What is the most dangerous situation you've ever been in?
Someone kindly wrote to me and said oh you're like a cat who's used up six of his nine lives, and I thought oh that's a bit of an exaggeration, because of course I've obviously have told my venture stories, and I've had an exciting life so I can totally sort of but I haven't worked it out. And that is about right. I suppose between my dog my first expedition was bad, it was a total failure, but that's sort of clouded in my memory, as sort of confused and loss and I had two stints of malaria, and so on so I don't really remember that very distinctly. What always stays in my mind though is a different occasion, went back to that Amazon 10 years later and was shot at. These people sort of port de mayo river and I suppose about 6 months before Pablo Escobar was killed, the big drugs baron. So I suspect he was lying low in the lowlands as part of the cartel in Columbia in the Amazon. Whether he was there himself I don't know but these two people clearly his, well he used the word the slang word ‘tranqueta', which is almost like hitman. These were I suppose hitman or I don't know one way or another. I didn't stop and ask them actually they just shot at me. I thought it wasn't because I was English, but I just thought I wouldn't ask them but I'd just paddle away, and I paddled away from these two people and the first shot missed me and I was waiting to be killed and I paddled away fast - as you could imagine. They just didn't turn out to be very competent hitmen. I mean they couldn't paddle a canoe and kill somebody at the same time, so that was the end of that; I got away around the riverbed. That just seems one of these, well I imagine it was a memorable moment but the wise end was particularly that I was so utterly exposed and so utterly unexpectedly I had got to know the forest. I knew I could survive more or less in it alone which is an unusual thing in the West, and yet suddenly I was absolutely helpless because these people weren't my people. They were not local people who I found generally friendly. I mean indigenous people they've always welcomed me but this was not the case at all because the Amazon is also full of opportunist and these people were out there for what they could get and well I was stopping them.
