More celebrity travels on our My Hols special

I’ve just got back from a holiday in St Lucia, which is where my parents are from. They came to London in the 1950s and retired back out there in the 1990s, as was their plan. My dad is now a fisherman — he’s 75 but doesn’t look a day older than 60.

I’m one of six kids, so there was never any money for holidays. My parents built up the legend of St Lucia throughout my childhood, so when I went there for the first time, aged 32, I was worried it wouldn’t live up to it. But I loved the place: the people are so warm and welcoming. I took my son this year for the first time; my wife is keen that he should know his roots.

My travel highlight was the four months I spent in Thailand when we were filming The Beach. We were based in Phuket, but I looked around the other islands on my days off. When the crew arrived, it was a dump — covered in fag butts, coke packets, condoms, syringes and other detritus of wild parties. The local fishermen use dynamite, so the coral was dead, too. It took the crew a month to clean it up — they removed three tons of rubbish.

They’d swept the whole beach for the first scene we filmed — me, standing alone on the sand, hitting a cricket ball towards the ocean. There wasn’t even a bird print in the sand; the sun was coming up and it was totally quiet. It was the most amazing experience. When I subsequently heard the lies

peddled in the press about the ecological damage the crew did, I was very disappointed. I’m sure our time there was what encouraged Leonardo DiCaprio to speak out on ecological issues. I think the film put Thailand on the map for a lot more regular people. When we were there, the travellers we met were quite extreme. I asked one guy how long he’d been travelling and he said since 1974.

I had my worst travel experience in Sicily. In 1989, I toured the island for two weeks. I ran out of money two days before my flight home, so I decided to go to the airport and wait there. The problem was, I had an abscess in my tooth, which I thought would be okay until I got home, but it got worse very quickly. I found a medic in the airport who gave me some antibiotics, and I had a delirious night sleeping in a stairwell in the building. The next morning, pus was coming out of my nose and sticking my eyes together — I looked like a monster. I was woken up by Italian policemen kicking me. They thought I was a tramp. It didn’t help that I was black. The police moved me out of the airport, so I spent the day pacing up and down outside until the evening, when I crept back to my sleeping place in the stairwell. That was definitely my travel low point.

I first left England when I was 22. I travelled from Paris to Lucca, in Italy, by bike and train. I remember coming out of the Gare du Nord with my bike during the Monday-morning rush hour, and the Parisians looking at me and my friend as if we were mad. I thought that if we followed the signs for

Versailles, we would eventually come out of Paris heading south. Which sort of worked. Our InterRail tickets were forged — we’d got them from a friend of a friend very cheaply. So when we sat on the train and the guard came around, we were terrified. Luckily, he stamped them, which was a huge relief.

A few days later, we were cycling in the Lot valley, down a steep hill into the town of Cahors. We had heavy saddlebags, so it wasn’t a good idea to go too fast. The road opened into a dual carriageway and suddenly there was a steep, sharp bend — I braked too late and I could see that I would either crash into the barrier or into oncoming traffic. So I did the kamikaze thing of jumping off the bike before it crashed — I must have been doing 40mph. I slid on my front for what felt like ages, but luckily I didn’t break anything. A man called Serge stopped, put my bike into the back of his van and took me to hospital, where they cleaned me up. Then he took us to a cafe and we all had coffee. It was very nice of him.

Times recommends

• New York hotels on sale in January
• Skomer Island, Wales: Britain's best job?
• Red Sea: the complete guide