Blimey, it’s a real jungle out there
Aug 10 2008 by Nathan Bevan, Wales On Sunday

I WAS watching BBC1’s wildlife series Lost Land Of The Jaguar last week and it reminded me of a memorable moment in Dirty Sanchez.

No, I don’t mean the bit where someone hammers their naked nether regions to the mantelpiece with a six-inch nail, although, I’ll admit that certainly isn’t something you see every day.

Not unless you live in the Dirty Sanchez household of course, where I imagine the “to do” list stuck to the fridge door reads something like: “Eggs, milk, washing powder, trap testes in an industrial press, cereal...”

The bit I’m referring to was where the bad, mad boys from Wales’ answer to Jackass are involved in an extreme game of word association and, panicking at the prospect of being smacked hard over the head with a bamboo cane for hesitating, one blurts out the words: “Water jungle!”

What he meant to say, of course, was “rain forest” which, having watched Lost Land Of The Jaguar, is somewhere I’m all for saving but nowhere I’d ever want to find myself.

Let’s face it, the things that live in there don’t like us. Not one bit.

Bitey, spikey, pointy things with fangs, claws and far more legs than is strictly necessary who have no time for camera crews, no matter how well-intentioned, sticking their retractable lenses in. Set up a makeshift dunny and within minutes a killer scorpion and its thoroughly bad-tempered brood will have made a home right there under the toilet seat.

And you can try to wash your clothes in the river all you want, there’s no way your going to get them whiter than the teeth of that scaly, six-foot cayman lying in wait for you in the reeds.

There are spiders the size of soup plates that shoot little detachable hairs at you should you be mental enough to pick them up, tiny hairs that burrow into your skin and make you cough and sneeze uncontrollably.

And, unfortunately, the one thing that really ticks these eight-legged nightmares off are people who cough and sneeze uncontrollably. Annoy them and in go the inch-long fangs and it’s ‘Goodnight Vienna’, or, in this case, Venezuela.

And don’t even mention the candiru – tiny little parasitic fish who, should you innocently start relieving yourself in some nearby stream, swim up your jet of urine and embed themselves inside your old chap before drinking your blood.

Sweet Caroline! It’s enough to make even the most ardent of tree huggers want to fire up the chainsaw, isn’t it? That’s if they can get their legs uncrossed long enough to make it to the tool shed.

I’ll admit, after watching the candiru in action, the redhead had to prize mine apart with a car jack. I was also less than enamoured with the fact that the show’s Steve Irwin-a-like, Steve Backshall, seems to have taken over from that other action man Bear Grylls as the object of her affection.

Built like a prop-forward, he’s almost always shirtless and engaging in some derring-do of one kind or another, like leaping over the side of his boat without a second thought to free a fishing net that’s become tangled on something in the murk below.

Steve, mate, you’re in the deepest, darkest Guyanese jungle, where hardly anyone has set foot before and that water is the same colour as the Merthyr canal that turned my hair green for a week after I went swimming in it as a kid. But up he comes with a torn net full of bowling ball-sized, razor-toothed piranha, hardly flinching even when one actually starts eating the side of the boat. “Why can’t you be more like that?” said the redhead, casting me a derisory up-and-down look.

Sigh! I think I was better off with Bear, you know.