(When that happens, I switch to a cross-trainer for a few weeks, which is just as great as I get to watch YouTube videos. I am the Dr Livingstone of YouTube, finding myself hacking through dense, unexplored forests of forgotten punk bands).
There is an array of ancient sculptured temples, modern cities, scenic hill ranges, unexplored forests and endless beaches.
The ornithologist and the botanist each reputedly could discover more about the life of an unexplored rain forest in a week than most other scientists could in months or even years.
Despite its appeal to explain plant invasions, the enemy release hypothesis (ERH) remains largely unexplored for tropical forest trees.
The book illuminates questions about Shakespeare, about what a classic means and also the unexplored hills and forests that lie on either side of the path art pushes through them.
Many of these could be wiped out without ever being described, especially as unexplored rainforests and cloud forest – the most biodiverse communities on the planet – continue to fall in places like Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea, among others.
We tried to take our minds off the armed drugs traffickers we were expecting by discussing the geography of the place; Rob pointed south to a vast, unexplored hillside where the forest lay unbroken for hundreds of miles – home to uncontacted tribes and a legendary lost city.
Deploying a pair of sweeping lasers that sent 400,000 pulses per second toward the ground, as well as an imaging spectrometer that could detect the chemical and light-reflecting properties of individual plants and trees 7,000 feet below, the researchers were able to instantaneously gather a vast amount of information about the unexplored tracts of cloud forest that passed beneath their airplane.
