‘Bloody hell,” says Simon Reeve as he wades through thigh-high mud somewhere in the Congo Basin. Reeve and his crew are three days from the nearest hotel or hospital and progressing, he estimates, at approximately 1mph, because every step involves scrambling, chopping, ducking or, as is happening right now, hauling themselves through ankle-sucking swamp.
Wilderness With Simon Reeve is the canny explorer’s new series, which promises an itinerary full of extreme challenges. His hack through the unforgiving rainforest fulfils the brief: this wilderness is hard to be in, but the rewards for his trek are things worth seeing and things worth saving.
He and his guide, ranger/conservationist Adams Cassinga, begin in a canoe on the Motaba River, before they trudge through thick vegetation to meet, first, the Baka. An Indigenous people whose interaction with the west does not extend much further than the polo shirts and football tops they’ve acquired by bartering with passing river traders, the Baka are not the suspicious isolationists they have every right to be, given their difficult historical interactions with white visitors. They sing and dance as Reeve and Cassinga arrive, excited to welcome guests. Villagers queue to shake Reeve’s hand, each less wary than the last.
In the morning, after Reeve has emerged from the hut the women of the village knocked up for him out of branches and leaves – perfectly round, like a verdant igloo, and so sturdy it looks as if a bowling ball would bounce off it – the men of the village take him to gather honey. A body camera strapped to one of the tree climbers shows us the technique: smoke the bees with a handful of smouldering leaves, then reach right in to the hive and pluck out combs of honey, chewy and pliable and dark yellow, rich with nature’s best medicines. Like every Baka hunting haul, the treasure is, instinctively, equally shared.
Cheered and nourished, Reeve leaves the village behind, and the serious business starts. His past programmes have taken him to every part of the world but have tended to stick to the same theme: here is an extraordinary place, he will say, before showing us the ordinary people struggling to flourish there because other, more selfish humans have arrived to exploit them and their land.
Apart from the Baka complaining that other tribes keep beating them up, there is little here in the way of specific people being disfranchised. Instead, the message is that the majesty of the Congo Basin, an area the size of western Europe with “billions of beautiful trees, stretching further than the mind can imagine”, is not to be taken for granted. With the Amazon now chipped and charred, the Congo is the only fully functioning lung the world has left.
And it is under threat. Having switched from boat to 4x4, Reeve and Cassinga drive past logging trucks carrying the vast trunks of trees that have stood for hundreds of years, but which will soon serve as signature flooring in loft apartments. The roads the logging companies have built will attract more loggers, legal and otherwise, as well as poachers.
Leaving Cassinga to his work, dutifully cataloguing each timber lorry and every felled tree, Reeve presses on into another section of the jungle, on the lookout for the region’s finest primates. Soon he spots a cheeky spiky-haired type up in the canopy, munching on nuts: the black crested mangabey. It’s fabulous and it’s unique to the area. A little further on, there’s a settlement where a teenager is pushing a cart laden with dark meat. Up for sale is antelope, porcupine … and black crested mangabey. Killing and selling animals is the only way the kid can put himself through school.
After that little fable about wildlife colliding with human aspiration, the search is on for the fabled bonobo, deep in an area of protected forest. For his finale, Reeve permits himself some cheesy nature film dramatics: nobody knows how many bonobo exist, or exactly where they live, so he almost certainly won’t find … hang on, there they are! An adult lies sunning itself as Reeve, tingling with delight, looks on from a few yards away.
Brushing insects from his eyes – so many it looks as if he’s wiping away mud, though there might be a tear there too – Reeve turns to the camera. “Beauty and wonder still exists,” he says. “I’m in awe of this wilderness and the life it still contains. This is one of the last great strongholds for wild nature on planet Earth.” Wilderness might be much closer to a conventional conservation film than Reeve’s previous work, with a message less specific and surprising. But that message – a reminder not to give up on the hard slog to preserve the wonders we have left – could not be more important.
• Wilderness With Simon Reeve is on BBC Two and iPlayer now
