The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Travel on trial ‘We then tuck into our beetle larvae breakfast’
Ashleigh Stewart picks up some wadi survival tips at the Bear Grylls Explorers Camp in Ras Al Khaimah
Iconvulse at the thought of eating a bruised banana. So you can imagine my reaction when confronted with a pile of beetle larvae for “breakfast”. Despite my morning also involving being launched off the side of a rock face, maiming myself on a loose boulder and sprinting up the side of a wadi, the notion of eating insects was what almost pushed me over the edge. Pun very much intended.
It’s 9am on a Thursday and I’m standing in the middle of a bone-dry wadi in Ras Al Khaimah, the northernmost emirate in the UAE, in the midst of a half-day course at the newly opened Bear Grylls Explorers Camp.
It’s the first regional outpost for the famous British adventurer’s survival courses, located part way up Jebel Jais, the UAE’s highest mountain, and next year will be the first to offer branded accommodation (container rooms that seem relatively cushy, considering some of the places Grylls has stopped off for a kip).
We’re here to pretend we’re in a “real life” rescue scenario – which, naturally for a group of city slickers from Dubai, is a rude awakening. The sunlight is just cresting over the top of the ridge line as I clutch my insect meal, the temperature around 30C (86F), as I wonder why anybody would spend a perfectly good Thursday morning pretending they’re lost in the wilderness – and paying for the privilege to do so.
We were deposited into the wadi two hours earlier, our camo bags and preppy activewear drawing the attention of a couple of goat farmers nearby. Our first lesson is a (slightly embarrassing, considering aforementioned audience) tutorial in “situational awareness”: arms raised, legs in a split stance, complete with loud, guttural growl. I mentally block this out and focus on how I’ll soon be able to start a bonfire out of a couple of twigs.
Next is a lesson on knives, and on the very Covid-19-friendly concept of “blood bubbles” – being socially distant enough to ensure no one is impaled by our blades as we whittle away a piece of wood to make a peg.
Walks between lessons are punctuated with handy tips on how to survive if you do, in fact, get lost in the wilderness. I jest, but it is a very real problem in the UAE – where hiking trails are poorly signposted and a favoured pastime is taking off across the sand dunes in a Nissan Patrol you really have no business driving. We learn how to navigate using the sun – a very fitting lesson in a country of perpetual sunlight.
This is followed by more regionally specific navigation tips relying on the shape of a sand dune or mosques (the buildings, and the crescent moon atop them, always face Mecca). Finally, we’re getting somewhere.
A quick lesson on rope tying is followed by a role-play exercise in survival: building a shelter (helpfully, there is a tarpaulin available), gathering water (from a nearby bucket in character as a river), making fire (using a battery and steel wool) and building a snare with our newly acquired rope tying skills.
I’m left feeling somewhat perplexed by the fire-building exercise, however. Our two options of birthing flames are either holding a battery close to some steel wool and a cotton ball coated in petroleum jelly, or using a steel striker from Amazon. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to go hiking with a scouring pad and I don’t own a striker, so this seems like cheating. I doubt Grylls would approve.
We then tuck into our beetle larvae (for no apparent reason), before reaching the grand finale: a sprint up the side of the wadi, an abseil down a rock face, and another sprint up the other side.
Embarrassingly, as everyone else laments the height of the abseil, I fall at the first hurdle; catching a large, loose boulder with my legs on the way up, leaving me bloodied and sore.
In comparison, the rappel down is easy enough if you don’t mind heights, though the last dash up the side of a wadi was a rude, and incredibly sweaty, way to finish. Luckily, our rescuer had the forethought to be carrying a chiller full of cold Pepsi, so it could have been worse.
Do I feel like I could now survive in the wilds of Alaska for days on end? No. But I do feel slightly more confident in my odds of surviving a couple of hours after wandering off-piste on a hike. True explorers might want to book the 24-hour version. And no, thankfully, there’s no urine drinking.
A half-day Bear Grylls survival course lasting three to four hours costs 450 UAE Dirham (£95) (900 Dirham for eight hours or 1,300 for 24); beargryllscamp.ae. Multi-day courses and accommodation available next year. Car rental advised.
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We were deposited into the wadi, our camo bags drawing the attention of a couple of goat farmers