In Lagos I met the editor of the Saturday Punch, the most popular newspaper in Nigeria. He took me to the house where he grew up, a very poor place in a squalid area. He said that years before, when he told his parents that he had been accepted at the university, his father went into a deep depression because he didn't know how he would pay for it. But then his mother produced a box of clothes and textiles she had been making and putting aside. Those items paid for his education. Now he drives a Mercedes and has progressed beyond his beginnings. It was uplifting to see that, despite the shocking conditions you can find in Lagos, it is still possible for people to rise above it all.

The biggest problems the police were facing while I was in São Paolo were drugs and kidnappings. Middle-class people were being abducted from their cars and kept in cages while their kidnappers demanded ransoms. I joined some of the special police on a search for victims in a pretty hairy area. Even the guides wouldn't get out of the car.

Bangkok has long been portrayed as a sort of sex capital. But I discovered that it wasn't quite that way. After talking to a number of people, I learned that the Western men and Thai women are often looking for long-term relationships. Many of them marry, with the men staying in Thailand or the women giving up good jobs to leave with them.