Born to be wild

You’d think that, with nature lover Steve Irwin’s untimely demise and the morbid interest in Chris McCandless, the ill-fated Alaska camper in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, people would be more careful about messing with Mother Nature. But there are still people who boogie-board while skydiving (the world’s most dangerous sport, with only a few surviving practitioners) while McCandless’ fateful last stop — an abandoned school bus in the Alaskan wilderness — has become a hot spot for tourist photo ops.

Then there’s Bear Grylls, who sports a macho-sounding name and hosts a popular TV nature show called Man vs. Wild. In the show, which starts airing here on Discovery Channel starting Tuesday, Aug. 12, 10 p.m., the British adventurer tells folks how to survive in extreme regions of the world — atop mountain ranges, in the middle of deserts, amid frozen arctic wastes. Each week, his trusty camera crew drops him in a different extreme environment and documents his efforts to find shelter for the night, locate non-lethal food and trek his way back to civilization. Kind of like Survivor without the competition — except Grylls has more credentials as a survivor (he’s a former British Army survival expert) and could conceivably handle whatever challenge is thrown at him without whimpering or ratting out a fellow islander. In short, Man vs. Wild is all about the nitty gritty: Gryll’s been known to eat goat testicles and snakes, drain life-sustaining fluid from elephant feces, and drink his own urine to stave off dehydration.

Of course, as with any media phenomenon, Grylls has been grilled about the realism of his shtick. In 2007, there was controversy when it was revealed that the host and crew of Man vs. Wild stay in nearby hotels and “camps” rather than tough it out in extreme locales for long periods. Grylls commented: “Episodes take about 10 days to tape. The night stuff (shown on camera) is all done for real. But when I’m not filming I stay with the crew in some sort of base camp.” TV episodes now clarify when Grylls gets support from his crew and when certain situations are staged.

We got to shoot some questions to Grylls via e-mail, and here are some of his responses.

PHILIPPINE STAR: You have a cool-sounding name. What’s the story behind that?

BEAR GRYLLS: I was christened Edward. That became Teddy and then Teddy Bear, so, that’s been my name since I was about two minutes old. 

How does your crew handle the extreme conditions shown on Man vs. Wild?

The crews really are the unsung heroes in all of this… Our briefing beforehand to the crew is if somebody gets dropped in here with no survivor skills and no water, they’d be dead in three hours, which is really a super short amount of time. It just means working in those climates there’s less room for getting stuff wrong. In the Sahara, three of the crew were evacuated with heat stroke. You can’t mess around with it. 

What’s one of the most dangerous locales you’ve been to?

The most recent one was Siberia. We were crossing a river… So we did a thing where we broke a big hole in this lake, but it’s -30º or whatever. I was going to dive in and swim the length of the pool underneath this ice and try and find some thinner ice and smash my way out of it. 

We had a safety diver and cameraman down there, both in full dry suits. I remember standing on the edge, butt naked, about to jump in and I tied a rope around myself and I said to the crew, “Look, if you don’t see me in a minute, just pull like hell at me because I can’t get out of the ice there.” I went in and eventually found some thin ice and bashed my way out. The divers came out in full dry suits and both were, like, hypothermic. I was absolutely frozen in those conditions, madly running around trying to get warm and doing push-ups, all this sort of stuff. 

Have you ever gone on a wild adventure date with your wife? 

Yes, I have done so over the years, but she’s a mum now and she’s the reason I always think of coming home. She just thinks it’s all mad, really, and I don’t tell (her and the kids) a lot about it, and I don’t want to talk about it when I get home. I just want to mess around with the kids and see her. So I always think she’s my reason for coming home, rather than a reason for going out on another adventure. 

What should someone always take with him or her on an adventure trip?

Actually, out of all the advice and kits and stuff that you can take, what I’ve learned is that the most important stuff is having the will to survive. The people who often survive these epics of disasters are not the people with the most knowledge or the best equipment. It’s the people who have the biggest determination to make it out of there in one piece. 

So having Christian faith, to me, is a big part of that as well. Ultimately, it’s our brain that’s our best survival tool… So much of survival is just about common sense and ingenuity and improvising and thinking your way around stuff. That’s what really gives us the edge in the big wilderness. 

What’s the attraction of the great outdoors?

I think that life can sometimes be quite fluffy back home. You never really get to the heart of things. I think the magic of working in small teams in difficult places, whether it’s in the Army or on a big mountain or Man vs. Wild, is that life becomes much more raw. I like that. I thrive in those sort of moments, I think. 

Have you ever thought about doing an “urban adventure” sort of show?

Yes, definitely. We’re trying to do a feature film of that next year in New York about surviving urban disaster situations, like burning elevators, being stuck in the subway, being mugged, your car goes off the bridge, whatever it is. So that’s definitely in plan and I get a lot of people asking that. We’re trying to do a big 3D feature film of that, which would be wild to do. 

Which celebrity would you like to subject to extreme environmental conditions?

I run a list, we’re doing that this summer. We’re trying to do a pilot show, taking a famous person on a really brief, short, mini-Man vs. Wild. We’re trying to take Simon Cowell initially to the Rockies and just, like, get dropped in together, maybe do a big river crossing, a big cliff climb, make a shelter and spend the night out.

Are there any survival myths out there that really get on your nerves? 

Yes, I think people often go, “You can never drink your pee.” That’s not actually true. I think these things are more complicated than they seem at first. But I think the pee one, for example, if you’re really dehydrated, drinking your own pee is not going to help you because your body is already dehydrated. But if you’re really well-hydrated, you can drink your pee initially. It’s actually going to help keep you hydrated. 

Does anything still scare you?

Yes, lots of things scare me. I’m often quite scared of heights despite all the climbing stuff I’ve done. But I really try not to shy away from that fear, I try to use it just to sharpen me and make sure I’m getting things right. 

I was wrestling a big alligator, trying to kill a big alligator with a little pen knife a couple of weeks ago in the Louisiana swamps. Before, I was absolutely terrified of just jumping on the back of a seven-foot alligator and wrestling this thing. But those fears are there for a purpose, and I really try and use that, I suppose. 

What do you hope the show will bring to everyday travelers who might accidentally fall off the Insight Tour?

I think the whole premise of Man vs. Wild is much more about if you’re in a nightmare situation, everything has gone wrong, you’re on your own and you have a life-or-death situation, this is how you can get out of it. So one of my frustrations is, I often get people saying, “It’s very dangerous, what you do.” Ultimately that’s what the show is. It’s showing people how to get out of a dangerous situation. So that’s one of the (benefits), I suppose.

So, how does snake taste? And goat testicles?

Snake, they all taste pretty much the same. Just a few weeks ago, I caught a big one and ate that straight away, just raw. It’s sort of blood and guts and meat. If I can cook them, it’s much nicer, but sometimes you’re on the move and you need to keep moving and eat on the go.

The worst is things like testicles or eyeballs or intestinal fluids. I ate a massive grub in Zambia that was absolutely huge. I remember biting into that. It was just an explosion of pus and blood and guts all over the camera. You just think, “This is not right,” but 95 percent of the time, I’m absolutely fine. But on occasion, I get it wrong. 

But yes, snakes are good. It’s all energy. It’s all food. 

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“Man vs. Wild 2” premieres Tuesdays, 10 p.m., starting August 12 on Discovery Channel.