Readers often ask if I find it depressing to visit African slums or mud-brick villages.

More than three-fourths of them are Uighurs, mostly living in mud-brick villages where they farm cotton, grains and melons.

We drove through mud-brick villages in what our driver Abelardo said had been the worst of Sendero Luminoso country.

The ancient city lies sixty miles south of Baghdad along a dull road bordered by date palms, mud-brick villages and fifty-foot-high placards of Saddam.

I met him in a mud-brick village on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern Gansu Province.

To escape city traffic, head for the Palmeraie, the palm-shaded district 5km northwest of the centre where you'll spot mud-brick villages and celebrity villas.

Underlying problems in rural areas, the economic boom of China's coastal areas has bypassed many of the mud-brick villages where peasants live.

Dunes, palm trees, mud-brick villages, children and animals would have made good picture postcards, but, for all its beauty, the desert was terrifying.

They had crossed the English Bridge, and the city gave way to mud-brick villages and sugar-cane fields, until they reached the edge of the desert.

Their teacher came back to her mud-brick village among the green fields of rural Laghman Province after working in a refugee camp in Pakistan.