Features

Then there are the fire ants that spray formic acid, pheromone- homing killer bees and several species of scorpions. We are camped in a real life horror-movie set."I had some of those scorpions as a kid," Nick laughs. "When they got loose, I'd use a UV light to find them before they stung my mother - it makes them glow in the dark."

There's more to the jungle than the things nightmares are made of, though. Good stuff also proliferates. 'John' had already told us it was possible to feed yourself with what the jungle provides, and Nick is proving the theory by showing us how to find a meal in the jungle and cook it in a hollowed-out length of bamboo.

We ferret through the undergrowth, one eye looking for food, the other for the fearsome fer-de-lance snake lying under brush. Nick finds what he is after; okra, cassava and coco. Chopped up and mixed with water that was gathered in the bamboo, he makes us a soup.

"The hardest thing to find in the jungle is a good source of carbohydrate, so this is excellent," explains Nick as the soup starts to bubble. "With these resources, you could live out here for months, years if you had to..."

Thankfully I don't have to. One night is enough of a nightmare. I haven't dreaded the onset of darkness so acutely since I was about five years old. Dark in the jungle is pitch black. Lying in a coffin six feet under the ground black. Nothing.

With the fall of night, the volume of jungle cacophony rises. A troop of howler monkeys high in the canopy screech like an impending car crash. With no sight, every sound is amplified a hundred times. It's Waterloo Station in rush hour out there, but as experienced by a blind person.

Sleep is the only option, I decide. My palm bed is three feet off the ground, but Nick says I am still not safe from jaguars or snakes. So he kindly leaves me his machete by my palm bedside, just in case...

I wake up at three in the morning, with torrents of sweat instantly frozen on my mossie pin-cushion of a face, because somewhere beneath my excuse for a bed, right bloody beneath me, comes the the purring of what sounds like The Terminator in moggy form.

The machete is inches from my ear, yet I dare not move an eyelid, let alone an arm. Whatever is snuffling about is so close that I expect to feel a paw open up my chest with the ease of a surgical scalpel. I'd not last the second it would take to grab the razor-sharp machete.

My only option is to call on the best advice 'John' has given me: sit silent, never move.

Jeremy Hart