I heard about Wolfe Creek Crater on a holiday in Perth. I visited the exceptionally interesting Western Australian Museum and saw amongst the bits of crashed Skylab, gold nuggets and dinosaurs,  a display about the first expedition to Wolfe Creek crater in 1949, where a meteorite had crashed into the northern Tanami desert 300,000 years ago. It is the biggest and most recognisable crater in Australia, and was only discovered in an aerial survey in 1947. It is rarely visited as it is, well, remote. On the edge of the Kimberly region, almost as far away from a major city as you can get in Australia. Definitely fitting into my requirements for a Far Flung Place.

I needed a long walk. The beach walk from Nhulunbuy to Yirrkala is about 12 km. Some of it requires clambering up small rocky cliffs, but mostly it is on the fine white sand. I popped into the Police station first, just to tell them where I was going in case I got into difficulties and did not make it back on time. They were totally nonplussed as to why anyone would want to do such a walk when there was a perfectly serviceable road connecting the towns, but they duly noted my details in their log book and reminded me to confirm when I returned. The officer on the desk shouted out to me as I left to "tell them if there is anything worth seeing".

Groote Eylandt had always held a fascination for me. Maybe it was the exotic name ('Great Island' is the English translation from the name chosen by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644) or the fact it was so damn remote and hard to get to, a small island sitting in the middle of the Gulf Of Carpenteria. I had not paid much attention to what to do there, as there was virtually no information on the island available.

I had never seen bauxite before, this is the red ore mined and then refined to make alumina. Bauxite is the reason that this part of East Arnhem Land is open to tourists (with the necessary permits) as the giant Rio Tinto strip mine is located there, along with a refinery, although the latter seems destined to close due to the high costs of running it at such a remote site.

One of Australia's far flung places is East Arnhem land. In the north eastern corner of the Northern Territory (NT), Aboriginal land since it was proclaimed as a reserve by the Australian Government in 1931, and off limits to tourists, except for a few places, such as Nhulunbuy (also known as Gove), on the coast.

Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan the legendary warlord who subjugated China from his Mongolian stronghold, built the Xanadu palace complex as a summer retreat from the heat of the Forbidden city in Beijing. The palace is arranged in a pattern of three concentric walled circles. Standing on the outer crumbling wall little remains of the buildings that once stood inside, only the odd column base, and linear foundations are visible amongst the plains of grass. When the Khan lived here many of the buildings were temporary, large tents were erected on arrival and taken down on departure.

Waiting for Mr Wong I looked through the Jinlianchuan hotel gift shop. It had the a delightful array of essential products seen to be required by tourists. No toothpaste or mineral water, but huge quantities of local brands of alcohol, sharing shelf space with stuffed squirrels in tasteful poses.

It's not every day you bump into Nelson Mandela. I had arrived from London via Athens and Nairobi on an epic Olympic Airways flight. I was exhausted, hungover and wondering how to safely get to my hotel in Hillbrow. All of a sudden there was a commotion and a group of six men with AK47 guns surrounding a small figure were moving swiftly out of the airport. It was the recently released Nelson Mandela, who was returning from his first overseas trip to Windhoek in Namibia. Everyone else in the airport seemed to be ignoring them, and there was no rush of journalists or photographers ready to greet them.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree,
where alph, the sacred river, ran