Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 13th

of November and I'm meeting one of my favourite people. This is Dr Joshua Allison. He is medical

director at unique expeditions and all you need to know about them is that they are, quote,

experts in the extreme. What does that mean, Joshua? We teach people and take people

to some of the world's most extreme environments, jungles, mountains, Arctic, deserts, all kinds of

places. Why would you want to do that? Why wouldn't you? I can't understand why anyone wouldn't,

because it's adventure and excitement, and you only have one short life, and you've got to go

travel and experience the world.

Well, yes, but it's actually much easier sitting at home in, I don't, Surrey,

where you're not going possibly to be risking your life. So what can you do to help people stay alive in the jungle?

The biggest thing about the jungle is the heat and the humidity. The thing that people are actually

always worried about is all of the creepy crawlies and animals and the snakes and the spiders.

But genuinely, the biggest or the best tip I could give anyone for staying sane and comfortable

in the jungle is to make sure you don't get too hot. Make sure you don't come down with

heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

But I'm there with all manner of creatures, in particular mosquitoes, which in the jungle,

I understand, can carry about 47 different ways of killing you. So why would I just be thinking,

oh, am I a bit too warm? Because having been to many jungles all around the world, I've seen very few people with malaria and

relatively few people with dengue and a huge amount of people who we have to stick in a puddle

or a river because they're too hot with all of their clothes on. So yeah, actually, you know,

in the medical world we say common things are common. It's much more common to put a backpack

that's too heavy and go walking in the

...