It was never my intention to become a 'spiritual traveller'. Nor do I know if I really qualify for the title, having never stayed in an ashram or followed a guru. It all happened in spite of myself, through a series of accidents rather than any thought-out design. It began, I think, when I was 19, on my year off between school and university. I was visiting a cousin who was a born-again Christian and lived in Botswana. "So Rupert," he asked me on my first night in his hot, drought-ridden country, while huge moths and other insects I didn't recognise fluttered at the candles: "At what stage in your spiritual odyssey are you?"

I had no answer. I was a teenager, concerned with girls, adventure and, well, girls. It had never occurred to me that my life might be a spiritual journey. But despite my inability to respond, and my innate resistance to my cousin's rather rigid brand of spirituality, the question resonated. And three years later, while living on my wits as an illegal immigrant in Canada, it raised its head again. I had been surviving any old how, doing various kinds of labouring jobs, when it occurred to me that I might be able to make my living by my pen - or rather, begin the long, long process of establishing such a living. I was living in Montreal at the time. While there, a story much in the Canadian newspapers concerned the intention of a government-sponsored power company called Hydro Quebec to flood an area of land equivalent to the size of France in Northern Quebec. The water and hydro power would be sold to America. Problem was, the land belonged to the Cree Indians, and they didn't want the flooding. No one was reporting on the story back in the UK. I managed to get an on-spec commission for a British magazine and headed north to do my first reportage.

What I found was a people intimately connected with the land, and who were not afraid to apply the words God and spirit to everything around them. Trees, rocks, water, animals, people, even machines - everything was seen as a manifestation of divine spirit. The woods around the Crees' canvas settlements echoed to the clack of bones and antlers tied to the trees to honour and invoke animal spirits they had taken. Medicine bundles full of prayers were fastened with strips of caribou hide to the forks of silver birch trees. They believed that to take more from the forest than was needed was to abuse God, but that to take as much as was needed was to honour God. This deliberate, focused, intimate relationship with a God of all things seemed to give the Cree a palpable strength of resolve. They won their battle against Hydro Quebec, and safeguarded the land. And I came away questioning my own world view. The Crees' belief in the interconnectedness of things had a kind of instinctive logic to it that was hard to ignore.

A few months later, back in Britain, the chance came my way to update a guidebook to - as it happened - spiritual retreats. I spent several months tramping up and down the UK, staying in Benedictine monasteries, Buddhist centres, New Age/Pagan communities such as Findhorn in Scotland, and even colleges of the pan-religious Ba'Hai faith. During that time I learned that - interested though I was - I was not yet ready for the rigour of a specific, regular spiritual practice. Yet I could see that life without such a practice was only half a life - the people in all these places were just too damn fulfilled by their own spiritual practices to dismiss. And I could see that, whether I liked it or not, my life was - as my cousin had once told me - a journey towards finding my own spirituality. But I was hung up on the idea of virtue: how could I try to follow a spiritual path when I had a young man's libido and thirst for adventure to contend with? It seemed an insoluble quandary.

The following years - the mid to late 1990s - brought a succession of contracts to write guidebooks to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. These projects revived an old interest in the wild Kalahari area, the vast dry grassland that lies at the centre of all four countries, and which my South African mother had told me stories of when I was a child growing up in grey, unexotic London. Many of those stories had been about the svelte, golden- skinned hunter-gatherers who inhabited that vast land of singing grasses - the people known as Bushmen. I began to get more curious about these people, whose culture (it was said) dated back at least 30,000 years. Yet it wasn't easy to make contact with them. After several attempts to overcome the obstacles of vast distance, the need for an expensive 4x4, language barriers and lack of local knowledge, I finally managed to meet and make a friend among the Ju'/Hoansi Bushmen of northern Namibia. One of the last clans to live almost entirely by hunting and gathering they - like the Cree - were resisting the appropriation of their land; in this case by aggressive, cattle-owning tribes such as the Herero, Batswana and Ovambo, who wanted the Bushman hunting grounds for grazing.

Perhaps inevitably, I became quickly drawn into reporting on the Bushmen's emerging political struggle. Two communities, the Xhomani of South Africa and the Nharo of Botswana, eventually became sufficiently comfortable with me to invite me to the trance, or healing, dances for which the Bushmen are famous. These dances last all night, a chorus of women weaving a sonic web of hand-clapping rhythm and shrilling song while the men dance a slow-stamping circle between them and the fire, led a by a healer. When the healer achieves his trance, the sight is spectacular; he shrieks, sobs with the pain of it. Blood and mucus pour from his mouth and nose. Quite miraculous healings take place - I have seen, for example, a woman cured of angry red swellings on her legs, and a child's whooping cough taken away in a single night of dancing. But almost more important than the individual healings is the effect these dances have on the communities themselves. Ancestral spirits are called in to flush out any tensions and conflicts that threaten the unity of the group. The importance of this cannot be over- emphasised. As Dawid Kruiper, leader of the Xhomani Bushmen, once told me: "We are the jackals, the little ones who sit in the dunes and wait while the lions eat." A pacifist culture surrounded by warrior societies - both black and white - the Bushmen were certain that this continual renewal of spiritual strength through the trance dance had given them the strength to survive the continual assaults that it has been their lot, historically, to suffer.

They also showed me, sometimes very graphically, how leading a spiritual life does not necessarily require being a saint. All the Bushman healers I know drank (though not to achieve trance). Many of them cheated on their wives, fought sometimes, and said and did thoughtless things. And the same is true of healers I have met at home. Though not so extreme a character as the Bushman shamans, one Cornish healer I know is very much a red-blooded male. Yet his ability to heal - by channeling love, as he calls it - is extraordinary. He once healed me, long distance, of a blinding toothache (he was in Cornwall, I was in Idaho, trying to live-capture a mountain lion in a snowstorm as part of a wildlife study). Another time, when I fell from a horse in Colorado and got up coughing blood, I made a successful mental appeal to him - 9,500 kilometres away - to stop the bleeding. And these episodes pale beside what he has done for cancer patients. As he says: "God expects devotion, not perfection."

Recently, during this life of travelling to and fro between the Kalahari (where most of my work is), England (where my commissions come from) and America (where I now live), I have become more interested in the Eastern traditions. Most of this has come through my wife, whom I met in India. Neither of us were there for any spiritual purpose - she was collecting data for her psychology PhD among Indian high school students and I was in between Africa projects, writing another guidebook. But my wife, whose hippy-minded Californian parents introduced her early to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, already had a daily meditation practice. The equanimity this brought her was evident from the start of our relationship. I felt inspired to follow. Though my practice is, as yet, much more erratic than hers, together we have been exploring yoga and the teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who preaches a philosophy of non- attachment to objects and ideas, and who was highly influential in the peace talks that brought an end to the Vietnam War. Coming soon is my first yoga retreat - which will take place on a remote ranch in northern Texas. And I am working up the courage to try, this summer, the discipline of my first meditation retreat, hopefully at Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village community in Southern France.

Which brings us back to where we began - travelling with a spiritual purpose. It is a cliché to say that life itself is a spiritual journey. But, like most clichés, it holds true. Although I never set out to travel as a means to a spiritual end, it happened anyway. Through the Cree and the Bushmen I learned the necessity of honouring God in all things and applying love to all situations - or at least as much as possible, given the limitations of ego and desire. Without the strength that their beliefs brought them, these two peoples might well have succumbed to the outside aggressors. And from the isolated spiritual communities of the West I have learned that a life lived in fear of the word God is a life devoid of any real meaning. Now, it seems, I am at last about to start travelling with more of a direct spiritual purpose in mind. But where this will lead, I have no idea. All one can do - in this as in all journeys - is begin.