Back Home Again!
Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008
I have just landed back home after one of hardest few episodes of Man vs. Wild. (At right is me with one of professional hunters assigned to the safety of the crew.)
Having started off on the Namibian coast on day one with fresh, soft hands after a good holiday break, two weeks later I am walking back through the front door of our houseboat with Shara saying I looked battered, with cuts, grazes, bruises everywhere, and with blistered, hard hands ... I guess I am just back into the Man vs. Wild way again after Christmas!
These shows, though, I feel will be especially good ones, full of some of the most intense scenes I can remember: from being dropped into the infamous southern Atlantic swells off the Skeleton Coast, doing battle with large puff adders, to riding some of the biggest rapids in the world; to then getting diarrhea hanging off a sheer rock face, making a canoe out of a dead zebra, and then being caught in a pit with a ravaged giant porcupine! No-one can say life is dull.
As ever the crew worked alongside me in some quite intense situations, and the San Bushmen I encountered were an inspiration to me. Wonderful, gentle, instinctive people.
I hope you guys enjoy the shows when they air in the spring along with Siberia and Indonesia, which I leave for in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, I am away again this week as I am speaking in both Phoenix and Prague, but am then taking my two young boys off for some antics in the English countryside!
Stay well.
Leaving the Sub Zero and Heading to the Desert!
Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008
I leave today for Namibia, one of the oldest deserts in the world and the second-least populated country on Earth, after Greenland.
It's going to prove a very hot one in the Southern Hemisphere summer ... but if I have learnt anything from all these expeditions, it is that the good moments of life are rarely easy.
If I am honest, I am quite apprehensive about these next two African shows (Zambia and Namibia), and I know how careful you have to be with crocs, snakes and wild beasts in those countries. (My two young boys seem much more relaxed about it than me!)
But we have a good team and I have operated in Zambia beforehand. I am sure once I am on the ground I will find that survival instinct comes to me again.
It is so often like this before I leave: I am nervous of the unknown and the risks, then once I land in country I am so absorbed with doing everything that the apprehension gets pushed aside.
Feeling nervous is normal though, I guess. What matters is that you still go, and give your everything, no matter how hard it is.
One of my favourite quotes I ever heard was from a soldier: "I look at it like this: I expect to work for 24 hours of every day, until my eyes bleed with fatigue. Anything less than this is then a bonus!"
Wish me luck.
