Amazon essentials
Adventurer Hazen Audel talks about his jungle must haves – from the backpack, to the camera crew.
Survival expert and adventure guru Hazen Audel (from the reality series Primal Survivor and Survive The Tribe) is back with a brand-new trip into the unknown in Primal Survivor: Escape The Amazon, Wednesdays on National Geographic (*181) at 21:00.
It’s a 60-day, 805km expedition on foot through the uncharted Amazon jungle to reach Guyana’s Atlantic coast. Whether he’s getting stung repeatedly while sticking his hands in a beehive for a scoop of honey, carrying around rotten fish because it’s too wet to make a fire, or sucking on a tender grub for breakfast, Hazen will stop at nothing to survive, and he never loses his sense of wonder out in the wild.
But he wasn’t alone on the journey. We spoke to Hazen about what he and his crew went through to make Primal Survivor: Escape The Amazon season 1.
THREE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
We’ll see your experience onscreen, but what was it like for your crew? It’s one thing for me to go through (the jungle). I might have a machete in my hand and I’ve got a backpack and I’m charging along. But they have a 27kg camera and they’re looking at the environment through a very small hole (lens), trying to keep up with me. At the end of the day, often the sun is already down when they have to make camp. They have to set up a hammock, they’ve already been muddy all day long, and there’s no way for them to get clean. They sleep in mud, they wake up with their feet and clothes still muddy, and then they carry on and follow me.
A lot of cameras died [broke] during this expedition, but they’re [the crew] tough. They had all kinds of infections. They had to deal with all the bugs and bites. A lot of us got different kinds of parasites, and we just had to deal with it. We all suffered together.
I do get upset with the show being about me, when there’s this incredibly dedicated team that works so hard.
They get to show off to the world really what they do, and I couldn’t be doing this without them. I also wouldn’t make it very far if I didn’t use the things that I learnt from the indigenous people all along the way. So it’s a team effort. By the end of those months and months and months, we were all incredibly tight friends. We still are very much a team. How big is the team when you’re out in the field? We have two primary camera operators carrying those cameras. We also have a person who’s dedicated to sound, so it’s not a silent film. Then it takes a lot of assistance from native people to give us local knowledge.
They help the team with boat travel, and offer us the safest places where we can set up a camp or where they can sort out their camera equipment for the next day. They may be building shelters for the camera equipment, so it can stay out of the rain. Oftentimes you’ll see this high-tech camera equipment, and it’s all under thatched roofs, from palm branches and stuff that had just been cut down minutes before a huge storm. A lot of the local crew and the indigenous people helped out along the way. We’re all there to highlight the indigenous people’s lives and the nature that we’re all around. It’s awesome. What was in your backpack? Even though it’s the tropics, sometimes if it’s raining torrentially, it’s impossible to light a fire and the nights we’ll get down to about 15°C. That doesn’t seem that cold, but if you haven’t eaten in days and it continues to rain, you can actually develop hypothermia.
I have an old-fashioned hand-medown, salvaged wool shirt. I have a roll of athletic tape if I get a huge wound – I’ll tape my skin together and that’ll get me through the day. And that’s about it. The rest of the time, it could be dried meat, whatever I catch, wild medicines or anything I make, like rope.