COLONEL John Blashford-Snell didn’t go looking for adventure - it found him.

In 1968, while serving in the army he was charged with exploring the Blue Nile. The river’s dangerous rapids had never been successfully navigated before and John Blashford- Snell wasn’t relishing the task of leading his men down them.

“I thought it was suicidal,”he says, as we chat at his home in Motcombe, Dorset.

“It was like asking a hill walker to climb Everest.”

Nevertheless, a persuasive General coerced the colonel into accepting the task, which he completed - earning him an MBE and some serious bragging rights (during the mission he invented white water rafting).

“It’s now taken off as an international sport,”he chuckles.

This successful mission gave Colonel Blashford-Snell an appetite for adventure and after the Nile navigation he formed the Scientific Exploration Society (SES), of which he is still the president.

He is also president of Just A Drop, an organisation that helps provide isolated communities around the world with clean water… and pianos.

“We were doing some charity work with the Wai Wai tribe in Guyana and the chief priest came to me and said ‘can you do me a favour; if you come back, can you bring me a grand piano?’

I told him to leave it with me.”

Keen to oblige, the colonel got hold of a grand piano and in 2000 delivered it from Britain to the Guyanan wilderness.

“We managed to fly it to within five miles of the village,” he says.

“From there we pulled it through the jungle, we had to build bridges and take it up the rapids on a canoe.”

Eventually the piano arrived, giving the remote village a focal point.

Keen to repeat this success, in 2007 the colonel helped deliver an organ, which had been donated by St James Church in Milton Abbas, to a small community in the middle of the Bolivian jungle.

However, not all of the colonel’s meetings with tribes have been quite so heart warming – twice in Ethiopia he’s been attacked by bandits.

“The first time was in 1968, but we were armed so we fought back,” says the colonel, who wasn’t quite so lucky in 2005.

“There were five of them and 26 of us, but they had AK-47s and we were unarmed.”

The colonel and his team were captured but, thanks to a satellite phone, they were able to call the MOD in Addis Ababa who sent a task force to rescue them.

And the explorer has also had his share of scares with wildlife. While riding an elephant through the Nepalese jungle, he and his big-eared friend were attacked by a tiger.

“The tiger was trying to get onto the elephant,”he says. “So the elephant lashed out and started trumpeting – the noise was deafening.”

Then there was the close encounter with a sperm whale, another hair-raising memory of his travels.

“I was in an inflatable boat off Papua New Guinea with a marine biologist, who was taking photos of a sperm whale,”he says.

“I looked forward and saw a dorsal fin coming towards us, it was bearing down on us like a torpedo.

“The whale’s head went underneath the boat and he started lifting us up – we slid off his back.”

As Colonel Blashford-Snell regales me with his stories, we wander around his office looking at the photos adorning the walls.

There are pictures of wild animals, exotic landscapes and snaps of the Colonel with various tribesmen. There’s also a mug shot of Sean Connery.

“He’s one of our members, he’s been very good to us,” says the Colonel.

“He’s a quiet unassuming man. He lives in the Bahamas and the last time I spoke to him he was complaining about people driving too fast past his house.”

That’s not very James Bond.

After three hours of talking I let the Colonel get back to planning his next trip – Mongolia in April.

“We’ll be looking for dinosaur remains in the desert,” says the Colonel, whose expeditions focus on ecological research as well as charity work.

“It will be a case of eyes down and seeing what we can find.”

If you’d like to go on an expedition with the SES, visit ses-explore.org for more details.