We left Bray, where we have lived for the past 11 years, in June 2000 for a round-the-world trip with our daughter, then 15. Now we're back, but it seems the world has come to Ireland, and instead of gradually allowing our travel memories to fade and become the stuff of dinner-party conversation, the news headlines pull us across to Asia, to the Third World, to people we lived with for brief days.
The nearest we got to Afghanistan was Nepal, a country that has many similarities. Never colonised or conquered, it has a fiercely unwelcoming topography: to the north, mountains where the air is so thin you get headaches, go deaf, lose your appetite, and gasp for breath on each upward step; and to the south, a recently reclaimed malarial swamp. In the hills, loyalty is to your tribe and family, not to kings, queens and politicians who are two days' journey away by bus.
I thought Kerala, Calcutta and Darjeeling were poor until we crossed the Nepali border and made the 15-hour bus journey to Kathmandu, passing subsistence farms and dirt roads that led south to the border with India, where upwardly mobile Nepali workers go to make a few more rupees.
Porters with broken flip-flops
Trekking through the Himalayan hill villages we walked on the same steep tracks as strings of porters with broken plastic flip-flops who carried solar panels, eight-foot lengths of timber, hot-water tanks and carpentry tools on their backs up the mountain passes, climbing rapidly and good-humouredly past us as we took our time, our luggage on the back of yet another porter.
These teams are considered to be high earners - they get the equivalent of £5 for four days' work - but their working life is often cut short by heart and lung problems.
In Ireland, if our child wants a comic, we buy them one, with maybe a packet of sweets to go with it. If you live in a village on a Fijian island, you get your turn with the comic after it has been read and passed round 20 or more families. I saw a boy reading and asked him to whom the comic belonged. He looked puzzled. Belong? Own?
Giving out packets of sweets to all the children of the village, we didn't have to worry about the smaller ones not getting their share - they were freely handed round by their bigger siblings, with huge smiles. These children's idea of leisure is to stop on their walk back from school and collect a bundle of firewood or a branch of wild chillies to bring home to their mothers.
In Riung, a Muslim fishing village on the north coast of Flores in Indonesia, black nets full of tiny silver fry are pulled out of the sea and spread along the main street to dry in the sun. At the end of the day everyone - men, women and children, down to the toddlers - communally empty them, collecting the fish in recycled cooking oil containers and hauling them down to the harbour to be taken by boat to a bigger island for processing. Apart from tourism, that is their main industry. So that is what everyone in the village does, and does with humour and laughter, the babies taking time out to splash and jump in the water.
Smiling and scrawny men begged to be allowed to convey us hefty Westerners and our luggage on their bicycle rickshaws in Jogjakarta, Java.
Women work hardest
I saw that women in India work the hardest and are for the most part silent, and always stand while others sit down, ready to serve food or clear away, their opinions unheard, their education incomplete, but their love of children and family and their support of their men obvious even to foreign visitors.
In the Third World it is the men who socialise with foreign visitors, men who can speak English, men who express their curiosity about our way of life and cannot believe how much we waste, and what we consider to be hard work.
Now we have come back to a changing Ireland, a land of new citizens, new languages being spoken on the DART, signs up in Dublin shops saying "assistants wanted; must speak English" - and the distinction still being made between "asylum-seekers" and "economic migrants", with the implication that if you have come here only to find work and a better life you are probably lazy, looking for an easy way out, wanting to sponge off the welfare.
No helpful guidebooks
Can you imagine the efforts that must be made by a family from Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa to raise the money for the fare here? To fill in the necessary forms and get travel documents if you can't read or write? To arrive without the benefit of educational videos, Lonely Planet guidebooks or news coverage in your country of origin to prepare you for the way we speak, the high cost of living, our weather, our attitudes?
If these new arrivals were lazy or workshy they would be dead of starvation and disease already. They have struggled to get here, hoping to find decent work and a better future for their families. Will we not let them work? Why should wanting a better life be a crime? Aren't there enough resources of land and work and opportunity for everyone?
If you don't think so, I suggest you go to India, Indonesia, New Guinea, the new central Asian republics, Thailand, Nepal or Pakistan. See what constitutes life for the vast majority in the Third World. Understand what links, economic and historic, connect us to the other side of the planet. And maybe learn from them how to appreciate what we have here.