Season 4
5 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 spends weeks with Englishman John W. (32), who left the London rat race and a safe job to live on a desolate Mekong island in Laos among simple villagers, with a fisherman as his mentor. John is happy living a hard, almost self-supporting country life with such tasks as growing his own crops, herding water buffaloes and fishing with traps in a dangerous torrent. On top come occasional chores and community life, even moving a hie on poles on shoulders. Ben gets the pros despite all the sweat and pain it costs, but also worries in the long run if John's choice offers a future, romantic prospects or safety net in case of say serious illness.
Ben has mixed feelings about sharing a week in the life of Barbara, who left the utter 'dull' safety of neat Switzerland for an adventurous life in the Australian outback. She remained soldiering on after the dead of her buckaroo husband, one of the last 'real' bush men. She's committed to animals, even wildlife, and utterly dependent on machinery which seems beyond repair. Forgoing nearly all comfort, she must contend with scorching heat, often even at night.
Ben Fogle admires Justin, a natural at self-reliance in the Appalachians, who refused at 18 to enter the rat race and moved into a cabin on his grandfather's Tennessee woodland to avoid 'being lived' five years ago. Justin, who earns the necessary cash as blacksmith, has little patience with Ben's regular clumsiness at handiwork wielding say a hammer. He proves himself an efficient hunter, tanner, food preserver etcetera, content with a pioneer life style, but may have to compromise for his fairly like-mined, yet semi-urbanized girl friend from North Carolina.
Ben makes an exhausting series of flights to a desolate island 'near' Tahiti in French Polynesia to meet a Londoner and his Aussie wife who became sea nomads, living full time aboard his sail yacht. He left the British rat race to sail the world, recruited her as experienced sailor and married her. Now they sail the seas, living mainly from the seafood they catch at sea and relying only on themselves and the adapted boat's autonomy in between rare stops, mainly for supplies and occasional repairs, many chores actually being aboard and/or at sea. Ben finds it hard work yet enjoyable for a while, but wouldn't abandon the comforts of home and full social life for it.
Ben returns to the Scottish Highlands, where he spend his honeymoon, but not as romantic tourist. A Sussex family uprooted their home-schooled pre-teen kids to follow mother's dream and attempt self-reliant crofting (small farm tenancy) on Rùm, Britain's desolate, most rainy Inner Hebrides Island. They compromise on modern comforts, and supplement their agricultural and fishing produce with a guest house and hats for export.
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.