Television presenter and author Simon Reeve, who has visited over 130 countries, has filmed a new BBC series, ‘Wilderness with Simon Reeve’, which took him to four areas of the world where nature was largely still in charge. Simon Horsford gets the low-down.
“I love being out of my comfort zone,” says Simon Reeve. “It doesn’t happen so often now, as a lot of weird stuff has happened over the years and I’ve banked those experiences and learnt and built on them but definitely when filming this year, we all pushed ourselves a lot farther than we normally would.”
We are talking ahead of his new series Wilderness With Simon Reeve, which starts on BBC Two later this month, and Reeve is detailing some of the exertions of the trip. In the first episode, deep in the Congo rainforest, this entailed a gruesome experience for one of the crew as a jigger flea is cut out of his foot (they bury their eggs under the skin) by the team’s medic, an ex-Marine. “There is a lot of risk involved and it was just luck it wasn’t me,” reflects Reeve.
Reeve has filmed numerous globetrotting series around the world from Meet The Stans (in four Central Asian states, back in 2003) and travelling along the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer to programmes about Australia and North and South America, to name but a few. But this time, the intent was different. “What I normally try and find are places that are populated with every form of life and where people immediately think ‘that’s got a buzz about it, or an issue about it’. Now we set out to find wild and remote parts of the planet, but it turns out that with eight billion people there are human beings in the wild parts as well.” He uses the phrase “where nature has the upper hand” to give more of an approximation of what they were defining “as nowhere is completely untouched – there’s plastic particles at the bottom of the ocean and at the top of Everest.”
This entailed looking for areas where nature was largely still in charge and that meant “proper expeditions, which took more time to organise and cost more money.” The result is four fascinating films, which take in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo before moving on to the Coral Triangle in the Western Pacific, the Kalahari desert and Patagonia. “They are four contrasting eco-systems – we didn’t want them to fit together in a neat jigsaw but wanted them to stand alone as different programmes.”
Nature, people and wildlife feature heavily in the various regions, some of which Reeve believes are some of the most important places he’s ever been to – quite a claim for a traveller who has notched up around 130 countries. The Congo rainforest, for instance, is vital “because it is part of the eco-system of the planet that helps to control the climate and the eco-system of not just the tropics but of the Earth [as a whole] and on that basis it’s critically important. More than that though, I think the Congo is so unknown and unacknowledged. It doesn’t really factor into our thinking. I would guesstimate I’ve heard maybe a thousand references to the Amazon for every one to the Congo. That feels like a collective madness because it’s such a critical climactic and environmental feature of the world and so important for us as a species.”
He feels the same about the Coral Triangle, a vast area which covers Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. “In my view it is the most important patch of ocean on the planet.” Not only is it home to 75% of the world’s coral – nearly 600 different kinds – but 37% of the world’s coral reef fish and six of the seven species of marine turtle.
“I really believe we need to have wild nature on our planet [and] in our lives as humans,” muses Reeve, “without it, our planetary eco-system would not function as it does and if you took it away unpredictability and disaster would result.”
I hope what comes across is that humans have always lived in the wildest parts of the planet [and have] helped to shape and create them”
It is Reeve’s ability to connect with people that also makes his films so enriching, but in this series of films that knack has an additional potency and reasoning. “Too often people have identified wilderness areas as being absent of human beings, or needing to be absent of them.” He suggests that there is a long history in conservation of believing that humans don’t fit into their particular image of how a wilderness should be. “I hope what comes across [in the films] is that humans have always lived in the wildest parts of the planet and haven’t just lived there, but helped to shape and create them in the first place.
“We are creatures of remote wild places as well as bustling cities and it only helps in the protection of these places if we acknowledge that. It also helps in the protection of those people as well, who are also under threat from logging and ranching.”
As for his own encounters in the series, Reeve says there was almost an embarrassment of riches on journey after journey, “my brain is flooding with memories of the wonderfulness and humour and warmth of the people [we met].”
In the Congo, Reeve stays with the Baka, the nomadic, hunter-gatherers. “They were very special, their culture is so very different and their mentality too in quite fundamental ways. Their life is focused around the community, rather than the individual. They believe in ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ and that [has been] their guiding principle of success for tens of thousands of years. They have a ludicrously small footprint compared to us and live, exist and work in harmony with nature around them.” The Baka’s philosophy is essentially about sharing and protecting.
He is well aware of the relative poverty and difficulties of their existence but suggests “Of course, we can’t all live like that, but we can still look at them as one of the most successful human civilisations and identify how they have made that work.”
Elsewhere in the series Reeve hangs out with the Bajau, sometimes referred to as ‘sea gypsies’, who live nomadically on their boats in the Coral Triangle; while in Patagonia, he meets a gaucho who spends much of the year living in a rustic hut on the edge of the South Patagonian ice field in the Andes Mountains; and in the Kalahari, he is in contact with the indigenous San people, the original inhabitants of southern Africa.
Reeve’s current success – he also does theatre speaking tours talking about his exploits and his life (he visited the Bath Forum last year) – is a long way from his well-documented struggles with depression and mental health issues as a teenager, about which he has been searingly honest, talking in his book Step By Step, of his “chaotic youth” and “fragile head health.” He also stated that at one point “things were so bad that by the age of 17 I stood on a bridge and looked into the final abyss.” But he came through it and admits standing on stage and talking about his life is an “bizarre leap….and quite a transformation”. The one qualification is when he admits that his Dad never got to see his TV programmes. “He died in 2001, a few months before 9/11, which is what catapulted me on to TV, initially as a pundit because I’d written a book on Al-Qaeda [The New Jackals: Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism]. [So] he didn’t know his lad had sorted himself out enough to do be able to do that.”
The travel documentaries were the spark for the speaking tours (initially suggested by a theatre promoter), and are seen by Reeve as another “challenge”, but were also the result of his experience “building confidence”. The shows are fun too as he mixes tales of his adventures with honest reflections on his struggles, while also being a passionate advocate for the beauty and future of our planet.
In the past Reeve has suggested “travel is part of our make-up; we need it in our lives, and we lose it at our peril.” But rather than the sun-bed and flop kind of holiday, he believes that travel can be transformative, if you so choose. “If you are not controlled by your fears, if you are not kept in check by your nerves, if you don’t believe in the worst-case scenarios, you can create a slightly newer you. Everyone can benefit from having experiences and their senses tweaked. I would always urge people to push themselves. So try to avoid those siren voices, which we all have – ‘this lounger is so comfortable’ – and get up and get out there. Eat some local food, go to a local bar and get some memories. Go for a walk, whether it’s the middle of the city, or the Outback.”
As for himself, he adds: “I’ve gone beyond the stage where travel is a therapy and now it’s a bit of an addiction, and when I couldn’t during lockdown I thought, ‘Oh I’ll be fine,’ but then, selfishly, I started to feel I needed the experiences of being in these places and that’s what I missed. But I’ve been such a lucky bloke and had those so many times and this all helped resolve some of the issues I had in the past. But now I’ve created some new ones [problems] and I need the rush and thrill of meeting people and being in these situations. When you’ve walked into a flipping Mafia nightclub in Kazakhstan, that sets a new a bar for your local pub,” he laughs.
Despite his wanderlust, Reeve, who is married and has a 12-year-old son, admits he is at his most content “around a lunch table with family and friends at home in Devon,” and hasn’t a clue where he is off to next.
Reeve also still tries to follow the advice of the young sadhu, described in Journeys to Impossible Places: “You people are in a labyrinth. Just be”, he advised. “I’m in a fairly good place at the moment and try not to be upset by minor life problems and to recognise that I am one of the luckiest human beings who has ever lived,” he reflects. “To be alive now, on our island with fresh water coming out of our taps and still [have] a health service and dentistry. These are major things that we take for granted and then you travel and realise they are not.”
Wilderness with Simon Reeve starts on BBC Two on 21 January;
Simon Reeve: To The Ends of the Earth is at Bristol Beacon on 7 May.