SURVIVING THE ODDS — SHOELESS IN A SARONG
Intrepid explorer Hazen Audel is back with another season of trekking through the wild in ‘Primal Survivor: Extreme African Safari’, writes Sanet Oberholzer
Afew minutes into the first episode, a collective giggle rose from the audience. “Can someone give that man a pair of vellies,”I remarked. “He’s out there wearing sliders,” the person next to me added. Our disbelief was directed at Hazen Audel’s attempt to climb down a large rock face in the first episode of Primal Survivor: Extreme African Safari. It’s not that he was doing so wearing a colourful sarong, but rather because he was wearing flip-flops.
What’s surprising is that he wore any shoes at all. The American biology teacher-turned-intrepid explorer and survival expert behind National Geographic’s documentary series is known for going unshod. “I’ve learnt not to wear shoes. There are benefits, but other risks. My feet are certainly needing more on the mend,” he once said on Facebook.
In this case, his shoes were fashioned out of used tyres. He chose them, he says, because they’re worn in the part of Africa he traversed for the first episode in the new series. “It’s so easy for us to have access to shops and buy shoes and get all kitted out. All the survival guys here will tell you it’s not what you bring, it’s what you know,” he told a group gathered to watch the the first episode ahead of the show’s premiere on November 22.
In this season, Audel embarked on a multi-country expedition through Africa’s Great Rift Valley, a region renowned for its wildlife, trekking 800km across deserts, through valleys, grasslands and mountains, all on foot, in search of one of nature’s natural wonders: the great wildebeest migration.
In the first episode, he sets off into Kenya’s hot, dry, unforgiving Chalbi Desert. Along the way, he meets the nomadic Gabra people, who share their ways of survival in what appears to be a most inhospitable place to live. He’s thrown into the deep end as he gets his feet wet joining the men at their singing well where their rhythmic chant keeps a steady pace while scooping water and passing the buckets along a towering structure.
He also encounters a migrating camel train whose nomads treat him to unusual drinks and life-saving snacks before he sets off towards the shores of Lake Turkana.
“[During] that journey through the Great Rift Valley, I was able to spend a week or two in different language groups ... learning the diversity of people just in that small area. It’s impossible to wrap your mind around the diversity that surrounds this huge place,” Audel said.
On his journey he has some close encounters with snakes and builds a bed in tree branches to avoid hyenas at night.
But for Audel, this is a standard day at the “office”. “My very first memories were me looking for bugs and catching snakes. I can remember the first time I saw a snake and ever since then I’ve had a fascination with them. I’m searching the world for unique snakes. I love them.”
In Primal Survivor, Audel has taken on the most inhospitable terrain, from tracking through jungles and rainforests to crossing the Andes and the Australian outback and embarking on an overland journey to the Arctic Circle. He’s filmed in Africa on numerous occasions, but this was his first time in South Africa.
“Every day has its challenges and it’s almost foolhardy to take on an expedition like that,” the explorer says. “In the end, the dehydration, the scabs and everything else that goes along with it, it’s a memory that I’ll have for the rest of my life and those sorts of things shape me.
“It’s interesting that ‘primal survivor’ translated into Spanish is solo contra el mundo, ‘alone against the world’. That’s not what this is, I couldn’t do this alone. But the Western world seems to embrace that sort of lone wolf mentality. They’re all really missing the picture because we are a bunch of meerkats or naked mole rats — we’re social and we need each other. We’re all learning from each other.”
Catch ‘Primal Survivor: Extreme African Safari’ on National Geographic, DStv channel 181, on Wednesdays at 9pm. Four previous seasons are streaming on Disney+.