Uruguay is not on every traveller’s list, partly because many are hazy about where it might be — in South America, but where exactly? And what is

it about the place that could have prompted Martin Amis and his wife to leave England for a life by the beach there?

On Stockholm’s trendy southern island, Sodermalm, haughty seagulls strut through the square, past the beautiful people eating at Urban Deli and Roxy in the long, warm eving. We choose Roxy, finding ourselves beside Jodie Foster, who is eating alone.

In a hot tub overlooking a sunny tarn where a little wooden rowing boat lolled by the jetty, I thought how much nicer it is to be an adult than a child. The last time I visited the Lake District, it was hell. This time, it was heaven.

They say that no one who goes to Antarctica returns the same. Certainly a cruise there is like leaving the planet. There might be an ice peak that looks like the Alps, or a glacier reminiscent of Alaska, but essentially this is different from anything we know. Unlike the Arctic, it has never had an indigenous people. With a land mass one and a half times that of the US, this is ice and snow on a scale which defies the imagination.

Prone on my massage bed, I see a monitor lizard stomping up the road. It’s at least 5ft long, tongue flaring, shoulders gangster tough — a thuggish reptile, snarling a reminder that Pangkor Laut Resort is no tepid paradise.

The man in the other boat flaps his hands behind his ears and points downriver. “Elephant,” whispers our guide, with a jubilant grin, and swivels us into a sharp midstream U-turn. Minutes later, hearts trumpeting, we meet our pygmy jumbo, less than 7ft tall and twitching his shrunken trunk right beside the river bank.