map, with jungles and peaks, a smoking volcano and ravines replete with buccaneers' booty. As we labour to the top, an overtaking local jokes, "Ne te casse pas la t?!" - the favourite native maxim - R?ionese Creole for "don't bust a gut!".We are 6,000 miles from Paris. To the east the Indian Ocean stretches to Australia, but for 70,000 R?ionese this is just as much France as the Champs-Elys? and they are as French as President Chirac. Two miles below us it is 30C but near the Piton des Neiges summit our boots are crunching ice. Whatever privations and setbacks may befall him, he will survive, because he is indestructible.. You can visit China's capital with Regent Holidays, 029 7921 1711, 's greatest virtue is that he writes it as he sees it, seldom taking the easy option of over-egging his (mis)adventures for the sake of a good line.

He encounters many primitive and perplexing characters, but avoids the pitfall of caricaturing them either as noble savages or idiots Eric Newby is the archetypal old school Englishman Abroad. DOES THE QUALITY OF NEWBY'S WRITING MATCH HIS STAMINA? He has his critics Classically educated, his style is not to everyone's taste. To the modern reader, his sentences can seem overlong: the one with which he signs off Slowly Down The Ganges falls only two words short of a century:"Here, at the Sandheads, some sixty miles south of Sagar Island, among the dome-shaped sands to the west of the Pilot's Ridge, invisible twenty fathoms below, where the long tails of sand ran down towards the deeps of the Indian Ocean, where the merchant ships waited for the pilots and the tide and the river, in its multiple guise as Hooghly, Bhagirathi, Ganges, deposited on the bottom of the dark olive mud mixed with glistening sand that shone like iron filings, the last scourings of a sub-continent, we felt that we had come to the end at last."Thank goodness for that, you might be forgiven for thinking. His determination to understand the human and political background to places of conflict never flags. But if you skim carelessly over such detail, you risk missing the next dramatic twist, or moment of playful humour - as when Newby visits Chairman Mao's tomb in Beijing:"Lying there, with only his face visible, he looked like an oversized omelette from the McDonald's across the way at the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square."Only Newby would bother to delay the punch-line by mentioning the compass point of a burger bar. Only Beirut, which was then in the middle of a civil war, escapes his attention in The Shores Of The Mediterranean (1984). Newby is not interested in fleshpots and holiday island-hopping: instead, he pokes about Mafia-ridden Naples, prises open doors in secretive, Communist Albania and Colonel Gadaffi's Libya, explores the ticking time-bomb of Montenegro, the religious crossroads of Jerusalem and Fez, and the frenzied backstreets of Istanbul.