Places with no names on maps, where no human being has ever set foot. That’s the kind of destinations three-time BAFTA-winning adventurer and wildlife expert Steve Backshall takes viewers to, as he, his film crew and his team of experts venture into unexplored territory in pursuit of new discoveries. The extreme physical challenges, the encounters with extraordinary wildlife and the meetings with remarkable people as he freedives in underground river systems, descends deep into the caves of the Maya underworld, kayaks in the Himalayan white waters or scales Arctic peaks are what the 10-part adventure series, Expedition with Steve Backshall, airing every Monday at 8pm on Discovery, is about.
A t2 chat with the naturalist whose wife, the two-time Olympic gold medallist rower Helen Glover, recently took her second baby bump on its “first official outing”.
Congratulations. Will it be a boy or a girl?
Thank you. We are not going to find out this time and let it be a surprise to ourselves.
As a youth you had backpacked solo through India. How old were you at the time?
I visited India with my parents for a couple of weeks when I was five or six years old. Then I did my first big trip in 1998-99 travelling from Kanyakumari to Kashmir over land, and got to see quite a few of India’s wonders. I was quite aware how much India has to offer and despite the months spent, I was just scratching the surface. The trip took six months. I was in my early 20s.
Had you already started out as a professional?
I had just started working for National Geographic channel. The first trip I filmed was in 1997 to Columbia. I filmed it all by myself — one-man band. After a while, the channel put me with a full crew. For five years, I was travelling all over the world making environmental stories.
And you never went back to the one-man band, I suppose?
I still do that quite a bit. On this expedition, there is quite a bit where I have gone off on my own and filmed myself. That’s quite a regular thing.
Aren’t solo trips harder? Are there times when you think: ‘I should have brought someone’?
Many times. (Laughs) It’s much, much harder. But it shows it is real. I think there’s much of television today that is constructed and not real. But when you are filming yourself, it is pretty clear what you are having to go through to make the programme.
What are the biggest challenges of going solo?
I did many years of filming solo. The problem is mostly that you struggle to get a good wide shot when you try to compose a landscape that you need to be in. A crew could shoot it directly. But when you are by yourself, you have to set the camera up on a tripod and set it to record the view, then you have to walk through that view and move back and set it up all over again so that it films with you. To do that all over again takes a lot of time. To fit yourself into a landscape is demanding. It is a difficult way of working.
Where did you go in course of shooting this series?
Over the course of one year, we went on 10 expeditions to places that have not been explored before. It involved spending over a month on rivers in a jungle that do not exist on any map. It involved climbing mountains in the Arctic and in the desert that have not been climbed before. We had no idea how to get to the summit or what we would find there. It involved paddling through the world’s largest fjord in the Arctic in the middle of the spring melt, making the first descent of a white water river in the Himalayas that had never been paddled before. It involved scuba diving in sink holes with crystal clear water in them and swimming into caverns where no one had even been. So over a year we had the opportunity of seeing through fresh eyes what no human being has ever seen.
What was a bigger challenge — doing things that have never been done without knowing how the body would react or the research of coming up with an unexplored virgin spot?
It’s both. For example, in the Arctic mountain there was 26 hours of non-stop climbing through the night. It is exhausting, difficult to endure and dangerous. On the longer expeditions, many of which were over six weeks in duration, we missed home very badly — being able to sleep on a bed, shower or have proper food. These things start to get to you over time.
Weren’t you bitten by a shark once?
This was during the making of another series called Deadly 60 in 2014 perhaps. I was diving with a tiger shark in the Bahamas and I was wearing a chain mail suit. I was feeding the shark and it decided to taste my hand as well.
So it wasn’t an attack?
No, it wasn’t.
Isn’t a mental preparation needed before you go on such expeditions, given what happened to a peer like Steve Irwin (conservationist who died in a sting ray attack while shooting underwater in 2006)?
I am doing this for a living for over 20 years now and I feel more happy and comfortable among animals than I do in cities or towns. As long as you learn the rules of how to behave with animals, they tend to be much more predictable than people.
You have also written a bit of fiction with a young boy and girl on the run as protagonists who battle tiger poachers, illegal loggers, big oil and gas companies destroying the Arctic environment…
Writing was probably my first love. I wanted to write a series of adventures that would talk about conservation issues. The best way to do that, I thought, would be to make it exciting and add an element of thrill while addressing these issues. For me, it is important to have fun. And if they want to find out a bit more about those issues, they would. I have not written for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to write while going on an expedition. I plan to do that again in a gap year.