Jean, a French anthropology student I had met in Leticia, swung wildly in his perfectly hung hammock and said, “Rent a scooter and drive through the jungle for a couple of days and you’ll find people who have never seen a Coke bottle. Can you believe that? Never seen a bottle of Coke. Then show them a Walkman, press the play button and you’ll freak them right out — totally.” Jean had just spent three months with some remote tribe in the Amazon jungle, and was full of these stories.

Why anybody would want to freak the locals right out with a coke bottle I don’t know. Nor did I care as I had bigger fish to fry. Once you’ve managed to get a hammock strung up, you face the problem of getting into the thing. Run at them and they’ll flip you over slapstick style and dump you on the deck. Slide into them and they’ll slip you right back out. Cling onto them and you’ll find yourself upside down like a bat with your nose an inch away from the floor. Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, you get the hang of it. It’s like riding a bike or perhaps more like falling off a log. It’s the most comfortable thing you have ever slept in and you wonder what all the fuss was about.

“Sex in a hammock is of course almost impossible,” said Jean using my victory over gravity as an excuse for a sordid anecdote. I picked up my BBC Espana Viva book, squeezed my headphones into my ears and started to learn how to order a beer and ask for the toilets in Spanish.

In most parts of the world you can get by with English, maybe a splattering of a few other languages and of course a little bit of mime. Not in South America. The bottom line is: if you don’t speak either Spanish or Portuguese (in Brazil) you are completely stuffed. Jean spoke both fluently while I spoke neither. Consequently I found myself linguistically shackled to him for a few weeks.

In fairness to Jean he did come up with some good ideas — it had been his idea to take the boat to Manaus. Our boat was a two deck, wooden, motor driven cargo ship that carried passengers as a lucrative sideline. The captain never turned anyone away and as a result the boat was so crowded you couldn’t swing in your hammock without hitting the people either side.

Downstairs was full of stacked tins of oil, fruit and huge lengths of dried fish that swung from the ceiling. The crew slept downstairs, I think to guard the stock. Upstairs there were seven back-packers and what looked like between 50 and 70 locals. Some were on for the whole journey, but most came and went after a few days.

Naturally enough our captain had wanted to charge me a ludicrously high sum for the seven day passage down the Rio Solimoes from Leticia to Manaus in the north of Brazil. After much bartering from Jean the figure dropped to £35 plus my watch, which the captain had, apparantly, taken a shine to. “In South America everything is negotiable,” said Jean smugly as I unbuckled my watch and handed it over.

The pace of boat life is incredibly slow. It took at least a day to slip into ship lifestyle, then it became great fun. Whole days passed with only the river and two strips of Amazon rain forest stretching to each horizon to see. Food became a major concern and a topic that, quite literary, bound the travellers together. Food was always rice and some sort of stew — all cooked in river water. Everything was eaten with manioc, a white powder which was the blandest thing I have ever inflicted on my taste buds, but was meant to be rich in nutrients. Occasionally our boat passed small villages on the river banks. Children waved frantically as though they were shipwreck survivors trapped on a desert island. I tried to explain to Jean that their lives must be so completely different to ours. To me, I explained, this was what travelling was all about, seeing what they see, experiencing a fragment of their lives if only for a second. I soon realised that I was casting pearls when Jean replied, “Did I tell you about the time I got a dose from a Pigmy?” I nodded and turned to Cliff.

Cliff, who was unkindly nicknamed after the Cheers character, was a walking, talking anorak. Totally out of the blue he would say things like, “At any one moment the catchment basin of the Amazon contains over one-fifth of the worlds fresh water.” Or, “did you know you are now looking at the largest area of forest on the planet?” He would then clamp his binoculars onto his eyes and give a running wildlife commentary that would start with vultures and become increasingly exotic. What Cliff didn’t see during these commentaries were the locals’ eyes on his rather flash binoculars.

In these parts robbery is not a crime, but an art form, perfected with years of practice. After thieves become really good they graduate to a post in law enforcement. Now, I’m not saying everybody is bent, but trust absolutely no one and you will be right most of the time. At night each of the backpackers tied their bags together in the hope at least one of us would wake up if all the bags moved. Jean was so paranoid he roped his pack to ours and tied another length of string to his wrist. When we docked at a small port one night and someone did try to grab our packs he was wrenched from his hammock and hit the deck with a loud smack. It was followed by a violent flow of French swear words so loud it woke the whole boat and sent the thief running. Jean became so popular after this he got to tell Cliff his Pigmy story. The irony was that Jean turned out to be the biggest thief on board.

At two the next morning Jean shook me awake and said we had arrived in Manaus and he was leaving. He explained that he hadn’t paid the boat fair, but had left his passport and some valuables as security until he could get to a bank in Manaus. He had just stolen his stuff back and was about to do a runner.

I unhooked my hammock while hoping the next part of the adventure was not going to be from the inside of a police cell.