My brother won a melon arm-wrestling in Khiva

We rolled into Khiva, the walled desert town in western Uzbekistan, filthy and exhausted after days of driving, and found the place in the middle of a local festival. Singing, dancing, a crowd, and, we quickly learned, an arm-wrestling contest.

The performances came first. National songs and dances, done with tremendous seriousness, and to be honest it had the feel of a very good school concert. We clapped along to the rhythm, the only obvious foreigners in the crowd, and nobody minded us at all.

Then the arm wrestling started, and a queue of local men signed up. There was clearly no chance of the five of us just sitting there and watching this happen. Somebody had to represent. We chose my brother, on the grounds that he had not objected fast enough.

He went through the early rounds. Then he kept going. Then, to our escalating disbelief, he was in the final, in a foreign town, in front of a crowd of strangers who had by this point emphatically adopted him. A bit of back and forth, and he won.

The prize was a melon. An actual melon, handed over with due ceremony. Between us we came away with four of them across the evening's contests, and we celebrated them like trophies, before the music started up again and everybody danced, us included, and we finally got to the first proper shower and bed in days.

That is the thing about turning up somewhere with no plan. You cannot book a night like that. You can only be there when it happens, and then say yes.

Say yes. You might win a melon.