‘Huntin’ bucks and drivin’ trucks’ - So Long, Uncle Sam

American lad: "I like the way you roll your r's"
Scottish lassie: "Why thank you, it must be my high heels"

(As told by an elderly American gentleman)

A deep red sun set behind the skyscrapers of downtown Philadelphia as the good ship M/V Rickmers Singapore sailed past, heading down the Delaware River and out to sea. We were leaving the US.


I stood out on deck and thought back to the last few months during which we’ve travelled across this huge country, from the coast of California to the docks of Philadelphia.

It’s taken us over 5,500 miles, through seventeen different states, from the Tex-Mex border to New England, from the Deep South to the Midwest.

When we first arrived I was slightly apprehensive, recalling the disappointments of my previous visit in 2001. In particular I remembered the dominance of the corporates, the chains who seem to have taken over many a place, steamrollering over the local features and quirks which give a town or region it’s own identity, the differences which that add up to make it unique, distinct and of particular interest to the visitor.

Riding the Greyhound along the interstate it was easy to think that the whole nation had succumbed to this, the view dominated by an endless procession of chain motels and identikit burger chains. It could have been anywhere, Maine, Missouri or New Mexico. Same, same, same.

Yet off the highway it was a very different story. For there is not one America, of course, there are many, and exploring the variety on offer, discovering these different worlds with their own distinct identities has been a great pleasure, full of adventure and surprises.

We have wondered at amazing landscapes, from the saguaro-studded deserts of Arizona to the frozen lakes of Minnesota, from the mountains of Tennessee to the swamps of Louisiana.

We’ve walked in pristine national parks bursting with biodiversity; we’ve seen wild turkeys, eagles and beavers; and visited both the start and the end of the Mississippi, one of the great rivers of the world.

We’ve been wowed by the cities, from the French quarter of New Orleans to the East Village of New York, the fine skyscrapers of Chicago to the history streets of Boston. We’ve watched Ibsen in Minneapolis and viewed Monet in Chicago; we’ve hung with hipsters in Austin and hobos in Nashville.

We’ve partied at Mardi Gras and slept in Liz Taylor’s old Hollywood home; we’ve drunk moonshine with rednecks and basked in homemade hot tubs under the stars.

We’ve ridden the Greyhound and the lonesome railroad; we’ve sped in a Porsche down in Texas, and paddled a canoe in North Carolina.

We’re taken a musical odyssey and found great sounds galore, from street jazz in New Orleans to blues in Chicago. There was zydeco in Jackson and country in Nashville, rock ‘n’ roll in Memphis and mountain music in the Smokies. We found polka in Minneapolis and Motown in Detroit; visited Elvis’s Graceland home and found Johnny Cash‘s last resting place.

We’ve tried burgers and fries, hash browns and links; kolaches, knish and Vietnamese pho; beignets and gumbo, po-boys and crawfish; collard greens and cornbread, black-eyed peas and BBQ ribs.

And there were ramps and catfish, walleye and wild rice; clam chowder, lobster bisque and buffalo wings; Philly cheese steaks, doughnut holes and pretzels; food from a dumpster and acres of pizza.

We’ve washed it down with a wide range of beers, many local, all delicious. We supped Dogfish in Boston, Dead Guy in LA, Honkers in Chicago, Summit in Minnesota, Lone Star in Texas; Abita in Louisiana; Yazoo in Nashville, Yards in Philadelphia...

We’ve lived through a thousand films, the quintessentially American: paper bags for your ’groceries’; steam escaping from vents in city streets; stoops and fire escapes on brownstone buildings; bow-tied academics on Harvard campus; white picket fences and red hip roof barn; state troopers and police cruisers; huge firetrucks and burly heroes; yellow traffic lights hanging on wires; ‘city limits’ signs on the edge of town; neat clapboard houses with a basketball hoop in the front yard; workshirts with name badges on; people with the ‘Jr’ suffix; retro-style diners…

But it was the people of course, which stick in the memory. There’s been the good, the bad and the quite clearly mad.

Thanks to our common language, our shared history and perhaps most of all the wonders of couch surfing, we have been able to get closer to Americans than people in other countries and nearer to finding out what makes this huge country tick.

We’ve stayed with nurses and hipsters, Spanish surgeons and Argentinean biochemists, musicians and teachers, students and stock market traders.

They’ve put us up everywhere, from bordello-themed rooms down in New Orleans to log cabins high in the mountains; from terraced houses out in the suburbs to crash pads in the middle of downtown. We’ve slept on couches and mattresses, floors and even a massage table.

We’ve made friends with strangers who’ve welcomed us to their town, memorable characters such as Wers-leh ‘White Lightnin’ the blues guitarist’, ‘Durl’ the bus driver MC and ‘Mow-reece’ the tram driver, who just digged my boots.

They’ve come from all backgrounds: rich and poor, vegan and carnivore, Democrat and Republican (‘you‘re liberal?! Get outta my house!’). There’s been hippies and hawks, rednecks and poets, veterans and protestors, gay, straight, black, white and all shades in between.

We’ve met Mexican labourers and Chinese chefs, Baptist preachers and Vietnamese microbiologists, tatooed ex-cons and Senegalese cabbies, Native American croupiers and Cajun waiters, drugstore cowboys and Puerto Rican plumbers, whooping frat boys and rednecks in Dodge Rams, ‘huntin’ bucks and drivin’ trucks’, flying the Southern Cross.

Given this range of backgrounds it should be hard to define what being an American is - you could ask them and they’d never be short of an answer. Perhaps therein lies the actual answer, for we found that Americans always have questions and are never too shy to express their own opinions.

There’s little English reticence here, and perhaps a greater certainty in their beliefs. Opinions are often more polarised and on controversial issues it seems never the twain shall meet: abortion, same-sex marriage, the right to bear arms...

I found the latter particularly difficult to understand: on several occasions I was shocked to discover the nice, sane person we were travelling or staying with was packing a piece. ‘Because I need to protect myself,’ I was told. From what? Other people with guns?

I just bit my tongue. Coming from a mild, rather phlegmatic country I find it hard to comprehend such a mentality. There are some issues I guess where we will have to agree to disagree.

There were benefits to being English here though and after several months of enjoying American’s most generous hospitality I can no longer argue that the ‘special relationship’ is purely one-way. We have often been quite overwhelmed by people’s kindness where people would go out of their way to help or to offer advice to someone from ‘the old country‘.

Many a time a local would prick up their ears upon hearing our English accents and soon the questions would start flowing, from the usual about the royals, the weather and the Beckhams, to those about the UK economy, their favourite British bands and how I sounded like Hugh Grant.

I learnt a great deal from these little encounters, and gained a real insight into people’s everyday lives, the lives that make up America. They seemed to enjoy this too, such as the fellow in a Mississippi sub shop who insisted on stumping me my meal in exchange for a natter.

And here I would sway between loving and loathing, buzzing on the good points but perplexed by the bad.

There’s still things there I find hard to understand: an obsession with the big and the energy-intensive; the gross disparities between rich and poor; a blind obedience to the flag and an unquestioning reverence for ‘patriots’; a poor public transport infrastructure (in some places non-existent); rampant obesity and the fast food culture...

But one thing stood out here above all else here: religion. It seems that in America the zealots shout louder. I lost count of the number of signs I saw warning that we were ‘all going to hell’ or the amount of insane rants I heard on the radio.

There’s a sizeable portion in this country who subscribe to this, and are not afraid to show themselves. We came across them throughout the land.

Back in New Orleans they stood out in Bourbon Street, amidst the maelstrom of drunks and debauchery with their hellfire grimaces and their placards of sinners: ‘sports nuts’, ‘pencil neck weak kneed gutless men’, ‘rebellious women’, ‘witches’, ‘pot smoking little devils’ and, bizarrely ‘used car dealers’. Come on now, you can’t condemn Frank Butcher…

It all left me aghast and disturbed. How did this happen? ‘Well what did we expect?’ one American said to me, ‘after all you sent over all the puritans‘.

He had a point, and I guess for every Thomas Paine and William Penn there must have been a boatload of religious nutters seeking a new land where they could express their free opinion (or empty their guns into armadillos).

Back then it was a land of opportunity and today it still struck me as such - a land where, if you go for it, you really can ‘make it’. The ‘American dream’ lives on, and millions still come here in search of a better life.

It’s a ‘can-do’ culture where people work hard and seem less likely to say ‘no’. It never took us much effort to enter a new place and find someone who could fix our laptop or give us a ride to another town.

Standards of living seem generally higher and for many life is comfortable. Or should I say was, until the economic bubble burst.
Perhaps they grew too comfortable and complacent as the world’s top dog; certainly many are now learning the hard way that economic fortunes can go down as well as up.

Can they turn this around? Of course they can, and they’ve got a nice fresh young chap at the top who they hope can do just this. Returning to the US, just after Obama took power we felt a
palpable wave of relief amongst the people we met.

‘Hope‘. It's a good slogan for the US.

I hope to return myself one day. Keep the cheesesteaks warm.







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Tikal and Wantage: Lost civilisations

Tikal. The fabled Maya ruins of a lost city, buried deep in the jungle, just waiting to be explored.


Such a risky adventure out into the unknown required stolid, dependable companions and who better, as the locals keep reminding us, to accompany me than someone called Lara.

And for good measure we recruited a third, an idiosyncratic potter from North Wales called Rik, a former climatologist and devoted ‘raw fooder’.

I was anticipating great things. We’d visited jungles before on this trip, discovering their hidden splendours both natural (Khao Yai national park, Thailand) and manmade (the temples of Angkor, Cambodia.

Tikal however, offers both, combining to make it surely one of the most enticing destinations on the planet.

Once a huge Mayan city, Tikal was a highly complex society, rivalling and, in some cases, outstripping its European contemporaries, both in size and sophistication.

Its inhabitants made impressive advances in a whole range of fields, including science, mathematics and - perhaps most importantly to the Maya - astronomy.

In its own environs, Tikal was a was a regional superpower; more often than not gaining the upper hand in the many regional wars fought between cities vying for power, managing to dominate the Peten region for 500 years.

However, it still shared with them a common fate when, around 900 AD, like the rest of the entire Maya civilisation Tikal suddenly and mysteriously collapsed.

For reasons unknown its inhabitants abruptly upped and left. Gone. The whole city abandoned and left for the jungle to reclaim.

Soon the great temples and mighty plazas become overgrown, and the whole city began to disappear under a tide of the organic matter from which it had once sprang.

Today the ruins can be visited, spread over an enormous site where the visitor can turn Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, seeking out ruins where falling walls are covered in moss and crumpled masonry sprouts trees.

We had a go ourselves, attempting to decipher glyphs and stelae etched with fearsome-looking squat fellows decked out in feathered headresses, and scaling the great temples, mighty pyramids of limestone which rise up to poke their gnarled heads up through the forest canopy.

Ascending Temple V I discovered a new-found fear of heights, my knees a-knocking, my stomach churning.

As I gripped the rails of the near-vertical wooden staircase I tried not to think about the several tourists who have tumbled to their deaths over the years; as I inched along the narrow ledges at the top I marvelled at quite how the Maya could have climbed up the single, sheer flight of steps, which lay crumbling away below us.

Back down on the ground fear soon turned to wonder as we entered the Acropolis; an involuntary ’wow’ spilling from my lips as I gazed upon the Grand Plaza.

Ahead lay Temple I, resting place of the splendidly-titled King Moon Double Comb AKA Lord Chocolate.

It was the only temple to have been fully clawed back from the jungle, so much of this huge site remains to be discovered, with wonders both manmade and natural.

In the fragile balance between the two worlds, since the fall of the city the natural world has been back in the ascendancy and all around you cannot fail to be amazed.

The ruins themselves sit in the middle of a national park, an oasis of biodiversity, with hundreds of species of trees, plants, birds and animals.

The trees were extraordinary, coming in all shapes and sizes, from delicate little palms to massive soaring monsters.

Strange flossy-like fronds hung off slender trucks, whilst neighbouring titans stretched out their enormous buttress roots across the jungle floor like some kind of monstrous arboreal callisthenics.

Some of them, like the Ceiba tree, rivalled the very temples in both scale and splendour. This tree was revered by the ancient Maya as the ‘holy tree of life’; growing up to 70 metres in height, with a trunk up to two metres thick I could see how they considered it to be ‘the axle of the world’.

Monkeys danced through the treetops, hightailing it through the branches, Agile spider monkeys leapt from tree to tree, bellicose howler monkeys hollered testily at a group of pastel-suited French tourists below.

We gave the latter a wide berth, the lessons learned from an encounter with a troupe of howlers the day before. That group, infuriated at our encroachment into their territory, subjected to a dual assault of terrifying cacophony and aerial bombardment, defecating upon us and going - quite literally - ‘apeshit.’

Other creatures awaited us: coatimundi, strange long-nosed creatures with prehensile tails investigating the contents of rubbish bins; tubby coatis, patrolling the small clearings; and even the odd crocodile, poking its sharp snout out of a pond.

Away from the human visitors, well off the jungle paths, dwelt a rich range of other exotic creatures: jaguars, armadillos, tapirs and snakes.

In the dawn light the forest canopy vibrated to the song of a thousand bird calls, and as the day entered we spotted some of these mysterious menagerie.

High up hawks and eagles patrolled the blue sky and vultures wheeled around on the lookout for carrion. Below them keel-billed toucans called and parakeets screeched as they passed over the forest canopy.

Beneath the treetops lineated woodpeckers hammered out a steady drum while, lower down, tiny hummingbirds flitted incessantly from flower to flower.

Down on the jungle floor, a great currasow scurried out of the bushes behind us while up ahead a gaggle of oscillated turkeys strutted along, scurrying to the edges as we passed through them on the narrow path.

Great armies of leafcutter ants strode across the forest floor, highly-organised creatures who leave a clearly defined path in their wake, a miniature M40 corridor along which they transport freshly-cut leaves.

It was extraordinary to watch these dogged little insects, overcoming all manner of hazards and determinedly shouldering their load, many times their own size, all the way back to base.

Other insects proved less enamouring, tarantulas for example, to which I came rather too close to for comfort.

In the dim dawn light I left the john, sauntering across a stretch of ground, blithely whistling ‘Sheila take a bow’, completing oblivious to the enormous hairy arachnid which I’d come within an inch of stepping on.

The beast must have been at least the size of my hand and surely capable of devouring it.

With such creatures in abundance it hard to concentrate on the manmade wonders. That was of course, until we came across the Tower IV. Bland name, incredible place.

From 64 metres up, on top of this crumbling edifice we looked out across the forest canopy, stretching as far as the eye can see. A spellbinding sight.

It must have been hundreds of miles, our perch a mere pinprick in an ocean of green. The only sign of human existence was a few crumbling towers in the near distance, knocking on for 2000 years old.

The remains of a lost civilisation, mankind trumped by nature.

It was a moment when you realise the insignificance of man in the face of the unstoppable power of the natural world.

It was hard not to draw parallels between the lost world of the ancient Maya and our own. Population crisis, competition over scant resources, climate change.

Rik proved particularly knowledgeable on the latter. He pulled out another enormous carrot and, as he gnawed on it, he pointed out that all mankind was doing was merely speeding up the process, the planet all set, as before, for a major change in climate in a few thousand years.

Adroit scientists and astronomers the Maya believed the earth ‘lived’ in cycles of some 5,128 years. Theirs, and ours is the third ‘earth’, a world that is due to end in 2012 ( just in time for the London Olympics).

Baloney or not it set me thinking about the future. My mind turned to home and I imagined some future tourist seeking out the ruins of our lost civilisation, pulling the creepers back from the remains of the Weatherspoons down our road, stubbing their toe on the collapsed lintel of Finsbury Park tube station.

Wantage in a deep freeze (would it make any difference?); the dreaming spires of Oxford under water. The world come full circle.

2012's not long off: better get that stadium finished sharpish.

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The Oaxaca coast: Great-tailed grackles, magnetic sand and fat-fighting trees

It might sound spoilt but we were beached out. Lara has absorbed more sunrays than Brighton beach did in a year; I’d ingested enough saltwater than the Gray Whales cruising off the coast.

It was time to get away from the bracelet-braiding hippies and the bongos of Mazunte, the nudists and the rudists of Zipolite and see some birds of an altogether different plumage.

And where better a place to spot them than Ventanilla lagoon, a murky tract of water and dense mangrove swamps tucked away off a beach just a short Camionera ride away.

Half an hour later we found ourselves gingerly crossing Ventinilla beach in flip flops, the sand too hot for bare feet.

The dark patches streaking the sand denoted the high iron content of the sand, something proven to us by our young guide who whipped out a magnet which, quite extraordinarily, instantly sprouted a Ken Dodd-style hairdo when passed near the sand.

Perhaps the unusual geology also helped explain the wreck of an old aeroplane, lying in the surf up ahead like a prop from Lost.

According to local hearsay it was running drug smugglers, who then cut and run (excuse the pun) - the locals must have had a big party.

More unusual sights awaited us as we clumsily clambered on board a small rowing boat and headed out into the lagoon.

It was like entering the Lost World, a multitude of strange birds call ascending our ears, calling and cackling, whooping and whistling.

Our eagle-eyed guide, armed with a well-honed knowledge of the lagoon and the creatures that dwelt within it was soon picking out a veritable menagerie from the shadows that this short-sighted Englishman would have glided right by.

The birds came in all shapes and sizes - from tall, elegant fish-eating egrets to tiny, flitting seed-eaters - and were painted in the most fantastical palate, a range of surrealist colours which might have come from the mind of Syd Barrett.

They had suitably bizarre names too, to match their strange appearance, reading like a list of characters from a Roald Dahl book: boat-billed heron; yellow-rumped cacique; pelagic cormorant; tropical kingbird; green kingfisher; pileated woodpecker; great-tailed grackle.
But no Norwegian blue.

The waters beneath held no less impressive an array of creatures.

It being the tropical south we encountered crocodiles, passive yet disturbing in only the way a crocodile can be, their eyes and the scales of their backs just breaking the water, lying still, all brooding malice.

Turtles poked long, thin necks up out of the water into the brilliant, seemingly unconcerned by the deadly killing machines eyeing them from the banks.

Back in Mazunte’s turtle centre we had seen these creatures up close, staring out at us from behind plastic windows, their expressions strangely human. When a staff member told us that turtles could cry, I believed him.

Mexico boats seven of the world’s eight species of these incredible creatures yet, strangely enough, it wasn’t until 1990 that the government banned their hunting.

Old, faded posters, dating from this time, are displayed in the centre, seeking to puncture the popular myth that turtle eggs were an aphrodisiac.

Two feature different people which appeal to Mexican machismo: one a scantily-dressed woman posing below the caption ‘My man doesn’t need turtle eggs’; the other featuring a lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) legend, Santo ' vs. those who eat turtle eggs’.

Back in Ventanilla, we edged further in, out of the green waters of the lagoon into the dark recesses of the mangrove swamps.

The trees closed in, the water grew shallower. Here dwelt the red mangroves, bizarrely-shaped arboreal wonders, upside-down organisms reflected the right way up in the water.

These trees are crucial to the local environment, serving as natural barriers against the encroaching sea, filtering out pollution and in the process turning the water a dark, brackish colour, their odour eggy and pungent.

Dead bodies of their larger brethren scattered the narrow waterways, victims of 1998’s Hurricane Paulina, which laid waste top large tracts of the Oaxaca coast.

Green iguanas scuttled amongst the trees, crazy patterns down their backs descending into a long, thin whip of a tail. Prehistoric-looking creatures in an primeval-looking habitat.

The forebears of this lagoon’s inhabitants dwelt on this planet long before Adam started eyeing up Eve, long before the happy couple’s descendents discovered the potential of burning carbon, and certainly long before billions of these buggers swarmed all over the planet, heating up their home and threatening to turn it into an uninhabitable place once more.

Back to the ancient gloopy stuff out of which they once crawled? Certainly tearing up the mangroves won’t help avert this.

These extraordinary habitats are the most threatened in the world, with only 1% of the planet’s mangroves protected.

In Mexico they are destroyed to make way for shrimp farms and new hotels, their durable wood harvested for western markets.

This is tragic: the world needs mangroves. These vital ecosystems support a huge diversity of wildlife, preserving endangered species, providing local communities with the essentials of life, protecting coastlines from erosion by the sea and even absorbing the impact of tsunamis.

And Mexico needs them too. Even if you are the most landlocked citizen, even if you don’t care for the environment think of the fatties, for here the mangrove’s bark has been used to treat diabetes.

Given the obesity crisis facing the country - now the second ‘fattest’ in the world and the accompanying diabetes crisis (this disease is now the number one cause of death amongst Mexicans, threatening to financially cripple the country‘s health care system) it looks as if these trees might be required to strip a little bit more.

That’s unless Pepsi’s new computer game, designed to help kids live healthy lifestyles can reduce waistlines instead.

Obesity-fighting computer games? Perhaps it was time to head back to the beach.

You can help preserve mangrove forests by buying environmentally-sustainable products. When buying shrimps or wood products check the label to ensure that the product you consume is not contributing to the destruction of mangroves. Visit http://www.mangroveactionproject.org/ for more information

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Thailand in Transit

Today I nearly melted. I've often wondered at what temperature body fat starts to liquefy, to sizzle and spread like butter in a frying pan, or at least become a bit more squidgy. I felt myself starting to unsaturate at about 2pm this afternoon.

We were on the appropriately and inappropriately named ''air con'' bus from Saraburi to Sakaeo in the bit of Thailand that no one ever visits. There is a reason for that - there's nothing there apart from ribbon towns dressing themselves up as cowboys with milk bars, steakhouses and Playbill style font. The bus was a sauna on wheels with low carpeted ceilings, tasseled window valances and checked, padded seats. Above two tiny vents wheezed and puffed out a thin stream of air that certainly hadn't been conditioned. With the added solar heating of a tropical clime and the bodies of 54 other passengers (apparently a human body generates the same amount of heat as a heater) it made for the second most unpleasant journey of the trip yet (still nothing beats the night bus in China).

After the brain sloshing journeys of Laos's pitted, potholed, painful roads, our transit through Thailand has been a breeze (apart from the aforementioned breezeless journey - a blip amongst six). For that is what Thailand has been for us - transit only. Unfortunately. We calculated that it would be quicker to travel to Cambodia through the east of Thailand rather than through the south of Laos. I don't know if it is and willingly would challenge someone to a race. That is the shame of slow travel. So much to see and not enough time to get there.

However, by taking in a corner of Thailand as well, we have managed to gorge ourselves on green curry, ponder the country's fascination with large garden ornaments (which are sold in vast quantities by the roadside) and get thoroughly confused by yet another currency. We also got to take in the flora and fauna of the Khao Yai jungle - hornbills, vipers, scorpions and simians abound. A macaque is a monkey, a gibbon is an ape. Three months of primatology should have taught be something.

Tomorrow we'll take a tuk tuk and bus to Siem Reap, the temple capital of Cambodia. There we plan to mix it up a bit. Perhaps we'll take a slow boat down the Mekong to add to the Luang Prabang elephant ride, Japanese Shinkanzen and Trans-Siberian Railway medley. Anything but the bus.

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Hornbills are forever

As we passed through the imposing gates of Khao Yai National Park, I half expected Dickie Attenborough to come mincing out “Oh welcome, my dears, welcome to Jurassic Park!’.

The scenery certainly looked suitably primeval - densely forested slopes smoothered in dense vegetation, partially covered by the early morning mist - and sounded so as well, with a whole range of strange whoops and calls echoing around us as our vehicle climbed up the steep, winding road.

But of course no dinosaurs. Indeed, given the current inhabitants, it would perhaps have been more apt to have been greeted by David, rather than Dickie, Attenborough.

The legendary naturalist would certainly be at home here, for Khao Yai is a nature lover’s paradise. As Thailand’s flagship park it boasts over 3,000 species of plants, 320 species of birds and 70 species of animals (including bears, elephants and - yes - tigers!).

Surely then, even a couple of pasty Londoners could be in with a chance of spotting something you wouldn’t encounter on your average stroll across Hampstead Heath.

We certainly looked the part for our jungle adventure, though our faces dropped when we were given the equipment our guide considered essential for protection from the beasties lurking in the bushes: leech socks.

No pith helmets, no machetes, just a large, bright white pair of rather natty-looking knee-length socks.

Squeezing their comical-looking farang back inside the pick-up our guide, ‘Mr Birdman‘, and his three young helpers, hung themselves off various parts of the vehicle as it crawled along the road, chattering excitedly and scanning the treetops for signs of life.

It didn’t take them long. A shout from an eagle-eyed acolyte and Mr Birdman dropped the anchors. Immediately they eagerly piled out, setting up telescopes, uncapping enormous camera lenses and pointing frantically into the canopy above. A white handed gibbon - or at least one of its hands - the startled primate swiftly making a bolt for it.

We pressed on, into the heart of darkness, cruising past a Barking Deer chewing nonchalantly at a bush by the side of the road, an empty Elephant salt lick, a ’warning: cobra crossing’ sign and small groups of western tourists in matching sensible trousers and floppy hats.

The road stretched on, empty except for the odd obnoxious pig-tailed macaque, snarling for a handout. There was nothing for it but to hit the jungle trail on foot. We parked up and dived into a gap in the thick green undergrowth.

Straight away the vegetation closes in on you. Great thick trees crowd out the light above, huge draping lianas, hanging down like electric cables in an unfinished house, block your path, giant trees roots trip you up and large quantities of rotting leaves and persistent precipitation combine to leave the paths muddy, the going treacherous.

We slipped and slid, tripped and tumbled, in the process generating enough noise to scare the entire population of the Cotswold Wildlife Park.

But perhaps this simply added to the noise of the jungle; the hum of the insects, the call of the birds and the myriad other exotic and mysterious sounds emanating from all around us.
With some trepidation, we followed the bouncing figure of Mr Birdman, leading us deeper and deeper into the maze.

Following intently behind him, I missed the bright green, and highly venomous Pit Viper dozing on a twig just inches from his elbow. And so did our experienced guide. But then he could be forgiven for his mind was on other things, namely baiting large, hairy, black scorpions.

Spying a small hole in the path up ahead Mr Birdman was on to it in an instant, brushing aside the leaf litter and poking a short little stick into this rather foreboding-looking hole.

A few minutes of twiddling with his stick and his persistence paid off: a large pair of angry-looking claws emerged, surely belonging to an equally irate owner annoyed at being so rudely awoken from his daytime slumbers. Our small group drew a collective intake of breath - this loon is actually poking a live scorpion, and a very large one at that.

But there’s no stopping the intrepid Birdman. With careful persuasion he’s soon got the beastie out, all five furious inches of him, holding him by the tail and triumphantly dangling him in front of our cameras.

I still don’t know why I agreed to hold this fearsome creature. Perhaps it’s because others did before me, and they didn’t seem to drop down dead. Well it made a nice photo.

Creatures of a more gentler persuasion followed with our chancing upon a family of White-handed Gibbons. These agile apes entertained all with their daredevil antics, leaping from one branch to the next against seemingly impossible odds. Humans may rule the earth but the treetops are theirs.

Beyond the Gibbons, the birdcalls intensified: Laughing thrushes, Bubus, Mynahs, Bluebirds and a whole host of other unidentified species. A couple of Wreathed Hornbills flew overhead, their wings generating the most extraordinary sound, as if a steam engine were passing above the treetops.

With our eyes to the sky we neglected the ground at our peril and soon we were encountering another unpleasant resident - the place was crawling with leeches. These weren’t the great slug-sized bloodsuckers of film fame and medieval medicine but rather small, insidious, cunning little blighters which moved with surprising speed.

There’s something very disconcerting about watching one of these wee beasties hook onto one’s boot, crawl up one’s sock and inch up one’s trousers, seeking out a nice patch of exposed flesh upon which to feed.

They move not like slugs but rather like slinkies, the coils-shaped toy you used to run down the stairs as a child. As the leeches feasted, the two burly young Canadian lads in our small group begin to regret turning out that morning in hangovers and bemuda shorts…

At last the forest opened up and we entered a large rolling plain covered in elephant grass, as high as your shoulder and sharp as a kitchen knife.

Heading gingerly for the safety of a viewing tower, their hands held high over their heads, none of my companions were interested in my sighting of an impressive-sounding Crested Serpent Eagle. Not even Birdman - his mind was on lunch.

Post-prandial we took in a range of Khao Yai’s charms: a one metre long Giant Squirrel, the waterfall from the film The Beach (no, we didn’t jump) and numerous Macaques at their roadside grooming parlours, holding up traffic.

The finally, as the sun started to sink, we found them. The highlight of our day: Giant Hornbills.
A pair of these splendid birds gazed down on us, from their home in their generous boughs of an old fig tree.

I’d read up beforehand about these magnificent creatures, our guesthouse kindly providing me the night before with an ancient dusty tome devoted to them as bedtime reading. They seem to be somewhat revered locally and, at first hand they didn’t disappoint.

They were simply enormous: from their long, slim black and white tail to their huge bright yellow bills they must have measured almost a metre from beak to tail. I had to concur with the slogan inside the book: Hornbills are forever.

Finally dragging ourselves away from this most glamorous of couples we carried on, hopeful that the descending darkness might bring out a few more shy creatures. A tiger perhaps, some wild elephants, or at least a python warming itself on the tarmac.

We got wild boar instead, the noise of our engine sending a whole family of them into a frenzy and Lara into peals of joyful laughter.

We called it a day and pointed our pick-up in the direction of the exit. We'd seen a most impressive menagerie, but even not a sniff of a tiger. As we sped through the dark I resolved once more to try again, in another jungle, another day.

And next time I won't forget my pith helmet.

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