On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who had organised my outing the previous day on a houseboat in the backwaters. “It’s a miniature houseboat, a souvenir of your trip,” he told me. And so it was, I discovered, on suspiciously peeling back the wrapping inside the airport.

The houseboat went through the x-ray machine without problems, but my backpack drew the attention of a security man. He wanted me to open all the pockets, and discovered a bottle of water that I had forgotten to take out. Instead of telling me I would have to dump it, as security jobsworths do in Britain, he asked me to take a few sips from it. Then he let me take it with me.

When I moved on to passport control, dropping my half-wrapped parcel on the desk while I fumbled for my passport, the immigration officer quipped: “Ah, this one’s bringing us a present.”

Why can’t they be as sensible and good-humoured everywhere?

It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, wrote for The Sunday Telegraph about a trip Kim made by armoured train to Moscow in 2001:

He brought all his own water, and he has a hundred security men to guard him. Also ten sniffer dogs. If you are Kim Jong-il, the peerless leader of North Korea and the great successor to the revolutionary cause, you probably need all the sniffer dogs you can get.

Recent correspondence with Mr Simpson prompted me to open his book News From No Man’s Land, which my wife bought a few years ago but I had not read myself.  I’m devouring it now, swept along by his enthusiasm for the trade of journalism and for what it can do and be at its best.

He writes:

It always used to irritate me to hear journalists referring to real incidents in the lives of real people as “stories”, with all the connotations which the word brings with it: dramatic incident, neatly rounded narrative, a satisfying ending. Gradually, though, I came to realize that the most important function people like me could perform was indeed to tell stories . . . Because “good” doesn’t have to mean sentimental or phoney or stupid; a good story can be something which illumines the real world, so that it stays illumined permanently.

He could have gone further still, starting from elsewhere. According to Christian Wolmar’s newly published Blood, Iron & Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World, you can travel 10,600 miles between Algeciras in southern Spain and Ho Chi Minh City. That is “the longest possible continuous journey by rail”. Unless, of course, you’re a railway buff who knows otherwise. . .

Once a fortnight — shame it’s not more often — Laura Barton writes the Hail, Hail, Rock’n'Roll column on the back page of The Guardian’s Film & Music section. Last Friday she was reflecting on what the river, the road and the railway have given to rock music.
That set me thinking about what I’d choose if I were able to add a soundtrack to Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys, which is due to be published by Aurum next week. I’ve put a few possibles on a playlist, courtesy of the wonderful site Grooveshark. Feel free to suggest more.

Trawling the archives and making a choice has consumed all my free time over the past six months, which is why postings on this blog have become even less frequent than they used to be.

As you’d expect, the book has outstanding narrative travel articles on the likes of the Trans-Siberian and the Orient Express. But I’ve interpreted the phrase “great railway journey” liberally, and so I also have a report, by my late colleague David Graves, on asylum-seekers trying to steal a ride on freight trains entering the Channel Tunnel. Here’s a taster:

In the darkness, they creep like ghosts towards Britain
As nightfall descends over Sangatte, the first groups of asylum-seekers emerge from the gates of a cavernous blue warehouse. Some groups are only three or four, others 50 strong. They shuffle off towards Coquelles, past the cornfields rippling in the wind, and prepare for their nightly battle with Eurotunnel to get to Britain.
Caught in the headlights of passing cars, they tread a well-worn route. Past the neat houses on the outskirts of Coquelles, where most of the local people are preparing for bed, and onward past the village post office towards the Calais-Boulogne motorway. Under a fence, across the motorway and towards the Cité Europe shopping centre.
Beside the lights of the shopping centre, where tens of thousands of Britons shop for cheap wine, the asylum-seekers start to fan out across rutted fields and through deep culverts towards a clump of small pine trees, in which they take cover. There is an odd shout or whistle, but otherwise silence, apart from the rustling wind.
It is here that the final dash to the Eurotunnel terminal, half a mile away, is planned. Kamal, an Iraqi Kurd, tells his friends of a breach in the 22 miles of razor wire around the 1,250-acre compound. It is a small hole under the perimeter fence, just big enough to wriggle under. There is a shout in the distance. Kamal, 24, who has been travelling through Europe to the Channel for three months, whispers: “It’s the police.” Everyone stays quiet for half an hour until it is time to move again. By now it is pitch-black.
Moving as silently as possible towards the perimeter fence, the asylum-seekers ghost through the night towards the hole. It has not been discovered by Eurotunnel’s security guards patrolling the compound. One by one, the refugees slip under the coils of razor wire. Ahead of them are the railway lines and trains they hope will take them to Britain.
Kamal is travelling with three friends. They are all Kurds from Kirkuk in northern Iraq. They have suffered years of persecution from Saddam Hussein and Turkish forces. Their desperate families have raised thousands of pounds to enable their sons to start a better life in Britain. First, though, they have to get to Folkestone to claim asylum.
The plan is to wait for a slow-moving European freight train. As it approaches the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, Kamal and his friends will attempt to jump on one of the wagons. They fan out towards the tracks, trying to avoid the floodlighting Eurotunnel has installed. . .