Les Stroud's Beyond Survival

- Hi, I'm Les Stroud, host and creator of "Beyond Survival."

Within the scope of filming this series, I circled the globe eight times in 10 months.

I was never not in a state of jet lag to embed myself with cultures who still either live close to the earth or engage in practices meant to keep their connection to the earth.

It was a chance to stretch my own skills and beliefs beyond what I knew, beyond survival.

In many cases, I had to come to these cultures in a state of humility, offering a gift and seeking permission to take part in their lives, to experience life as they knew it.

I went in without pretense, without presumption, without agenda and left myself completely in their care so that I was open to learning their ways, hunting, fishing, eating, sleeping the way that they do.

Sometimes it was modern influenced with much connection to the outside world, and other times it was near primitive.

In all cases, I was challenged both in my own well-honed skillsets with survival and wilderness experience, but also in my own belief system about life itself.

I learned to go beyond the technicalities of hunting and fishing and shelters and fire, and instead to dig deeper into what it means to be truly connected to the earth in profound ways, to go beyond survival.

(ominous music) We're really just looking for a needle in a haystack here, looking for a couple of small little pea-size grubs so you can make poison for your arrow.

Those kind of skills are vanishing rapidly.

I'm Les Stroud.

I'm on a mission to seek out the true masters of survival, the last indigenous people from around the world, before they're gone, before the past is lost, before their world vanishes.

I can learn their ways.

(thrilling music) The Kalahari Desert is 900,000 kilometers wide, sprawling through Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia, and I'm in Namibia on a journey to connect with a tribe called the San.

Believed to be the original inhabitants of southern Africa, It's possible that no other culture on the planet has lived and survived as long as the San people.

Around 3,000 years BC, the Sahara slowly transformed from rich hunting grounds into desert.

The animals and tribes were pushed south, and they've been surviving here ever since.

The San hunt with poison arrows and practice a legendary trance dance that allows them to communicate with the spirit world.

This is how our ancestors used to live and I've come here to learn their secrets.

To get to the San, I'll travel two days over land through the vastness and beauty that is Namibia.

Once free to roam the desert, the San's allotted hunting grounds have steadily shrunk due to new land ownership laws and cattle ranching.

Their communities have been pushed into the furthest reaches of the Kalahari.

It's important that I get a good feel for the land or rather the sand that the bushmen of the Kalahari once called home.

(vulture cawing) These magnificent dunes border the areas and the lives of the San, and inspired their souls as much as they would or should our own.

(birds screeching) Where the desert and sand become rockier terrain, this is where the San people lived and survived for thousands of years, places where they could hide and hunt game and believe it or not, gather wild edibles.

These bad lands look about as desolate as anywhere you'll see on the planet, and they do exist all around the globe.

In fact, it's a very fertile hunting area and has been for thousands of years, and this is where the San people would come to hunt until they were displaced from this area.

All of these ridges, all of the top lookouts are littered with millions of pieces of off flakes, reduction stones that come from flint knapping, or making stone tools.

I'm gonna go down and get a closer look.

(rocks crunching) This is a lot harder to walk in than it looks from a distance.

The ground is actually very rocky, very pebbly.

A lot of slipping.

Imagine the San that spend their whole lives walking this in bare feet.

(rocks crunching) Yeah, so here it is here.

Check this out.

These are the places where the San would come and hide out in the shade.

There's not a lot of shade in the desert.

So when you find overhangs like this, it's a perfect opportunity and place when the sun is just unbearable to hang out and get your body temperature down.

Small family groups would come and live in these caves, and of course you can see out over the whole valley.

You can watch game move, know where you've got to go hunting.

They would come here in very small groups, one to maybe 10 people and survive.

Gotta watch it in these rocky areas here.

Real serious hangout area for black mambas.

Keep your eyes open.

All right, see.

A spot like this where you start to see the sand worn down usually means animal activity.

There's very little lithic evidence down this far in the valley of the San people.

That's because down here's where they're going to actually hunt.

If I'm going to find anything here, it's going to actually be a broken arrowhead or spear point.

All of the flint knapping will be done up at the top, on the ledges where they can make noise and watch for game.

Seeking out shade is vital in the Kalahari Desert.

A place like this is the perfect location for what I call passive survival.

San people could come, hide underneath these outcroppings, keep away from the heat of the sun, and at the same time hunt game in, although a very desolate looking place, a very fertile place for big game animals.

This is not about cultural survival here.

For the San, this is the area of pure physical survival.

(tribal music) My journey to the San people is not over yet as I cross Namibia on endless miles of flat and straight paved road, leading to dirt road, leading to trail, leading me eventually to the San people themselves.

(footsteps trudging) Halfway on my journey and I've reached the rocks of Spitskoppe.

These smooth rocks, shaped by the sand and wind over thousands of years, were an important spiritual place for the San.

Primitive peoples throughout the world have left their artwork on rock walls.

The San were no different.

I'm hundreds of kilometers from where I'm spending time with the Kung bushmen, and yet the evidence of them having lived here is all over these rock walls.

Now, I always get into a debate as to why paintings are put where they are.

Some people believe that there's an earth energy, a mother earth, if you will, powerful energy that flows through the rock and in through the body of the artist, and I also think that there's times when it's simply someone who wants to express themselves creatively.

You just simply put a picture on a rock wall and that's it.

With the San people, there's an addition to it.

It's also a form of communication.

So rather than just a spiritual expression or creative expression, they would actually use these paintings to give communication to people coming through.

For example, with the animals, if their heads are all facing in a particular direction, it means that's where the water is, and in the desert, water is everything.

So it's a message to the next person who comes along, this way for water, and that's the way I'm going.

(thrilling music) This one here is actually an expression of the trance dance.

It's like an out-of-body experience and when they go through it, they actually hunch over in a skulking-like fashion, and if you see this drawing here, it's like he's come out of his body and gone into that other place, that spiritual world, and that's the world I'm heading into to learn the ways of desert life with the San, how they hunt with poison arrows, what they eat, where to find water, and most importantly, how they secure their spiritual survival.

The San believe their spirits leave their bodies during the trance dance and journey to another realm, the land of the ancients.

If I can gain their acceptance, I can take part in this ritual and then take my own journey, perhaps even communicating with the ancients, the ancestors of the San.

Two days of overland travel, and I finally make it to a place whose name I can't even pronounce, to one of the areas in Namibia where the San make their last stand before their culture is wiped out forever.

We're going to settle in a little bit here now.

I'm going to get my stuff settled into my hut, and we're going to share hunting stories around the fire tonight, get us all ready for tomorrow.

My crew has just finally brought me into the San village and hopefully very soon, I'll be heading out for the hunt.

To enter a village like this, you've got to do so respectfully, and you've got to show them that you honor the situation.

So I bring in a gift, not a big, crazy gift and a whole pile of stuff, just simply some buns and some tea and coffee, some Mase, and even the washbasin itself is the proper gift to bring in a situation like this.

So it begins.

(guide speaking foreign language) (Les speaking foreign language) (Hassan speaking foreign language) Thank you very much for allowing me to come to share with them and to learn their ways.

(Hassan speaking foreign language) (Les speaking foreign language) Huh, this is where I'm sleeping.

Without effort or question, Hassan welcomed me into their village.

There's an ease amongst the bushmen, and the first lesson of survival is strength as a community.

The women and men work together well.

A symbiotic give and take exists between the tribe and their otherwise most unwelcoming environment.

It's my first day with the San people.

A century ago, there were thousands of these clans scattered around the desert.

Today, there are only a few dozen left.

Their hunting and gathering techniques are unique skills that could be lost in just one more generation.

The whole family is gathered around in a clan, (San bushmen speaking foreign language) pounding Mase for dinner and some of the wild edibles that they picked, and of course it's tea time too.

(fire sizzling) (teapot rattling) (San bushmen speaking foreign language) The San gather in the night to tell stories and discuss what I'll be allowed to do with them.

A debate breaks out.

The older men are worried that hunting with the poison arrows will be too dangerous for me.

(San elders speaking foreign language) The bows are small and the arrow is tiny, perhaps the smallest in the world, but the poison they coat the tips with is incredibly powerful, enough to kill.

Tomorrow, I'll learn a skill that few, if any, outsiders have ever been shown, how and what to gather to combine the natural ingredients and make poison.

- Welcome to my hut.

I already had to kick out a little mouse, a few ants crawling around, but they've got this hut safe for me, so it's perfect.

There was actually quite a bit of a debate tonight over whether or not I should hunt tomorrow.

Some of them were saying, he should hunt, he should hunt because he's hunted before with a bow and arrows.

I have, and so they wanted me to.

Another said, well, it's very, very dangerous because of the poison arrows.

I could slip once and stick an arrow into my side when I'm crawling along the ground after some game and could do myself in.

So they thought it was dangerous, but they want, they said they want me to hunt so they can provide me with my own bow and arrow and take it from there.

So standard night around the fire, just like you'd find anywhere else in the planet.

We're all hitting the hay.

Up ready for the hunt.

I'm in Namibia, Africa.

I'm living with what is perhaps the oldest culture known to man, the San bushmen of the Kalahari.

Before we head out on a hunt with bows and arrows, I'm lucky to be here on the one day of the year where they raid honey from a beehive deep in a baobab tree.

The village has been keeping an eye on the bees to know when it's the right time to harvest the honey, and it's by complete luck that it happens to be today.

Heading out on foot means venturing into a harsh landscape that's changed little since the dawn of mankind.

Getting a little excited this morning, we've got fresh elephant scat on a trail on the way to the honey hunting.

Dung from the powerful Namibian elephant, once it dries, is essentially a big ball of dried plant matter.

It's the perfect bundle of tinder.

It'll smolder for a long time, producing a lot of smoke.

When the bees sense smoke, they automatically assume a grass or forest fire has begun.

Their instinctual reaction is to return to the hive and cluster in tight and wait it out.

This duck and hide response takes their focus away from protecting the hive, allowing a hand to reach in for honeycomb without worry of being swarmed and stung.

(tribal music) They've got the elephant dung right up in the hole, get the smoke up in there and it's ticking the bees off, let me tell you.

(bees buzzing) You can hear 'em.

Man, you can hear 'em working up a buzz.

The bushmen are always careful to watch the bees throughout the year to see when they've started a new hive and begun making honey.

Only the men gather the honey.

The women and the kids stay back in camp.

The honey bees of Africa are reputed to be the most aggressive honey bees in the world.

A skill like this is absolutely vanishing.

They only do this once a year, so passing on this information, you know, it's gotta be held in great importance or it's not gonna happen.

The older people come here and it's only once a year and the younger people are in school or they're gone.

It's not gonna be passed on.

Again, it's another skill that's truly vanishing.

(San bushmen speaking foreign language) The intensity just keeps picking up.

More and more bees coming out all the time.

They're just trying to make a bigger hole there, and as soon as they do, you put the smoker back in there, calm the bees down.

The poison in 1,000 bee stings is enough to kill a person, and there could easily be 40,000 bees in this hive.

Modern professional beekeepers wear masks and full body protection, but these tribes have figured out how to deal with the fear and the danger, and their reward is a high energy meal.

They finally struck some honey.

That's a lot of work to get into the tree like that.

Like I said, they only do this once a year.

If they can, they're going to find their way into some major slabs of honeycomb coming on back.

That's good honey.

(San bushmen speaking foreign language) Whoo, now that's some honeycomb.

Look at this guy up there.

With a chance to do this only a few times a year with the hives that exist around the village, everyone takes a turn at reaching for the sweet bounty.

You can see the enjoyment on their faces, well worth the work of digging in.

Got bees landing all over us.

A couple of stings here and there, but nothing too bad.

Still an incredible thing doing that when you think about it.

What a little bit of smoke can do to calm the bees down and just reaching your hand in, pulling hunks of their home out and eating them while they fly around.

To my surprise, everything is eaten and nothing is taken back to the village to share with the women and children.

I'm never really told why.

With the honey hunt complete, it's time to head out for more substantial food, but first, the group splits.

A few of us head out to find the magic ingredient to make poison for arrows, a tiny grub that lives a foot or two under the hot and hard pack desert ground.

We scan and travel through the scrub brush environment, looking for a handful of small bushes where the grub prefers to live, and I notice that no teenagers join us on the mission.

No younger San are here to learn the skill.

(San speaking foreign language) So all three men are digging down right now, trying to find the larvae they're looking for, where they get the poison.

There's a lot of danger, even in just gathering.

If you touch the grub and then touch your eyes, you can poison yourself.

They never go hunting with poison arrows alone for this reason.

It's a dangerous occupation.

To be able to pick out a tree, know that it's the right tree to dig down deep, to work hard at digging deep, just to find a couple of small little pea-size grubs so you can make poison for your arrow.

Those kind of skills are vanishing rapidly.

We're really just looking for a needle in a haystack here.

This is what it looks like, and then inside it is a grub.

Some elements of the poison are not poisonous at all on their own, and in fact one is even edible.

The other part of the poisoned mixture for the poison-tipped arrows, wild asparagus.

They mix that with the grub that they found.

This is the acacia tree.

He's getting some of the bark.

Mix the bark, the wild asparagus and the grub together, and they have the poison for the tip of their arrows.

(San bushman speaking foreign language) In a moment of sincere lament the bushman says to me, my sons and brothers don't know how to do this.

They're not learning these ways and soon they'll be gone, vanished forever.

Check it out.

Look at that.

You do have to watch for cobras, spitting cobras in a place like this, in cracks and crevices, but this is a massive, probably famous baobab tree.

I'm in the hole, I'm in the middle of it.

So this is all inside a tree all around me here.

That's cool.

That's one huge baobab tree.

The nuances of surviving on the land are many, and although these modern day San are experts, the true masters were their ancestors.

To gain wisdom from the ancestors, you've got to take part in the trance dance.

It's during the ceremonial dance that communication with the ancestors occurs.

The San believe it's the spiritual connection that has ensured their survival for so many generations.

It's day three of living and surviving with the San bushmen of the Kalahari desert, and they continue to share with me their secrets to life in this desolate and intensely hot and dry landscape, but just who would have taught them how to make poison from this environment, how to mix various natural ingredients into a lethal and toxic substance.

One man tells me, we've just always known, and another one says it was the ancients.

Our great dead relatives tell us during the trance dance what plants to pick, what time of year to pick them, where to find them.

These and other answers to surviving in the Kalahari are taught to them through this legendary ceremony of spiritual importance.

This day in this location, it's a matter of combining four or five ingredients, including the guts from a grub, a leaf, and a few roots to make the perfect lethal concoction that we can put on arrows and use to bring down large game with a simple prick of their hide.

In a practical sense, these recipes have been handed down from father to son for generations.

A variety of poisons have been used with various groups of hunters, perfecting their own signature kiss of death.

Toxins won't work unless they enter the mammal's bloodstream, but if it does, the poison destroys red blood cells, preventing the animal's ability to carry oxygen from its lungs to the rest of its body.

Death by slow asphyxiation.

It can be a long and arduous process as a hit animal can still travel 40 to 70 miles before the poison fully takes effect.

The bushmen will track their prey as long as it takes to fall to its death.

They're extremely careful not to get any in their eyes when preparing the mixture.

There's no known antidote.

(music) (water gurgling) (flourishing music)