MUCH OF THE TRIP, the bungled takes were a result of my own inexperience. I had never been on camera and wasn't sure I was suited to it—my whole career as a writer and reporter, after all, is about being an observer and blending into the background. My only real qualification to be a host was having written the October 2003 Outside article on which the show was based. That had me even more worried, because I knew enough about the area to know that filming there would be difficult on its own merits, without the additional complications presented by a rookie host.

Traveling to the Asmat is like journeying back in time. First glimpsed in the 16th century by Portuguese explorers, New Guinea, and especially the Asmat region—not seen by Europeans for another hundred years—remained isolated by virtue of its inaccessibility, difficult topography, and notably unfriendly locals, gaining a reputation as a backwater populated by headhunters and cannibals. When Rockefeller arrived in 1961, the Asmat was home to one of the most primitive and least visited societies on earth. Today, any modern influences there coexist uneasily with older habits—a man using a golf umbrella to shield a torch from the rain, a woman opening a can with a machete, a three-year-old toddler smoking, really smoking, a cigarette.

By the time I arrived, clean-shaven and stripped of my glasses, per network orders, I hardly even felt like myself. The plan was for me to ad-lib everything based on the research I'd done—there was no real script, just a bullet-pointed outline that Jeff and I had put together. But on our first full day of shooting, I kept including irrelevant details and forgetting important ones. I mispronounced "avoid" as "aroid," twice. I cursed, laughed nervously, reread my notes, punched the side of the canoe, and apologized to the crew.

Television required the unfamiliar skills of working with a group and processing everything in real time. Our first morning, we had set out to begin retracing Michael's last river trip, but before we could leave Agats, the team wanted to record a piece recounting the town's history and describing the journey. The idea was for the canoe to be moving—action!—while Nat kept the town in-frame over my left shoulder. Only, after every dozen or so failed takes, Agats would no longer be visible in the background and we'd have to circle back and start again. Television cannot be this hard, I thought to myself, can it?

"That one was good," said Jeff finally. "Now I just need a little more out of you about how it's the hottest you've ever been out here, something like that."

"But it's not the hottest I've ever been," I countered, as combative as I was clueless. In truth, the heat was bad, and between it and the heavy humidity, we existed in a state of constant, sluggish dampness.

"Dude, come on," said Jeff, "it's pretty hot." When we finally got it done, I looked over at Nat and Dean, two experienced TV hands, for their reactions. They looked worried. They had reason to be.