Simon Reeve reveals the trips that led to adventure and romance – and helped save his life

When I was a teenager, I was in a very dark and desperate place. I’d flunked out of school and was on the dole. I had no idea what to do with my life and found myself on the edge of a bridge at more than one point. A lady in the job centre told me to take everything step by step, and I took it literally and went on a little holiday to Glencoe. It could have gone very badly wrong because I took nothing but my trainers and a cagoule, but I made it to the top of a high ridge and came back down revitalised. It was a life-changing experience that showed me I was capable of something; I was able to put one foot in front of the other and do something a bit difficult. 

 

FIRST TIME ABROAD

 

I didn’t get on a plane until I was an adult and started working. When I was kid, we didn’t have much money and always went on holiday to Dorset. I have happy memories of digging in the sand on Studland’s beaches. My only experience of the foreign world that was Europe was a camping holiday to France. We caught the ferry to Calais and stayed on a campsite near Paris, which seemed very glamorous compared to the grey bit of London that I was from. My brother and I believed that we could communicate with the other kids by speaking English with a French accent. We weren’t taking the mickey – it was stupidity and naivety. 

 

FIRST TV TRAVELOGUE 

 

I went on a journey through the so-called “Stan countries” of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It felt like going off the map into a forgotten part of the world. From the moment I stepped off the plane in the middle of the night in Almaty, it was exciting and surreal: I went to a canyon that rivals the Grand Canyon for grandeur, named a baby in a drunken ceremony in a yurt, played a form of polo on horseback with the corpse of a headless goat. Beforehand I’d thought, “I’ll just do this one telly adventure and then go back to writing books.” But I absolutely loved it and wrote begging letters to the BBC with programme ideas. 

 

GREATEST PHYSICAL FEAT 

 

I caught malaria in Gabon in Africa and surviving that was hellish. I was an idiot: I should have been taking my anti-malarial tablets more diligently. I can vaguely remember having a phone conversation with a doctor in London who said, “You have to take this medicine and World War Three will break out in your body,” and it did. I was properly out of it for a few days and I’ve never really felt the same since. I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m a white male TV presenter from a wealthy country and so I was able to get treated; millions of people around the world are not.

 

MOST ROMANTIC GETAWAY

 

A last-minute holiday to Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt with Anya, who’s now my wife. There was a bit of strutting up and down the boardwalk, then we got bored and went on an adventure into the desert. I took a wrong turn in our hire car and we got stuck in sand in an area where there was supposedly militant activity. I was thinking, “Stay calm, let’s assess the situation and make a plan” when I realised Anya – who only had a bikini on – had disappeared. I went round the car and she was on all fours, digging out the tyres from the sand, while I faffed. I thought, “She’s a keeper”. 

 

HAIRIEST MOMENT

 

I was filming in Nagorno-Karabakh, an unrecognised country on the edge of Eastern Europe, and walking down a culvert next to a road when somebody suddenly came running up, saying, “It’s a minefield, don’t move!” Sometimes people get stuck in minefields for days because they have to carefully prod the ground before taking each step. We were there for a while before another vehicle pulled up and a mustachioed military officer told us, “Don’t worry, this is where we put the antitank mines.” And so we were able to walk out of there, very gingerly, because tank mines wouldn’t be set off by humans. It was still terrifying. 

 

FARTHEST-FLUNG DESTINATION

 

A scorching part of south-eastern Colombia where I dropped out of the sky from a small plane. I was following the equator around the world and visited a tribe who were three weeks by boat from the nearest community – even the old folk had never seen a foreigner before. People were welcoming, but they were wary as well because they knew that local loggers and poachers were out there in the jungle and heading in their direction, and we were an advance warning of that. They took us to see their sacred monument at the centre of the world and were very pleased to hear that my GPS showed that they were indeed on the equator. Even on a planet with more than seven billion people, you can go places where few humans have been and that’s a stunning feeling.

 

CLAIRE WEBB