Jamie Neale returned to shoot a television interview in the Australian forest where he was lost for 12 days and admitted yesterday: “I was an idiot.”

The 19-year-old backpacker from Muswell Hill, North London, went missing on his gap-year holiday in Australia after going for a walk in the Blue Mountains about 100 miles (160km) west of Sydney.

In his first interview since being found by bushwalkers last Wednesday after almost two weeks in near-freezing temperatures dressed in only light clothing and living off what food he found and water from streams, he denied that his disappearance was a hoax and said he had underestimated the Australian Bush. “People can say what they want because I’m not lying. It’s the truth. I admit I have been a total idiot,” he told the current affairs programme 60 Minutes in an interview for which he was paid an estimated $200,000 (£98,000).

“In the UK, you walk for a day and you end up in a pub, but out here you can get lost so easily you’ve got to be more prepared and think about what you’re doing a lot more.”

Mr Neale said that his greatest fear had been of starving to death. “I was thinking I might die on that mountain,” he said. “I had actually written some goodbye notes and things to my family saying, ‘My last walk’, saying ‘Sorry’, explaining how I’d got lost and different things like that.

“I’m not a particularly religious person but I started thinking about God and I was praying and saying, ‘Surely you can move a helicopter an inch and find me’, and ‘Why won’t you just help me?’ ”

Mr Neale, who appeared shy and embarrassed about his ordeal, returned to the mountains after leaving hospital in Katoomba on Friday. He posed for photographs at the Narrow Neck Plateau near where he was found and told how he was bitten by leeches and ate berries and geebung weed to survive.

He said that he made makeshift shelters and blankets from bark and branches, and went into “survival mode” once he stopped hearing search helicopters. He lost his digital camera as he tried to escape from the dense scrub.

His father, Richard Cass, who flew from London to help in the search, had given up hope of finding him alive and was preparing to leave Sydney when he received a text message saying that Mr Neale had been found alive.

The pair held a drinks party in Katoomba on Friday night for some of the 400 volunteers who had searched for days. Mr Cass returned to England on Saturday. Mr Neale is expected to travel by train to Perth to stay with relatives for eight weeks.

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