One critic of the book said that you seemed happiest when you ‘‘unexpectedly stumbled across processed food or paved roads.’’ And you’ve said that as a travel writer, you absolutely don’t want to get malaria, be uncomfortable, sleep on anything hard or worry that an alligator is going to come up and take your leg off. Yes. Isn’t that a fairly rational position to take?

Absolutely. I was going to say that my idea of adventure travel is Airbnb. But to go back to that point, the person who wrote that was slightly wrong, because strangely — and I’m sure anybody who’s walked the trail would confirm this — you discover that you don’t want processed food and junk. What you actually want is vegetables.

You’ve become an accidental ambassador of science. You said that your book ‘‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’’ was supposed to be a one-off exercise from someone who always failed at science in school. Did you actually fail science? No, but I got pretty close. I always scraped by, but I never came away with any kind of an appreciation for the wonders of science. In that sense, I failed spectacularly.

You’ve also said that creationism is less magical than science, less awe-­inspiring. How so? If you’re a spiritual person, I think the scientific explanation for the universe, and how it got the way it is — the fact that it’s so vast and so ancient, and in all of this amazing void of space, as far as we know, the only living things are us on this little planet — actually makes God seem more majestic.

You live in Britain now, but you’re from Des Moines. And as we speak, presidential candidates are there, eating fried things on sticks. What does our presidential-election pageantry look like from the chronological and physical distance you have now? When I was growing up, the caucuses weren’t the huge phenomenon they have become. The only famous person who came when I was a kid was President Johnson. It was such a big deal that all the schools let out, and every kid in Des Moines went to it.