Going with the flow:

Explorer Steve Backshall (right) talks about his love of adventure as he sets off into uncharted waters for his new BBC Knowledge TV series. Melenie Parkes reports.

British explorer sets off on a new adventure.

Steve Backshall has had many strange bedfellows during his career as a naturalist and explorer. He’s shared a bunk with snakes, cockroaches and venomous centipedes.

But perhaps most unusual of all was a 200-year-old mummy.

“That was kind of a weird, happy accident,” Backshall says brightly, recalling how he was given the honour of sharing a room with the ancient, smoked corpse of a tribal elder in a tiny village in Papua, the largest province of Western New Guinea.

“Not that I would say I got a tremendous amount of sleep – if any sleep actually – because, yeah, it was pretty spooky.”

It’s just one of the many extraordinary encounters that Backshall experiences in his new series, Steve Backshall’s Extreme River Challenge. In the course of his career as a television presenter, Backshall has travelled all over the world exploring uncharted landscapes and even helping to uncover new species. But his quest to travel from the source of the Baliem River in Western New Guinea to the sea was a journey more than 20 years in the making.

“I came across the river and I saw it, its many different elements and how stunningly beautiful it was,” he says. But what also attracted Backshall was the prospect of a section of the river that is so remote it is largely unexplored.

“We knew that nobody had ever been down the river by boat before so we were the first people into these stunning, primeval, prehistoric places and it was pretty special.”

The plan was to kayak down the entire river but several challenges arose, including a disagreement over safety concerns with one of his Kiwi crew members. But the opportunity to make new discoveries holds an irresistible pull for Backshall.

“Every single time I find myself in a place that I can, hand on my heart, say nobody has ever been before or hold an animal in my hand and say

this species is unquestionably new to science, to really feel like an old-fashioned explorer, is something really, really special,” he says.

On his journey, Steve encounters an abundance of native wildlife, much of it of the creepy-crawly variety. However, he is extremely relaxed around scorpions, monster spiders and even man-eating crocodiles. In fact, there is only one animal that really makes him nervous.

“I find people quite frightening,” Backshall laughs.

“I’m more intimidated in a crowd or in a big city on a Saturday night after the pub’s closed than I ever would be in the forest working with animals.

“You’ll spend weeks in the rainforest catching the world’s most venomous snakes – nobody gets hurt – then you come back to camp and get mugged or robbed at gunpoint. People are much, much more frightening than animals.”

Backshall’s job is often a dangerous one and there are many hair-raising moments in Steve Backshall’s Extreme River Challenge. Fortunately, Backshall’s wife, Olympic rowing champion Helen Glover, is also an adventurous spirit and understands his desire to clamber up cliffs and ride wild rapids.

“She is the toughest, strongest, fittest human being I have ever met and I’ve met quite a few and I think really she would give anything to be out on these expeditions herself.”

Given the nature of his work, Backshall is often compared to fellow British adventurer Bear Grylls and the pair are friends and ambassadors for Scouts UK. Is there any competitiveness between them? “I kind of thought that we would have that whole kind of testosteronefuelled thing,” says the 45 year old, “but we just didn’t.

“We just kind of sat down and chatted about stuff and were pretty calm and relaxed and there wasn’t a single arm-wrestle in sight,” he laughs.

While Steve has been to New Zealand several times, he has a bucket list of what he’d like to see next time he visits.

“I’ve never seen a kiwi. I’ve never seen a kakapo. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve seen a living weta either – so probably the three most iconic New Zealand animals I’ve not seen.

“I know that Helen has her eyes on the Coast To Coast race down there which I think she would be absolutely fantastic at and there are just so many cool things to do in New Zealand. It is a place that has, to my mind, more adventurous people than just about anywhere else on Earth.”