Travel with a purpose is all the rage. It's not enough any more to travel just for the fun of it, to fly away to some foreign land and spend all your money there. If it was travel with a porpoise, that would be something.
But if the future of travel is all about giving back, well, do backpack-loads of clothes, money, cameras and other ephemera count?
If the answer is yes, then I've been giving back ever since I got to tag along with the folks on a tour of America's industrial heartland in 1979.
We flew via Rio de Janeiro because it was cheap (partly because people were scared of flying on DC-10s, and Varig, the Brazilian airline, had a fleet comprising, it seemed, only of DC-10s and ratty, urine-spattered Boeing 707s).
In Rio, I saw my first favela, spreading up the hill from the back door of our Copacabana hotel. That same morning, I also gave back as a traveller for the first time - my crappy but very much loved Kodak Instamatic camera was lifted from the breakfast table while I savaged the buffet.
I was 12 years old. From that day on, journeys were marked with things lost (and, every now and then, found again).
Some, like the Kodak and my entire travel fund of $82 in cash in Maputo in 1993, were stolen.Mostly, though, things just slipped away through a mixture of inattention and good old idiocy - like the time I arrived in downtown New York on a rainy April night and let a kind, helpful New Yorker take my last $20 bill.
He was going to fetch some quarters for me so's I could use "his" bank of payphones outside Grand Central Terminal to phone the youth hostel (I did wonder why he jogged away through the traffic, crowing like a rooster, the 20 held above his head).
"What did you learn from that?" my cousin - who then lived in a very nice apartment up on East 69th Street - wanted to know when I knocked on his door a few days later.
"Don't arrive in New York at night? Alone? In the rain?" "How very Hemingway," he said.
The list of things lost represents the GDP of a small Pacific island nation. There was the brand-new Psion palmtop, abandoned in a Knysna guesthouse, along with 9,000 words of a travel guide I was writing. There was my red fleece, "donated" in February to the crew of a Maldivian tuna boat.In Thailand, a rafting guide borrowed my new, green flip-flops and slip-slopped off into Chiang Mai's dusty streets at the end of the trip. I have left lens caps and lens hoods in bars and on rattletrap buses in Mozambique, India and Great Britain - where I also once dropped a pair of groovy John Lennon mirror shades off the side of a badly steered punt into the green murk of the River Cherwell.
In Hanoi, I left $600 and my passport under the mattress in a fleapit hotel - luckily their housekeeping was so slack that when I returned in a cold and sweaty panic a day later, it was still there.
And last year, the bemused cleaners of a Fly Blue Crane flight to Kimberley would have found my digital recorder - containing an untranscribed interview- in the seat pocket.The best, though, was the Royal portable typewriter I left with the owners of a guesthouse on Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand after weeks thumping away like an idiotic Kerouac on a few rubbish scripts for a film-school application. I had lugged the typewriter from Joburg but I sure as chips wasn't going to carry it around Asia. The owners gazed at my gift, with its QWERTY keyboard, and placed it behind the bar, where it probably remains.
That I would then spend weeks scouring Bangkok for an "English" typewriter to retype those same lousy scripts, well, that's another story.
• What things have you loved and lost on your travels? Write a list in no more than 150 words and send it to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za
• Do you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photograph of yourself for publication with the column...