The Hadramaut Valley is one of the most exciting and unvisited regions on earth, with remarkable landscapes: arid desert, 1,000m cliffs dropping down to palm-fringed villages, and flash-flood valleys.
Because these lakes are flooded valleys, they offer an ever-shifting assortment of dozens of branches and coves.
The area farther south, especially the stretch from Daman to Goa (known as the Konkan coast), is indented with rias (flooded valleys) extending inland into narrow riverine plains.
I was covering the floods, so drove tortuous routes around flooded valleys, hundreds of miles along wind-battered motorways and down dozens of rain-lashed country lanes, but I'm not complaining.
I started out in Marlborough, home of the Queen Charlotte Track, which curls up through the Marlborough Sounds, a breathtaking series of flooded valleys so higgledy-piggledy that they apparently comprise a fifth of New Zealand's 15,000km coastline.
Even Capability Brown, capable of levelling hills, moving villages and flooding valleys for other clients, merely softened the edges of the old formal scheme - drastic alterations, he said, would "unravel the mysteries of the garden".
Day one of the Loop heads 140km northeast from Th Khaek toward Vietnam, surging through lush jungle and along unsealed roads past lunar landscapes of flooded valleys.
After descending, recuperate on a bench in Princes Street Gardens, once a flooded valley protecting Edinburgh Castle that is now a bucolic spot for a break.
Yet, the Haweswater Hotel is one such property, standing on the lakeside road on the east side of Haweswater, a flooded valley that is now a reservoir for the North-west's drinking water.
The self-indulgent traveller in me would like to keep the road lonely and romantic; but if a few rented pick-ups and a campsite are the alternative to caravans of dumper trucks and cranes and a flooded valley, bring them on.
