LRN No.25: lost in the Amazon
Plus: why Batman is scared of numbers
I once got lost in the Amazon. Really - I did. Even as I type this, I can’t quite believe it’s true, but it is, and there are pictures to prove it. Look:
It was early 2008, and I was a young, very green reporter, making a film about illegal gold mining in the Amazon for Channel 4’s Unreported World. (I think you can still find it online somewhere.)
Our brilliant producer, Tom Phillips (now the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent) had managed to get us access to film with the Brazilian Air Force. They were delivering medical aid to remote Yanomami villages, where people had been struck down by malaria and other diseases brought in by miners illegally searching for gold in indigenous reserves.
As you can see from these photos taken before we got lost, it was an incredible privilege to get to go to this part of the world. And probably a unique one: Tom recently told me that the villages and forests we visited in 2008 almost certainly don’t exist any more.
On our way back from the Yanomami village where we’d been filming, we took a wrong turn. Tom, my director Paul and I were being led by the Air Force Colonel who was in charge of the expedition, but we became separated from the rest of his team, including the medic. We had left our own medical kit behind. We had eaten almost all of the food we’d brought with us. And then we tried to cross a river and I fell in, and my water bottles became detached from my backpack, drifting off downstream before my eyes. We had barely any fresh water, or any containers to purify river water in.
It wasn’t safe to walk in the dark, so we continued walking as fast as we could while there was still daylight. Pretty soon, we all became exhausted - Paul dangerously so. Some Yanomami people found us on the path, and told us they’d seen the Air Force doctor up ahead; they offered to go back and alert him, and bring him back to us. In the end, Paul was OK, but he had been very seriously unwell. We had to spend a night in hammocks slung between trees, in the thick of the Amazon. Fortunately, the doctor had enough Valium for everyone.
I have been thinking about this after the death of Michael Mosely. When things are dangerously hot, or remote, or both, one small misstep can be fatal. In our case, we were lucky: our story is now an adventure - an anecdote, a set of pictures to share in a newsletter - instead of a tragedy. But the line between the two is very thin. My heart goes out to his family.
In other news, I recently watched Worth, on the recommendation of an audience member who came to see me speak about The Price of Life at the Wayward Book Festival in Falmouth. Former Batman Michael Keaton stars as Kenneth Feinberg, the man tasked with working out how much compensation the families of 9/11 victims should receive. It’s ultimately a story about how a lawyer used to applying rules learns to see humanity and individual difference.
It’s an interesting watch. But what struck me, after watching two hours of it, was how taboo the prices ultimately put on life remain at the end of it. We never learn what level of compensation any of the characters received. The numbers themselves are unspoken - secret, private, maybe even a bit grubby. I think we need to get better at talking about the prices put on human lives. Once they are out in the open, we can see where there is unfairness, and we can try and remedy it. Unless we get over our squeamishness, it will be easier for injustices to go unchecked.
Other things that have caught my eyes and ears:
My eyes popped at this graph in the FT showing the flurry of bets that preceded the announcement of the July general election. We are not a serious country
Loved the peerless Gary Gibbon’s illuminating report on Keir Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions
Managed to track down Ed Miliband’s EdStone just before I went on stage at the Nevill Holt festival. Book tours take you to interesting places
poor Ed Miliband. Was fascinated and saddened by this piece on the exploitative fertility industry
Ended up very sweaty and somehow right in the middle of the front row of the Smashing Pumpkins at the O2. I got there by sheer force of my 40-something will. There is life in the old lady yet.
