Adventurer Ben Fogle travels the world to find out just how far some people will go to escape the rat race.

After an international search, TV presenter Ben Fogle, from Where The Wild Men Are, says a New Zealand island rates as his near perfect place to escape the rat race. Kerry Harvey reports.

Ben Fogle (right) has visited nearly 200 countries in his quest to discover just how far people will go to escape modern life. Over five seasons of Where The Wild Men

Are, the British adventurer has also been looking for his own perfect place – and he thinks New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island comes close.

“I was blown away by it. I would honestly say it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve been and I’ve been to a lot of places,” Fogle says, from his home in London.

“I’ve got pretty exacting standards. I’ve been to nearly 200 countries and in some ways I’m looking for my perfect Utopian wilderness to escape to and I really think Great Barrier Island almost has it all.” Where The Wild Men Are

follows Fogle as he meets people who are trying to live “off the grid” in some of the world’s most remote locations.

The English broadcaster and writer has spent his life seeking adventure and an ideal place to set up home with his wife Marina and their two children – Ludo, eight, and Iona, six.

He has rowed across the Atlantic, completed a six-day charity marathon across the Sahara Desert, beaten EastEnders actor Sid Owen in the boxing ring, raced across Antarctica and, in September, was named as the United Nations’ Patron of the Wilderness.

Fogle began his television career as one of the contestants on the 1998 British reality series Castaways.

“I went to live on an island in the Outer Hebrides for a year. We were completely marooned and I loved it. “I vowed then – I was 23 or 24 – that I would make a life living off the grid on some island somewhere in the world,” Fogle says. “Now I’ve got a family obviously it’s a little bit harder to do that. My wife loves the outdoors, the wilderness and travelling but she’s also a bit of a city chick. “She does like being able to pop around the corner for a latte and being able to go to a supermarket so I’ve kind of put it on hold. “However, as the children get a little bit older, I love the idea. I think we will do a kind of family gap year and we’ll travel somewhere and put the kids into a local school. Whether we do it as a whole lifestyle and a permanent change, I don’t know. I think I would have a bit of persuading to do with my wife.” Meanwhile, he spends much of the year meeting people who have already taken radical steps to escape the rat race. The latest season – the sixth – takes him to Australia, Canada, the Sahara Desert and New Zealand. It also travels to Spain to meet a couple who have settled in a remote corner of Andalucia after being inspired by other people on Where The Wild Men Are.

It is the second time the series has filmed in New Zealand – the first featured the Long family who live in Milford Sound – and the latest episode follows Ben, an Iranian-German former university lecturer who is trying to live off the grid on Great Barrier Island. “There are many different ways you can describe the grid. Obviously it’s electricity, gas, water, all of those things that are piped into a house and most of them have completely cut themselves off from that,” Fogle says.

“However, the ultimate goal for most people is to cut themselves off financially as well and it’s the one that almost no one can do.”

As a result, people become inventive with some opening their homes to visitors like an extreme Air B&B while another might sell artwork or run a survival course. That is in addition to the daily struggle to just survive.

“The cliche is that you leave the city for a simpler life and it is simpler but it’s not easier. You swap one worry for another,” Fogle says.

“Where in modern life now in New Zealand, people might be worrying about having enough money to pay for fuel for their car or for the latest smartphone, out in the wilderness the worry is the water source is going to dry up, are they going to catch enough fish?; Do they have enough food that they’ve grown to last the winter?; Can they keep the food fresh?

“It’s tough and it’s hard. It’s varying degrees of relentlessness. Some people I’ve spent time with it seems to be a 14-hour job every day. Others have found a more relaxed approach to wilderness living.”

“The cliche is that you leave the city for a simpler life and it is simpler but it’s not easier. You swap one worry for another.” – Ben Fogle