'We are all explorers at heart – it’s part of the human condition'

Things are looking bad. As I sit down to write these last words I’m stuck in the Strait of Malacca, having escaped from Typhoon Mangkhut. I’ve yet to drink my own urine – but already the prospect appeals.

I’m aboard a vast cruise ship with 3,500 Chinese passengers, most of them already bent over gambling machines, and in half an hour it’s my job to step out of this air-conditioned cabin to deliver a rousing speech. I’m here to tell them that the age of the explorer is not dead – though, frankly, for this lot it might as well be.

Yet we really are all explorers at heart, are we not? It’s part of the human condition. Certainly, it was my condition as a boy. I wandered about, discovering things – and in that, surely, I was no different from any child. 

It wasn’t that I particularly enjoyed our camping holidays, even that time we went to, a particularly stony place – bent tent pegs! – beside a colony of enthusiastic nudists (it turned out) in southern France. Nor were the Allens wealthy. But one factor made a difference. My dad was a test pilot; with him up there in the skies, anything seemed possible.

“It’s coming our way!” I remember my brother yelling, when we were fishing for sticklebacks. I was five and I was cold. The water had somehow got in my gumboots. We stared at the plane making its approach from Alderley Edge, a Vulcan bomber rumbling towards us through the grey clouds of Cheshire. Dad today seemed to be doing a practice bombing-run over Macclesfield.

I was too wayward to be an actual pilot – “You’d only go and deliberately leave the bomb doors open” was how my brother put it – so, rather than deliver the UK’s nuclear deterrent in the Vulcan Mark-II, it was better that I traverse the remotest corners of our globe.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” said my father when I announced, aged 10, that I was going to be an explorer. “Like Sir Walter Raleigh,” I added. Dad smiled an encouraging smile – but my mum just sighed.

“No harm in him having his dreams,” she murmured, stoically. But she knew. We all knew. Unfortunately, I’d taken after my father.

Through school, I clung on to that dream; at university I even discovered seven new species of fig wasp. But it was no good. “I just don’t have what it takes,” I confided to my parents at last: “Money.”

And then it struck me that the people living out there in the fetid jungle didn’t have any either. They saw the forest as home. Mainly because it was their home. All that vegetation provided food, shelter and medicine. So, I worked in a warehouse to earn my airfare and headed off.

Of course, it helped that I was immortal – or at least, like all 22-year-olds, I thought I was. A kindly Venezuelan fisherman took me into the Orinoco Delta – the same labyrinthine mangroves that had caused Sir Walter Raleigh no end of bother. There, I was deposited with the Warao, a quiet people who lived in shacks above the treacherous mud – and who promptly ran off. Perhaps they did the same in 1595, when Raleigh turned up.

I sat for hours alone in the harsh sun while all around me silhouetted women gaped from a safe distance at a burnt, uninvited Englishman who didn’t have a clue. This “explorer” job just isn’t for me, I decided. Worse, when the elders arrived, and I carefully explained that I wanted to learn a few handy skills, they handed me to a gang of little children. Even the toddlers wouldn’t speak to me. Perhaps they were too busy gutting fish with their extremely large knives.

While this wasn’t a glorious start, I’ll always be grateful to the Warao of the Orinoco. Already, on that first day of my unlikely career, I was learning that, alone out here, I was even more helpless than indigenous infants. Put another way, I wouldn’t last long if I acted like the great explorers of old.

All this was many years ago, and now I’m marooned on the high seas. I’ll deliver my speech, I’ll make my escape, but what will be even nicer than recounting my adventures to a shipload of gamblers will be using this new column over the coming months to share with you my thoughts and experiences of the world beyond Macclesfield.

Benedict Allen is today embarking on a UK-wide speaking tour about his adventures. For more details see benedictallen.com