TV’s pampered celebs would never survive in the REAL jungle
I HAVE long been sceptical about the I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! camp in the Australian jungle, which appears too carefully orchestrated to be real, so it was refreshing to read Alison Boshoff’s exposé (Mail). In 1971, I spent four months training in a real jungle camp in Mexico. I had been offered a job as an agricultural engineer among one of the Mayan indigenous groups in the state of Chiapas and the organisation I was working for insisted I undertook this training. I spent the first six weeks at the main base, where we lived and ate locally grown food served in a dining room, but with pit toilets, dirt floors and no mod-cons. We took turns cooking and had lessons in the Mayan language, travelled in dug-out canoes, slept in hammocks and were trained in fire-lighting, life-saving, hiking and basic medicine, such as giving injections. For the second part of the training, we hiked for eight hours to a camp deep in the rain forest, where we had to build our own shelters. We cooked on open fires and had to ration our six weeks of food — rice, black beans, tortillas, eggs, tea and coffee. One camper drank all his coffee ration in the first week and was not allowed more. We were told always to have at hand our basic survival kit — machete and file, water bottle, cooking canteen and water-purifying tablets, medications for malaria, diarrhoea and insect bites, painkillers, a space blanket, compass, small torch, matches and pitch pine — carried on an army webbing belt. One night, we were suddenly sent on a survival hike: we were each left alone without any food or shelter for three nights. I had to make an A-frame shelter and build a fire to keep animals away. I lived on snails and edible plants. It would have been almost impossible to catch and kill an animal to eat — they would have heard me and run off before I’d spotted them. Finally, we stayed in a small Indian community to learn the language and culture for a month. This was a genuine jungle survival experience and, for some of the participants, it was so challenging they decided not to take up the job they had been offered. I suspect most of the I’m A Celebrity campers would have been tuckered out after just three weeks on the main base, let alone the survival hike!
Rev BOB SHORT, Nottingham.