THERE’S no such thing as a wasted experience, David Moffatt believes, and boy, he’s got plenty to talk about!

From the tribal lands of Africa and South America to the river plains of the meandering River Nile, he has lived a big life.

Today, the father of two and grandfather of seven splits his time between his homes in Warwick and Corbridge, from where he and his wife roam the coast and moors of his native Northumberland.

But in his book, Without a Paddle: Tales from the Tyne and Rivers Far Away, he roams the world.

It is the story of his working life as an agricultural consultant, first for the Ministry of Overseas Development and then for ULG Consultants, an international consultancy in rural development.

He says in his prologue: “In a lifetime of travel to far-flung parts of the world I have encountered many great rivers.

“The tales that I tell here are from just a few of them. But all these rivers and all these tales are just threads woven into the canvas of the river that fashioned me.”

His book is, indeed, bounded by the Tyne, the Rio das Mortes – the River of Deaths – which runs through the heart of South America, The Gambia in West Africa, and finally the mighty, 4000 mile long waters of the great River Nile.

The boy who spent his childhood within a few short miles of the Tyne, in Rowlands Gill and later Whitley Bay, opens the narrative for real in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

It is unforgiving territory, he remarks, as he works in a small forest clearing, expectant vultures circling him all the while.

Moffatt’s ability to set his own endeavours within the context of the bigger picture is evident right from page one, and therein lies the joy of this book.

You learn about the places he travels through and the people who have gone before him.

Mato Grosso, a place I had never even heard of, is long associated with a great exploration mystery, I discover.

In 1925, apparently, one Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, his son Jack and another companion, disappeared without trace while searching for signs of a long-gone civilisation.

“Their fate remains one of the world’s great enduring mysteries and now I sat close to Fawcett’s last known base of Dead Horse Camp,” Moffatt writes of his time spent analysing soil structures and habitats in that woodland clearing.

“Two years after their disappearance another expedition was dispatched to discover what had happened to Fawcett and his party.

“Its leader, Commander Dyott, concluded: ‘That Colonel Fawcett and his companions perished at the hands of hostile tribes seems to me and all my party beyond dispute.

“However, Fawcett’s disappearance has never been irrefutably explained and to this day remains a source of conjecture, with theories that range from the party being devoured by cannibals to their finding a paradise that they couldn’t bear to leave.

“So despite Commander Dyott’s conclusions, since his pronouncement 40 years before, more than 100 would-be rescuers or researchers had died in 13 expeditions sent to uncover Fawcett’s fate.”

Moffatt’s own expedition had been mounted by the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society to study an environment untouched by modern civilisation before a new road, linking the new capital of Brasilia to the Amazon, was driven through it.

The Times newspaper, which had long followed the hunt for the missing Fawcett, had funded it to the tune of £40,000, probably, said Moffatt, gambling on the odds that ‘somebody – maybe the entire expedition – would be killed, disappear or get kidnapped by some hitherto unknown tribe’.

The Times reporter Anthony Smith, renowned for his lust for adventure, went with them, and while Moffatt’s job wasn’t going to fill many column inches for that august institution, he did win a Royal Geographic Society award for his work in Brazil and it is his account of the expedition that endures.

Light and very readable thanks to his eye for interesting detail, searing honesty and wry sense of humour, the latter half of the book does, however, get a little bogged down with the mundanity of daily life.

Luckily, passages describing the minutiae of his various contracts and household exigencies or selecting which floor offers the most comfort in an Egyptian high-rise hotel or, as in this example, the practicalities of typing out his PhD thesis, are rescued by that humour.

“My research may have lacked a certain incisive brilliance or scientific innovation, but my thesis was undoubtedly one of the longest the university had ever seen.”

Without A Paddle is equally thorough, but hugely more entertaining than his thesis sounds! It is published by Matador Books.