Attempts to find the true source of the Nile have been going on for centuries. Many of those adventurers who set out to find it are household names - David Livingstone, John Speke and Richard Burton among them.
Given the dramas surrounding New Zealander Cam McLeay's successful expedition, it seems inevitable that future generations will be studying his experiences as well.
Mr McLeay does not really fit the stereotype of a Nile explorer - no English accent or teams of bearers or cumbersome safari suits for him.
This adrenaline-fuelled, super-fit father of three has been compared to the Eveready bunny for his ability to keep going.
Where some people are addicted to being in mountains and knocking them off, he has the same problem with rivers.
He started as a rafting guide on the Rangitikei in his last year at Victoria University of Wellington.
Rafting was just taking off in the North Island at that time and most of the guides he worked with were North American.
It did not take much effort for them to persuade Cam McLeay to go and work in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, after he finished his bachelor of commerce and administration.
For three years, he summered in rafts and wintered on skis, and managed to get himself on trips to Africa thanks to his rafting skills.
When he did the inevitable OE in London, working in the City, he was still in demand for rafting trips all over the world, all of which were well sponsored and documented.
After returning to London, his Kiwi mates - in high-income, low excitement accounting jobs - listened to his tales with envy.
Mr McLeay had teamed up with now-wife Kate by this time, and they decided on an eight-day rafting safari in Africa with a few friends to celebrate his 30th birthday.
Nobody said no to the invitation, so the few friends ended up being 60 people.
With that many people, it was simpler and cheaper to just buy their own rafts and gear than to rent it.
The birthday safari was a massive success and the McLeays ended up with enough rafting gear to set up their own business, and enough happy safari-goers to book out a whole year's worth of river adventures in six different countries.
With the main marketing and administration part of the business in London, and the rafting going on all over the world, Queenstown would not have seemed the obvious place to move to.
But Cam and Kate lived here here for five years, where their first two children, Archie and Bella, were born.
It was tough keeping tabs on everything from the other side of the world, so they decided to sell the business, keeping only the Ugandan operation - an enormously popular and challenging one-day trip on the Nile, which takes about 10,000 passengers a year.
The Ugandan rafting operation, called Adrift, needed some hands-on involvement from the couple, so they decided to leave their Lake Hayes home and return to Uganda for three to six months.
Eight years and another son later, they are still there.
They live in a big old bungalow on Lake Victoria in the capital, Kampala.
The temperature is always 25degC-30degC so they spend most of the time out on the huge veranda.
It is very much an expat life, with just a few long-term residents (the McLeays are considered long-term after just eight years) and a constantly changing short-term community, mainly made up of people working in aid programmes.
Uganda is a fabulous place to visit, and Cam and Kate have streams of New Zealand friends and family coming to stay.
Mark and Annabel Burdon, of Arrowtown, took their three children, Will (9), Arthur (11) and Harriet (12) there last year, and all of them - particularly the children - agreed it was the best holiday they had ever had.
It has got all the summer adrenaline activities Queenstown has, but with the enormous added bonus of serious wildlife. And constant warm weather.
As well as running the commercial rafting trips, Cam is still very much involved in his own adventures.
Ascend the Nile, was rudely and savagely interrupted by the ambush and murder of the friend who had come to help them out of a sticky situation.
It got a lot stickier.
Mr McLeay and a couple of friends - fellow New Zealander Garth MacIntyre and Briton Neil McGrigor - had set out from Egypt to find what they believed was the true source of the Nile.
Travelling in Africa is never simple and this expedition was a major test of courage, patience and logistics.
They had planned for everything that could have gone wrong, which was just as well, as pretty well everything did.
The book is terrific and even knowing that Mr McLeay is still alive does not stop it being terrifying.
The three team members did not plan to write a book about it, but they all kept journals.
When one of them met writer John McCrystal, he heard about their exploits and said he would love to put it together.
They insisted on being able to edit the finished product, as they were particularly anxious that the section on the ambush and murder of their good friend, expatriate Briton Steve Willis, who ran a backpackers hostel in Kampala, was handled sensitively and accurately.
The British media had managed to get a lot of the details wrong when the disaster took place.
As it turned out, Ascend the Nile makes an excellent tribute to their friend, and Mr Willis' widow, Debbie, is very happy with it.
It is an unusual format - a journal made up of the three separate diaries the team members kept.
The photographs are stunning and the captions are often funny. This is a serious adventure story and truly, truly exciting.
And it sounds as if there might be another expedition in the offing.
Mr McLeay says a group of scientists is suggesting there is a new source of the Amazon...
• Ascend the Nile is published by Random House New Zealand. Cam McLeay will be speaking and presenting a slide show about the expedition at a book launch and signing to be held at Dorothy Brown's Cinema, Bar and Bookshop, Arrowtown, on Tuesday, August 18, at 4.30pm.
- Miranda Spary
