My earliest perception of a jungle came from the old Tarzan movies – Johnny Weissmuller re-runs, then all the other bare-chested muscular guys who followed on the big screen and television. I gathered that jungles were full of swinging vines, chimps and elephants.

I didn’t know at the time that those “jungles” were mostly Hollywood sets.

So I found myself in genuinely unfamiliar territory when I explored my first real jungle – a tropical rainforest in Malaysia in 1978. The real jungle looked a whole lot more chaotic than the ones I knew from the movies and I didn’t dare swing on the liana vines to carry me from tree to tree.

What I learned only recently, during my travels in Uganda, is that not every scene in those films was shot on a studio back-lot. According to local hearsay at least, a film crew did travel to Uganda to shoot background footage – B-roll of a real jungle, even if Weissmuller himself probably never set foot in one.

My mate Scott Christiansen and I had a layover day on arrival in Uganda and decided to explore the National Botanic Gardens at Entebbe. We enlisted a guide named Tony, who knew the flora and fauna intimately and kept us entertained with stories and facts for a couple of hours.

I had to use some imagination to picture the gardens in their heyday. The 40-hectare park was established by the British in 1898, and you can still see evidence of the ambition that went into it – plants gathered from across the tropical world, grown together on the shores of Lake Victoria.

But like many botanical gardens I’ve encountered in Africa, it was sorely neglected, clinging to past glory rather than realising it.

That past glory includes a proud claim: that these gardens served as a backdrop for the Weissmuller Tarzan films. Tony brought us to some old moss-covered stone steps and told us you could see them in one of the movies. I couldn’t find film clips to corroborate that specific claim – but it didn’t matter. It was enough to feel, for a moment, that I was stepping into the jungles of my boyhood imagination even if Tarzan himself had never been there.