The BBC’s great explorer Simon Reeve doesn’t like the word “adventure”. He pulls me up a couple of times over lunch when I use it to describe his trips up the Congo river, or into the Kalahari desert. “Forgive me, Tim,” he says, “but adventure is a kind of loaded term” – too many intrepid personal heroics, not enough culturally sensitive traveller, I guess. He thinks a “search for experiences” better describes his one-man quest to bring the world’s four corners into British living rooms. “As a species, we have a constant need for encounters and food and smells and...