In 2005, I backpacked for five months in South America. I’m a stickler for planning so I left nothing to chance. I’d mapped out my route following the Panamericana – the beaten track running south down the Pacific coast.

Two weeks in, something odd happened at a Peruvian bus station.

I don’t know if it was the Hemingway novel I’d been reading or the Pisco Sour I’d been imbibing, but I was overcome by a desire for adventure. In a moment of wild abandon, I threw away my map and jumped on a clapped-out minibus heading towards the Amazon jungle and deepest, darkest Peru. As the bus pulled away, my heart raced and an exhilarating feeling washed over me.

I was free and in total control.

The feeling lasted for about a day. During what was meant to be a quick overnight interchange in a remote one-hotel town, there was a deluge, washing away the roads in both directions, making them impassable.

I spent the next eight days counting the cost of my recklessness. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t go forwards. I couldn’t go backwards. I was trapped – and in a small, cockroach-infested hotel run by an unhinged taxidermy enthusiast who clearly belonged on some sort of register.

I’m reminded of this incident whenever I read about our government’s Brexit strategy.

I haven’t quite worked out who is who in this metaphor. I’m certainly not implying that the British electorate were off their faces when they voted Leave, nor that Nigel Farage is Ernest Hemingway. But my decision to head into the unknown without a map seems sadly analogous to the shambles in which the UK finds itself.

To be fair, since the referendum result in June, there have been plenty of reasons to stay positive. Most recently, the September GfK Leisure Travel Monitor showed a strong finish to bookings for the summer 2016 season, which look like ending at about 4% ahead of last year. Bookings for winter 2016-17 also look healthy at 17% ahead of last year, and it seems there is lots of early demand for summer 2017. It’s tempting to infer that consumers have “shrugged off Brexit”, and there is one very good reason for that – it hasn’t happened yet.

A September Private Eye article sarcastically summed it up: “Amazingly, the economy is continuing as if we were still at present a member of the EU and able to trade tariff-free across the 27 member states” and then in slightly more agricultural terms: “the sh*t has not hit the fan yet as Theresa May tries to avoid turning on the fan for as long as possible”.

At the start of October, as talk of Article 50 got serious and hard Brexit became a thing, sterling plummeted. The fan has been turned on, and it’s a big one. Only its not sh*t that’s hitting it. It’s Marmite.

Back in 2005, I did manage to shrug off being trapped in a Peruvian episode of Twin Peaks. My adventure finished five months later in Rio de Janeiro, where I lay on an Ipanema beach, drinking from coconuts.

Maybe Brexit will be all right in the end too.

Martin Alcock is director at the Travel Trade Consultancy