Although a few friends saw my shoestring travels as unusual and interesting, in the eyes of most I had lost my way. After attending primary school in southeast England, I had won a full-fees scholarship to an exclusive public school, where, at the age of sixteen, I scored the best exam results in the school's history. But then my trajectory flattened and nose-dived. I emerged from university with a degree in zoology, vaguely prompted by my interest in fish, but no idea of anything I wanted to do. So instead of crushing knuckles underfoot on the career ladder, here I was, in my late thirties with a trail of abandoned jobs behind me, making less than the minimum wage from selling occasional magazine articles. Part of the problem was my father, who in his youth had been a farmer but who'd been disinherited after he'd abandoned the family trade to become a priest. As a teenager, predictably, I'd rejected organized religion, but I seemed to have absorbed other, more profound things from him that I couldn't shake. One of these was an indifference to the trappings of worldly success. Or perhaps I was just saying this because, with my threadbare employment record, and something else that nobody knew about, those things were never going to be mine anyway. And this wasn't quite true either. On very special occasions, Dad would wear a gold watch on a chain. It had belonged to his father before him, one of the last farmers in England to work the land with heavy horses, and one day, Dad always reminded me, it would be mine, in the unimaginable future when he would no longer be here. Meanwhile, as I squandered time, he did a good job of concealing his disappointment, even when it was compounded by my youngest brother Martin following my erratic footsteps, dropping out of university to become a wandering English teacher in Spain, France, and Italy. Occasionally a letter from a girl in Brazil would turn up at my parents' house and I'd see the looks next time I talked about my ‘research trips'. I felt that if I could only magically transport my father to an Amazon lakeside then he would understand. Because this was where, for whatever reason, despite all the blood-sucking insects and mud like a First World War battlefield, I became properly alive. It was hardly the Garden of Eden, but it was the gateway to a state of mind that he would recognize. Because, despite our differences, we shared one fundamental belief: that there is more to this world than what's visible on the surface.