Surviving In The Wild

Discovery Channel's program Man Vs Wild is a useful collection of such survival skills which just might get you through in case you are ever stranded in a remote and seemingly uninhabitable wilderness like the Zambian bush in Africa or remote Siberia. What are the chances of that happening, you ask? Very less. Of course in 1972 some passengers of the Uruguayan Air Flight 571 had to face a somewhat similar battle when their plane crashed in the Andes, and they lived in the wild for over two months.

This particular production's survivor, his name is Bear Grylls, displays and describes various unpleasant acts like how to find and eat protein-rich larvae, how to catch and cook a frog, how to barbecue leftover carcass, among others. There is a lot of useful information too - for example how to decide which rock is worth climbing if you ever need to get out of a canyon which has a good chance of flash floods, how to decide where to stand if you suddenly come across a pack of wild African elephants and how to filter muddy stream water using wood charcoal to make it drinkable.

Here is a link to Discovery's Man Vs Wild fan site.

Here is the link to the Wikipedia story of Uruguayan Flight 571. In order to spice up your interest just a bit - the wiki article also mentions that some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism in order to save themselves. And that is the definition of a Human Being - social, yet so very animal.

On a related note there is an interesting story of the young man, only 20 something years old, who left his home, survived in the wild and ultimately met his death in the Alaskan wild. Sean Penn's film, Into The Wild, is based upon that story. I did not get a chance to see the film but I did hear Pearl Jam's OST on it; for me Hard Sun was the most notable track.