4. Orang-utans (Tangjaug Putting National Park, Kumai, Borneo, Indonesia) Mt Yasur, Tanna Island5,. Vanuatu

Idecided to go sailing in the Optimist. I headed to shore; luckily it was an onshore breeze so I didn’t have to tack in. I walked to the local village, but when came back the tide had gone out, so I had to lug the boat down to the water and then I couldn’t let the centreboard down fully because it was too shallow.

I got it down only just enough to not go completely backwards but it still took 30 minutes to get back to the boat. By then it was 4 o’clock which was a good time to go ashore and get our ride to the volcano.

When we got ashore we found our taxis were actually utes with two wooden benches; at least we didn’t need air conditioning. It was quite a ride to the top of the hill. There was no seal or gravel. The carpark was a semi-flat, cleared piece of land.

We climbed the stairs to the top of the volcano. It was massive. The smoke was so thick we couldn’t see the stars on the other side of it; the only light was a deep, red glow coming from the craters and whenever it spat stuff out, it sounded like a Boeing winding up on a runway.

It would stop for a second and go quiet, then the smoke went blood red and just got redder and then a massive explosion occurred, vomiting out pieces of magma the size of the ute. As they hit the other side of the crater, it sounded like large chunks of gravel impacting hard against the bottom of a car.

As it rolled down the crater, the orange glow seemed to maintain its shape, colour and extraordinary heat. As the sun wore from the horizon, the eruptions went from large to enormous. The pieces were thrown 100ft above the crater at 300 metres a second; every time it erupted it shook the ground hard enough to move the rocks on the ground several inches. When we got tired, we headed back down to the ute and back to the boat.