Season 3
4 episodes
45 min. per episode
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A city dweller immerses in wild, uncovering resilience and purpose while confronting nature's harsh realities and human vulnerabilities.
Episodes
Ben tastes life in the Namibian desert with Dennis 'Boesman' (local term for the native Bushmen) who left the rat race after a business career in capital Windhoek to farm the hard way with his wife, Japanese agricultural engineer Yuri, and their daughter aged four. Ben stays in their broken caravan -nothing in ever thrown away- and struggles with the scorching heat, yet risks in barefoot despite thorns. Using abundant solar power, Dennis achieves virtual self-reliance, a constant struggle due to the extreme aridity, provided he shoots and guts two 'gemsbok' (the local giant antelope) a year, helped by Ben who gets mixed feelings.
Ben joins a senior, fully self-reliant world of former New York farmer who, desperate by broken marriage, business going down hill and asthma, sold everything and followed his boy's dream, becoming an Alaska trapper. Its' so remote Ben can only reach it by son Nate's water-plane There he even found a like-minded wife, who does must of the gardening on top of domestic chores and general two man-jobs, even the heaviest lifting, like their indispensable boat. Otherwise most sympathetic Ben's emotional barrier concerns the killing of wild animals by the three sled dogs-owning couple, which eats a year from a moose and a grizzly but also sets many traps to sell furs as only 'cash crop'.
Ben joins the senior brothers Bob and 'Wild' Bill who moved to a desert patch they bought in Utah from Oklahoma after a thrill-hungry life of daring career switches after one of them daringly testified to talk a drug gang into jail, requiring him to leave in witness protection and ironically bounty-hunt criminals in the hideout region. Undaunted, they keep up self-reliance even after a cardiac crisis left Bob brain-impaired. The former contractors now need the minimal comfort of the house they built around a mobile home, Ben must dwell in the cave storage the previous owners blasted with dynamite from the rocks and helps out with endless chores like logging to boast their meager pensions, half of which are spent on food supplements. The 'nearest' neighbor farm worries about the seniors in such a remote place, where rock slides are common.
Ben stays with a couple that live north of the Arctic Circle, Gaynor is from London and she quit a good paying job to go and live and marry Milos a Slovakian expat in northern Sweden. Here they operate a dog sledding tour business. Temperatures can go down to -52 at night during winter.
A British urbanite follows in the footsteps of various individuals, who against all odds, have willingly forsaken the luxuries and lifestyle of the modern world, for a less-than-ordinary life in the wilderness.