Scary tales up the Amazon

Old explorers never die, they just tell scary stories. Jungle basher Robin Hanbury-Tenison launched his latest book, Modern Explorers, co-edited with Robert Twigger, at Sandford’s in Long Acre. “Tell us the one about the spider,” pleaded guests such as Clare Francis, John Hemming, Joanna Lumley, Pen Haddow and John Blashford-Snell. So RH-T related how he was up the Amazon wearing bell-bottomed trousers in the Seventies when a hairy creature crawled up his leg. “It was well past my knees on its way to the crown jewels when I beat it violently,” he said.

“I still have the wounds. Indian villagers said I should have died.” Mercifully he didn’t show us the evidence.