Surviorman, Season 2, Ep 2: Ecuadorian rainforest

M

MG_Saldivar

Joined
Feb 5, 2005
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First impressions:

1. Except for the wood axe he carried in the Canadian boreal forest in the 'plane crash' ep, I can't recall Les previously carrying a tool as large as the machete he had tonight. It sure came in handy!

2. That huge biomass of bugs he had crawling all over him most of the ep had ME crawling! :eek:

Les earned his dough this ep...
 
Seven, I *think* -- the Discovery page is unclear.

Wikipedia lists seven eps for Season 2:

* Kalahari Desert, Africa
* Amazon Jungle, Ecuador
* South African Plains
* Labrador, Canada
* Leaf River Basin, Illinois
* Forreston Boreal Forest, Northwest Territories
* German Valley Swampland, Arkansas



On another topic -- I feel sorry Les got foot fungus but what possessed him to wear heavy socks and full leather (possibly insulated!) leather boots rather than canvas or canvas-and-leather jungle boots?
 
there is a lot of episodes to watch over on youtube....:) i still don't understand why he never carries a fixed blade... at least a mora c'mon now..:o
 
Would anyone be able to upload the Ecuador episode to youtube for those of us Survivorman fans without access to cable?

Cheers,
 
I wonder how many parasites he caught this time while drinking water straight from the river?

He caught parasite in Georgia that took him a year to get rid of.
 
It is hard for me to understand why Les did not find other food in addition to the shrimp and couple pieces of fruit in a rainforest which is teeming with animal life. His blowgun and try at doodling was great, wish he can caught something. Sometimes I think he enjoys starving himself for the 7 days.

MvW is definitely more entertaining but Les is the man.
 
Stroud outdid himself again, showing us what life can be like in the pestilential Ecuadorian rainforest.

In just a few days, he developed debilitating foot fungus. When wearing a shirt, he was covered by a swarms of flying insects. Vampire bats sucked his blood at night. He drank water straight from the river and confides that he paid for it. At one point, he is bitten so painfully on the back, he momentarily loses control.

Without the sleeping platform he was able to construct with his machete, he probably would have had to call the whole thing off at the start.

For all his efforts at traditional and non-traditional fishing, he came up mostly empty. Just a few small freshwater shrimp. From the land, only a few fruits.

At the end, he nearly becomes food for Jaguar. We do not see the cat on camera (did I miss it?) so the truth of the incident is hard to know. But if the producers wanted to edit in pre-existing footage of a Jaguar, they could easily have done it.

Stroud has created a unique format by filming his own isolation. Nowhere else on TV can you see anything like this. I'm a huge fan.
 
I also noticed that the disclaimer at the front end of the show seems longer and more legalistic... I'll have to pop in one of my Season 1 DVDs to compare...

By the way, I want to express my respect for the W&S forum for being as open to criticizing Les as (most of us) are to criticizing Ed Grylls.

(Although I still love Les' show and would myself end up a pile of compost in the same situation. :o)
 
The swarms of bugs sure convinced me that I have it sweet in the Pacific NW woods-- a few gnats, skeeters and some deer flies. I'll pass on big spiders and cockroaches running over me while I'm trying to sleep!
 
DaleW said:
The swarms of bugs sure convinced me that I have it sweet in the Pacific NW woods-- a few gnats, skeeters and some deer flies. I'll pass on big spiders and cockroaches running over me while I'm trying to sleep!
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Amen brother. I grew up in southwest Florida and thought I knew about bugs. Ugh, that episode gave me a severe case of the willies.

I could not believe he was handfishing given the possibilities of severe injury - the risk to reward ratio seemed awfully high.

I also can't help but think that he actually chose an extremely inhospitable area of the forest - since it had minimal structures and was poorly maintained, yet the tribe was so close by.

Since the area obviously could support a group of natives he probably could have been alot more successful hunting and foraging had he selected the right spot.

Likewise I'm sure that while a 150-250 lb. cat certainly can be dangerous I am still very skeptical. Especially since they are purportedly being hunted into extinction.
 
This was one of my favorite so far..That was the first I had heard of that nasty little ant..WOW!! I got stung by a Velvet Ant once and it made my hand numb for a good while..That was the first and only Velvet Ant I have seen.

R
 
His fishing technique leaves a lot to be desired, a butterfy? What, no worms in the Amazon? And he could of done better than wading into the hole with 3' of line on a stick, alerting the fish. What about night fishing when the catfish bite?
 
shotgunner11 said:
I noticed how often he mentions that he "will be completely alone",

A jab at our boy Bear?
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I enjoy both shows, but Bear is the man! Les gets props for toting around all the equipment, but Bear takes the cake when it comes to attitude. The man will be totally miserable and almost always comes up with something positive to say.
 
I've always enjoyed Les' shows...unfortunately I'm going to have to wait until I redeploy in December to catch any of the new episodes (cable service sucks in Iraq:D). With that said, I spent 6 months in the upper Amazon basin jungle. We were more in the "highlands", but you could (and we often did) hike down to many of the head-water rivers. I remember just pausing on the hike down, waking down a small stream bed and seeing the floor literally crawl with arthropods and reptiles...amazing! There was a great little swimming hole we hiked down to and I once hiked down by myslef and saw a couple of local kids fishing in the "pool" and they had a half dozen pirhana on the rocks...luckily they weren't from the vicious family:eek: Never thought about skinny dipping after that!

I do remember having a warning about sleeping with the mosquito nets over our cots because of the bats. They would crawl up on your chest and bite into your lower lip for blood. That wasn't the big deal, it was the rabies that they were carrying which caused concern. My biggest issue was the spiders. I was a biology major and love the outdoors (being from WA myself), but arachnids are just something I don't enjoy playing around with. We had several encounters with a smaller tarantula family around our camp...I try to forget those memories:o

We took the anti-malaria pills...which gave me the runs quite excessively. I stopped taking them to avoid the 10-15 daily trips to the john, but after one NCO picked up malaria and lost 40 pounds in just a couple of weeks...he was boots up and they had to evac him to hopital in Panama, I started taking them again:barf:

I had several outsites to visit that were co-located with Ecuadorian or Peruvian soldiers along the DMZ. I remember one visit where the soldiers went out hunting. The brought back a few endangered species. These very remote outsites were only provided with rice and beans for rations, and the conscript soldiers were augmenting via hunting and fishing.

Looking forward to catch a rerun on this episode. It was truly (and ruggedly) beautiful down there.

ROCK6
 
This episode blew me away. I have no Monday morning quarterbacking for this one.

Catfishing by hand is kind of common down here in Louisiana. I never did it.

Les mentioned his hip injury due to adventure racing.

From Wikipedia

Adventure racing is a combination of two or more disciplines, including orienteering and navigation, cross-country running, mountain biking, paddling and climbing and related rope skills. An expedition event can span ten days or more while sprints can be completed in a matter of hours. There is typically no dark period during races, irrespective of length; competitors must choose if or when to rest.

Adventure racing historically required teams to be of a specified size and to include both men and women, but many races no longer restrict team size and include single-sex divisions. Some also include age-based categories.
 
mrostov said:
I wonder how many parasites he caught this time while drinking water straight from the river?

He caught parasite in Georgia that took him a year to get rid of.
Click to expand...

I caught a parasite in Georgia that took almost five years to get rid of...man, I was so happy when she got remarried.:)
 
Serrinon said:
I enjoy both shows, but Bear is the man! Les gets props for toting around all the equipment, but Bear takes the cake when it comes to attitude. The man will be totally miserable and almost always comes up with something positive to say.
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By totally miserable, do you mean miserable until the cameras stop rolling and he goes to shower, sleep and eat in a hotel? I can endure a lot of pain and hardship if I know that I only have to do it for five minutes and then I can go back to civilization for 10 hours. Les doesn't do stupid stunts and take unnecessary risks like Bear, but then again Les isn't a fraud. Also, if Bear lies about staying at hotels, do you really think that the stunts he pulls like drinking his own urine are actually true? It would be really easy to get a urine look-a-like and have him drink that. In fact, it would be par for the course.
 
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