Making television documentaries is a great way to travel. Since I have managed occasionally to creep out of the studio and onto the road (and rail and aeroplane), for the purposes of making television programmes, I have been despatched to Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Hawaii, Cuba, Dominica, Goa, Calcutta, Kenya, Nigeria, Beirut and a variety of bits of the United States. Not to mention Montreal and Edinburgh to cover comedy festivals, and Bayeux to film a tapestry. Join the BBC, it turns out, and see the world.

Overall, I have enjoyed myself hugely - and I hope some of the programmes have turned out all right as well. But there are some disadvantages. Documentary-making is not one long holiday, nor even one long Holiday Programme, whatever viewers might suspect. Or indeed whatever I secretly hoped before I started. Sad to say, even though you might spend two weeks on location making a 40-minute film, there is precious little time to lounge around on the beach, or to spend 'researching' local night clubs. Rather disappointingly, even relatively straightforward films seem to take endless amounts of time to shoot. And films never seem that straightforward when you are on location trying to film them. Also, budgets being what they are, filming has to start virtually from the moment the presenter arrives and continue until the minute he leaves. Even rare days timetabled as days off turn all too regularly into days catching up.

There are, of course, plenty of meals and drinks to be had with the crew, but this is a vital part of bonding together as a group and should not be seen as a pure pleasure. And if you meet up with local people as well, this must be regarded as a vital process of learning about other cultures and not just partying for the hell of it.

Time to acclimatise never seems to be allowed at all. Take Hawaii. I landed late at night on the other side of the world. Had we crossed the international date line? I literally did not know what day of the week it was. But I soon discovered I had to be up at the crack of dawn the next morning to row in a Hawaiian canoe. Several gorgeous, sun-tanned twentysomething oarsmen teamed with me: pale of skin, lacking of sleep, slight of frame and spread of middle age. All to produce a few frames of Hawaii 5-0 parody for the end credits. However, as the director pointed out, it could have been so much more if I had had the sense to fall in and start drowning on camera.

Then there is the travelling itself. As I know to my cost, the modern child requires a vast amount of baggage in order to get from A to B. Cuddly toys, backpacks and buggies, snack foods and nappies, plus an array of items constructed entirely from garish coloured plastic are de rigeur. This, however, is not a patch on a film crew. Even the most solitary-looking TV journey is made by a small army of voyagers: a cameraman, a soundman, a camera assistant, a director and/or a producer, and perhaps a researcher, translator or local fixer. With them come their equipment. Metal boxes full of film or video tape, metal boxes full of lights, reflectors, batteries, cameras, tripods, metal boxes full of tape recorders, tape and microphones. Metal boxes, for all I know, full of spare metal boxes.

All of these have to be dragged around airports, checked onto planes, and loaded into vans, boats and trains. On the first leg of the great railway journey across China, we were worried about getting our equipment stolen, so we locked it in a 'soft-class' sleeper, while we mere humans struggled onto 'hard-class' bunks at the cheaper end of the train. Who else would give up their seats, and their beds, to their luggage? On a later leg of the same journey, all the equipment travelled on to Beijing with just our Chinese-speaking translator for company, while the rest of us stayed the wrong side of the barrier at Jinan station getting arrested. On a later film, the whole lot flew to the wrong island because some idiot (me, since you ask) said the wrong thing at an airport check-in. Still, in these days of high security awareness, it is nice to know that 50 or so metal boxes can still fly unaccompanied on a small passenger plane without let or hindrance!

In Lagos, we managed to get arrested twice in two weeks. Firstly for filming for several days with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Information but without the express permission of the secret police, and secondly for filming a roadside food stall without the permission of the local police station. It is remarkable the effect that cameras have on insecure members of the security forces the world over.

Cameras do bring out the more adventurous side of some people, though. The most stressful part of my normal travelling life is attempting to hail a taxi in Oxford Street. But in my documentary existence I am forever leaping onto tiny aeroplanes, dodgy helicopters, over-laden Land Rovers, unstable fishing boats, unconventional ferries and unpredictable horses. Needless to say, each owner, pilot, guide or driver, inspired by the presence of a camera, races, shows off and generally pushes his or her vehicle to its limit. It is as though they want them and me to die on camera, or at any rate come close to it.

I know how they feel. I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to take over the controls of a small aeroplane flying over the sea between Cuba and Florida. You pull the joystick one way to go up, the other way to go down, left to go left, right to go right, in, out, in, out, shake it all about... I was ordered to stop by the director getting seasick and squeezed in the back. "For God's sake Clive," he said, "let the real pilot take over again and let's go back to base as soon as... " (Sound track then obscured by retching sound.)

Ah, illness. All travellers risk upset, infection and disease, but the TV presenter risks his particular bout of Delhi belly, sleeping sickness or raging fever being caught on camera for the delight of the watching millions. Indeed, when I turned to Michael Palin for advice on this point, he assured me that being ill on screen is vital to maintain viewers' interest. But when you feel your insides are about to become outsides, it is no fun being Our Man In A Pale Suit trying to conduct an interview in a steaming hot location miles away from your old friend Armitage Shanks.

This brings me to another danger. It is important that the film-maker does not wind up filming someone else's film crew. With Michael Palin circling round the world in every possible direction, with every holiday destination covered by the Holiday Programme, or Wish You Were Here, with every war zone attracting crews from all over the world, with every Amazon Indian tribe apparently attached to its own resident camera crew, with every part of the natural world negotiating a series with David Attenborough, with every exotic railway journey the subject of a TV travelogue, this becomes ever more difficult.

I was once filming on the beautiful but little-known island of Dominica in the Windward Islands. At exactly the same time, Tony Robinson was on the same island making another film for the BBC. Now what are the chances of that?

But it has to be said, documentary-making abroad is much less dangerous than fighting a war, less demanding than relief work, better paid than vso, less exhausting than grape-picking, more fun than a sales conference, and less uncomfortable than travelling on the Northern Line. In fact my only real complaint is that I am at home writing this, rather than away on another trip. Maybe next year.