On Tuesday night I courageously battled the rain and the rush hour Tubes (I didn’t want to get wet on my bike!) to go and listen to Ed Stafford talking about his own epic expedition to walk the length of the Amazon.
The twist on his lecture was that Ed was not going to be in the National Geographic store on Regent Street with his audience – he has not yet completed his journey and is still in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest!
Ed had not bothered to dress smartly for his talk: he wore a sweaty yellow t-shirt and spent most of the talk swatting mosquitoes whilst we sat comfortably and enjoyed the air-con.

This is the first talk I have been to conducted live via Skype Video linkup. OK, so the connection was dodgy, crackling and cut out more than a few times. But it was still amazing to be able to interact with him out there in the jungle.

An event like this is raw and honest. It is also hard for him to have the clarity and perspective that comes after an expedition when you are far away and have had the chance to reflect on your experiences.

Watching him I felt that my own preference for expeditions lies away from the high-tech age of instant, constant communication. Ed’s team are carrying 20kg extra weight with satellite phones and laptops. One of the lures of travel for me is being away from communication, of simply being able to live in the moment I am experiencing rather than satisfying our century’s Big Brother appetite.

But there was also something compelling about the talk knowing that afterwards I was heading home to a hot dinner and fluffy pillows whereas Ed was still out in one of the hardest, most remote environments on Earth, and will be for another year.

At the end of the talk Ed tipped my ambivalence about high-tech expeditions. He could, he said, be having a “jolly” trekking through the jungle with nobody knowing about it. But if he was to have any significant impact for the Prince’s Rainforests Project then this was the only way to do it.