I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in Bolivia, and I didn’t shoot a baboon. This is because there aren’t any. In fact, there is no evidence of intelligent life at all. Let me give you a small example. I was lying in my hotel room one morning when, without so much as a knock, a cleaner walked in. With a mumbled, “Buenos dias”, he went into my lavatory, closed the door and took a dump.

Let me give you another example. The electrical shower head in another hotel I stayed in was connected to the wall of the cubicle by several bare wires. There was even a fuse box in there as well. This, then, was a bathroom that could get you clean and give you an amazing new hairdo all at the same time.

If you ask a Bolivian to do something, he either won’t do it at all or he will do it wrongly. This is because most Bolivians live at extremely high altitude where there simply isn’t enough oxygen to power your limbs and your brain at the same time. You either sit in a chair all day and think or you move about and don’t. At one stage I spent several moments trying to light a cigarette with a battery.

You may wonder, then, why the Bolivians don’t simply move out of the mountains and down to lower ground. Well, that’s because all the country’s low-lying area is covered with a massive and hideous wood. We call it the rainforest and say it is the “lungs of the world” but plainly it isn’t. Or there’d be some air in La Paz, and there isn’t.

The rainforest is portrayed by rock stars and schoolteachers as a magical and mystical place full of wonder and majesty. This is nonsense. It is the worst place in the world, and the sooner a burger company chops it all down, the better.

Everything in the rainforest is specifically designed to make your life either a little bit worse or completely over. At one point my left arm brushed against a leaf, and even now, many days later, it is a mass of weeping sores and pain. And that was just a leaf.

One of my friends was bitten by a brown recluse spider. Another was chomped by a 12ft anaconda. Twice, I climbed into my tent to find a bloody tarantula in there.

Strangely, however, it wasn’t the deadly wildlife that caused the most annoyance. It was the stuff that buzzes about and tries to make a nest in your ears.

We have flies and beetles and spiders in England, but nothing prepares you for the sheer size of the flies and beetles and spiders in the rainforest. They were big enough to have recognisable faces and character traits. One beetle I found, with Denis Healey eyebrows and a bit of a harelip, spent his night walking around my tent snipping the hind legs off grasshoppers.

Well, I say grasshoppers, but of course they were no such thing. These things were four inches long and actually bled when their legs came off. I swear to God I heard one calling for its mummy.

Sleep was impossible. You would spend an hour in your tent, bashing everything you could find over the head with a shoe until you were convinced all was well, and then you’d lie down and close your eyes and, within a minute, you’d sense that a JCB was driving up your leg. This is extremely frightening.

Bashing rainforest insects over the head with a shoe is pointless. It just makes them sad. Setting them alight doesn’t work either.

At one point I ignited the spray from a can of deodorant and used the whole lot on a particularly stubborn cockroach that looked a bit like Sean Connery. Only with curly hair. Net result: he survived intact, I smelt nasty the next day and my tent caught fire.

You might imagine that it’s worth putting up with the insect misery for the breathtaking array of flora and fauna. You’re wrong. There are no flowers at all, and apart from some absolutely beautiful butterflies that are the colour of an LSD trip and the size of Boeings, it’s all either dreary or deadly.

One tree in particular caught my eye, quite literally, since it was made entirely from cocktail sticks. Others hide their roots under a thin veneer of moss so that you trip over them. And it goes on like this for ever.

We’re told that an area of rainforest the size of Wales, or the Albert Hall, is cut down every day, and that may be true. But this pointless and unpleasant wood still goes on for thousands of miles in every direction. Frankly, I’d napalm the lot.

Occasionally you do reach a clearing, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you are out of the woods, so to speak. Because often it is full of armed men with mad eyes and sniffly noses who will shoot you in the head. Or, if you are unlucky, it will be a tumbledown and filthy village full of gap-year Brits with dreadlocked hair who have told their parents they wish to follow in Gordon Sting’s footsteps but are actually spending six months gradually giving their trust fund to Pablo Escobar.

Tribes? Elders? Chaps with saucers sewn into their lips? They may well be in there somewhere but the only locals I saw were crowded round a television set getting agitated about Carlo Ancelotti’s new diamond formation at Stamford Bridge.

If there are any people in the middle of the forest, it is not because they want to be there. Otherwise why, when they do get out, do they choose to live in La Paz, where all you can buy is cement and motor oil, and there is no air, and strangers take a dump in your lavatory every morning?

It is our duty to help these poor people. Someone, then, must start a charity as soon as possible with the sole aim of turning that insect-filled forest of death, rain and misery into something a bit more like Hong Kong.

Times Recommends

• Why China is stoking war of words with US
• We might err, but science is self-correcting
• Google phone translation: can it ever work?