In 1985 he made headlines in New Zealand again after it was rumoured he had died following a failure to reply to an invitation from David Lange to attend a reception he was also attending in Dar-es-Salaam. Amos later said his "disappearance" was just an invention of the media. His first wife Jill said it was unusual for a former cabinet minister to voluntarily live in such a remote place but also stating "...he always was an unusual politician." A parliamentary colleague Richard Mayson who travelled to Tanzania to visit him, described Amos as living the life of a 20th-century version of David Livingstone.