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"If you are OK, then it's safe. But we try and stick to army rations. They might taste horrid but they won't kill you, and in a place where lots will, that's a good thing."

It has taken us five hours to travel just two miles first by SUV and then on foot, darkness has now fallen and 'John' has to be back at Price Barracks in Belize City before dawn. Alone, in one of the toughest environments on the planet, he heads off in his Landie for the solitary drive back. It's a risky trip, but he's not bothered. The jungle is his second home.

We are left in the hands of Nick Bougas, who works with the British Army in Belize, but who - for a small fee - will also take the likes of you or me into this unforgiving sweaty hell hole for, er, fun.

He has planned for us to camp overnight, unprotected from native big cats like the jaguar and puma, unprotected from the slithering carpet of reptiles that emerge at night, and unprotected from a band of renegade armed robbers who are loose in the jungle.

We climb into his Discovery and head south across Belize to his backyard, a dense swathe of primary rainforest straddling the steaming Sibun river. The Disco flails through the quagmire until the mud eventually turns to water. The last mile to our overnight camp has to be covered by canoe.

When we eventually arrive at the 'campsite', we discover it is already inhabited. By a million mosquitoes. I've had malaria; the worst case ever seen by my ex-Royal Army Medical Corps GP, apparently. And he was a veteran of Belize.

I hate the little bastards, so we light a fire fuelled by oily cahune nuts. This would be a no-no in the army - we would give away our position in seconds. But we vote and smoke wins. Bougas, for one, needs no convincing. He has a pair of inch-long bot-fly larvae growing in his scalp.

"We have five hours left before darkness. And the first rule of the jungle is not to walk about in the dark. It's when all the nasty stuff comes out," Bougas warns. "So before then we need to make sure we are fully prepared for the night."

There seems very little preparation needed for my sleeping area - a bed of cahune palm leaves, under a roof of cahune palm leaves with only a campfire to ward off cats as big as a Harley-Davidson, and SAS-issue bug repellent to deter the multifarious creepy crawlies.

Ours is a tiny oasis in a sea of stuff you'd pay not to experience, like the 'tourist tree' - so called because its red, peeling bark looks like sunburnt skin. Even passing close to one can make your skin burn.