LUXE Serendipity magazine

Into the Wild: Following Simon Reeve’s Extraordinary Wilderness Journeys

By Donna Richardson

There are still places on Earth where the map seems to fall away, where roads disappear, landscapes stretch beyond the horizon and nature dictates the terms. In Wilderness with Simon Reeve, the acclaimed explorer and broadcaster ventures deep into four of the planet’s most spectacular and remote environments, embarking on journeys that are as much about the people who inhabit these wild places as they are about the landscapes themselves.

Across four extraordinary expeditions, Reeve travels from the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea to the turquoise waters of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, through the vast wilderness of Canada’s Yukon and across almost 3,000 miles of Mongolia. These are journeys of endurance and discovery, offering a glimpse of worlds that remain largely untouched.

Papua New Guinea: Into a Lost World

The adventure begins in Papua New Guinea, where Reeve heads deep into the Torricelli Mountains. Here, dense rainforest covers steep mountainsides, creating a landscape that is difficult to penetrate and remarkably little explored.

The journey involves days of trekking through hot, wet and near-impenetrable jungle, climbing ever higher into an environment that feels more like a lost world than a destination accessible to modern travellers.

The reward is an extraordinary wildlife encounter. Reeve and his team search for the critically endangered tenkile tree kangaroo and achieve something remarkable: becoming the first television crew to film the elusive animal in the wild.

But the forest’s greatest stories are not only found in its wildlife. Local trackers and conservationists reveal how communities understand and protect this extraordinary ecosystem, demonstrating the intimate relationship between people and the rainforest.

Mexico: Into the Blue

From the jungle, Reeve heads to Mexico and the spectacular Sea of Cortez, a marine wilderness renowned for its extraordinary diversity.

Travelling by boat and diving beneath the surface, he encounters some of the ocean’s most impressive predators. Bull sharks provide a formidable close-up encounter, while a descent into the open ocean brings him face-to-face with scores of critically endangered hammerhead sharks.

The Sea of Cortez is more than a destination for wildlife encounters. It is a working environment for fishermen and a place where marine biologists are striving to understand and protect fragile ecosystems.

Here, the drama of the expedition comes from the unpredictability of the ocean. Beneath the dazzling surface lies a vast and sometimes intimidating world, where humans are visitors in an environment governed by tides, currents and powerful marine life.

Canada’s Yukon: Into the North

The third journey takes Reeve to Canada’s Yukon, one of the world’s great remaining wildernesses.

Travelling by canoe and on foot, he explores enormous forests, mountains and river valleys, venturing into a landscape where human settlements can be separated by vast distances.

The Yukon is also home to some of North America’s most iconic wildlife. Reeve enters the realm of wolves and mighty grizzly bears, experiencing first-hand the challenges of travelling through a wilderness where encounters with wildlife can never be entirely predicted.

Along the way, he meets members of First Nations communities whose knowledge of the landscape has been passed down through generations. Their understanding of the seasons, animals and terrain offers a different perspective on what it means to live alongside the natural world.

Mongolia: Across the Great Steppe

The final expedition is perhaps the most epic in scale. Reeve crosses almost 3,000 miles of Mongolia, travelling by four-wheel drive, on horseback and on foot.

The journey begins in the immense Gobi Desert before heading towards the frozen peaks of the Altai Mountains. The landscapes change dramatically along the way, from arid desert to vast grasslands and finally to the high mountain wilderness.

Reeve meets nomadic camel herders and Kazakh eagle hunters, discovering traditions that have survived for generations in one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries.

But there is one creature that dominates the expedition: the snow leopard.

Known as the “Ghost of the Mountains”, the elusive cat is notoriously difficult to find. Reeve and his team are warned that they may never see one. After travelling deep into the mountains, however, their persistence is rewarded with an encounter with one of the world’s most mysterious and beautiful predators.

Wilderness and the People Who Call It Home

What makes these journeys particularly compelling is the realisation that the world’s wildest places are not empty.

They are home to people whose lives, livelihoods and traditions are closely connected to nature. From jungle trackers and conservationists to marine scientists, First Nations communities, camel herders and eagle hunters, the series reveals the human stories woven into each landscape.

It also highlights the growing efforts to protect these environments. Across the four expeditions, Reeve encounters people working to conserve endangered species, restore damaged ecosystems and preserve traditional ways of life.

The result is a travel journey far removed from conventional tourism. There are no easy routes, comfortable hotels or predictable itineraries. Instead, the rewards come through hardship: a rare animal glimpsed in dense jungle, sharks circling beneath a boat, a grizzly in the Yukon wilderness or a snow leopard appearing high in the Altai.

For travellers fascinated by the world’s most remote corners, Wilderness with Simon Reeve offers an invitation to look beyond the familiar. It is a reminder that some of the greatest journeys are not simply about reaching a destination, but about entering a landscape on its own terms — and discovering the remarkable wildlife and people who call it home.

Wilderness with Simon Reeve follows adventurer Simon Reeve into four of Earth’s last great wild places, from the Congo Basin to Patagonia, the Coral Triangle, and the Kalahari, meeting remote communities and seeking rare wildlife. The show blends gripping survival challenges with awe-inspiring nature, praised for its authenticity, Reeve’s engaging style, and its inspiring call to protect fragile ecosystems.

1. What first drew you to exploring wild and remote places?

I grew up in a fairly grey bit of West London, so wilderness certainly wasn’t outside my bedroom window. I think that’s partly why it had such an effect on me when I finally encountered it. Suddenly there was this other world — enormous, beautiful, unpredictable, full of life — where human beings weren’t completely in charge.

I’ve always had a slightly restless curiosity as well. I want to know what’s over the hill, who lives there, what their life is like. Wild places magnify that feeling. They make you feel tiny, which I think is extremely healthy.

2. What has the wilderness taught you about yourself?

Wilderness strips life back to basics. Food, warmth, shelter, water, your companions: suddenly those things matter enormously and most of the nonsense we fill our lives with disappears. It’s also taught me that none of us does these journeys alone. The further you get from civilisation, the more important other people become.

3. Is there a particular wilderness experience that changed the way you see the world?

Spending time with people who genuinely live in wilderness has probably changed me more than any single landscape. We have this idea that sophistication means cities, technology and possessions. Then you meet somebody who can read a forest, a desert or a mountainside almost like a book, who knows where the animals are, what the weather is doing, which plant is useful — and you realise there are completely different forms of intelligence and knowledge.

That was true with the San in the first series, and it was absolutely true again with the villagers and trackers in Papua New Guinea. Without their knowledge, we would never have found the tenkile.

4. What is the most dangerous situation you’ve encountered in a remote environment?

There have been a few contenders! On this series, the deep dive in the Sea of Cortez was one of the situations I took most seriously. We were descending into open ocean with no seabed beneath us, looking for hammerheads at around 30 metres and potentially deeper. At that depth you’re using your air much faster, there’s the risk of narcosis and decompression sickness, and we actually drifted a couple of miles during one dive.

The sharks weren’t really the dangerous bit. The diving was. That’s often the way: the thing with the scary teeth gets the headlines, but gravity, cold, water and human error are usually much more worrying.

5. How do you prepare mentally and physically for challenging expeditions?

Physically, I try to get properly fit beforehand because there is no hiding place once you’re several days into an expedition carrying kit uphill. For this series I spent months jogging around Devon wearing a 15-kilo weighted vest, looking completely ridiculous. It worked, though.

Mentally, I try not to think too much about the whole expedition at once. Just get through today. Get over that ridge. Reach the next camp. Put one foot in front of the other. And embrace the fact that things will go wrong — because they always do.

6. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned from people who live in remote wilderness areas?

How welcoming they are. Again and again you arrive in places where life is objectively tough — bitterly cold, incredibly isolated, very little comfort — and people open the door, feed you, tease you and make space for you.

In Mongolia I found it really striking. Harsh landscapes seem to draw people together. The wilderness can be unforgiving, but the people living in it often aren’t.

7. How has climate change affected the wild places you’ve visited?

You can see it, and you hear about it from people whose livelihoods depend on knowing their environment intimately. In Mongolia, nomadic herders told us about droughts, violent weather and livestock losses. In the Yukon, changes to an already stressed ecosystem are being felt by the creatures and communities that depend on it.

But one lesson of this series is that climate change is not acting alone. Even somewhere that looks magnificently wild can be affected by fishing hundreds or thousands of miles away, mining, roads or decisions made in cities. Wilderness isn’t sealed off from the rest of us.

8. What do you think people misunderstand most about wilderness?

That it means somewhere completely untouched by human beings.

There are almost no places like that. Humans have lived in and shaped wild landscapes for thousands of years. A wilderness, to me, is somewhere where nature still has the upper hand — where it still sets the rules. And often the people living there are part of that ecosystem, not somehow separate from it.

The other misunderstanding is that wilderness is empty. It absolutely isn’t. It is bursting with stories.

9. How can ordinary people experience nature without damaging it?

Travel thoughtfully. Use local guides, spend money with local communities, don’t leave rubbish behind, don’t interfere with wildlife and support places that are genuinely protecting what you’ve gone there to see. Done properly, tourism can actually give wildlife an economic value for local people.

We saw that very clearly in Mongolia, where responsible tourism could help make a living snow leopard worth far more to local communities than a dead one.

10. Do you think there are places that should remain completely untouched by tourism?

Yes, probably. There should be places where nature is simply left alone. But I wouldn’t make that a universal rule. Carefully managed tourism can be a hugely powerful tool for conservation because it creates jobs and gives communities a financial reason to protect landscapes and wildlife. The important thing is that tourism serves the place — rather than the place being sacrificed to tourism.

11. What has been your favourite wild landscape to explore, and why?

I’m terrible at choosing favourites because each wilderness gets under your skin in a different way. But the Torricelli Mountains in Papua New Guinea were absolutely extraordinary.

We climbed for days into this mountainous rainforest that became wetter, greener and more otherworldly the higher we went. Ferns, vines, huge trees, creatures appearing out of nowhere — and this sense that science still knows comparatively little about what lives there. It genuinely felt like entering a lost world. Then to find and film the tenkile at the end of that climb was just magical.

12. Have you ever felt genuinely frightened while filming in the wilderness?

Definitely. Anybody who says they never feel frightened in genuinely remote places is either lying or needs examining.

At Bear Cave in the Yukon we were roughly a hundred miles, as the crow flies, from the nearest people. There were wolves around the camp and grizzly bears in the area. At night I’d wake up needing the loo and think: Right. I’m going outside in my long johns, on ice, into a landscape containing large carnivores. What could possibly go wrong? Fear is useful. Panic isn’t. A little bit of fear reminds you to concentrate.

13. What role do local communities play in protecting wild places?

An absolutely fundamental one. That’s probably one of the strongest messages of the series.

In Papua New Guinea, local villagers stopped hunting tenkile and became their protectors. Their trackers then led us to animals that outsiders could never hope to find. In Mongolia, Bina is bringing local herders into snow-leopard conservation. In Mexico, fishermen who once simply caught sharks are now helping scientists tag and release them.

Conservation imposed from a distant office can only achieve so much. If the people who actually live alongside wildlife become its champions, that can be transformational.

14. If you could take someone on one wilderness journey anywhere in the world, where would you go?

I think I’d take them across Mongolia. It has such staggering scale. You can drive for hours across the Gobi and feel as though humanity has vanished from the planet, then suddenly find a ger, a family and the warmest welcome imaginable.

You have deserts, mountains, snow leopards, camels, horses, golden eagles — it’s nature showing off. And I’d want whoever came with me to experience that extraordinary combination of vast emptiness and human warmth.

15. After seeing so many remote parts of the planet, what gives you hope for the future of wilderness?

People give me hope — and nature itself gives me hope.

At Cabo Pulmo in Mexico, an area that had been hammered by fishing was protected and the underwater ecosystem came roaring back. In Papua New Guinea, villagers changed their relationship with the tenkile and helped bring an animal back from the brink. We were able to film a wild tenkile because those people had protected it.

Nature can be astonishingly resilient if we give it space and time. We spend a lot of our lives being told that everything is doomed. It isn’t. There are terrible pressures, obviously, but there are also victories. We need to notice them, learn from them and make them bigger.

16. What’s your favourite part of the show?

The moments when all the effort suddenly pays off.

You can trek for days, get soaked, frozen, bitten, exhausted and wonder why on earth you’re doing it — and then somebody whispers, ‘it’s over there!’. In Papua New Guinea it was the tenkile above us in the trees. In Mongolia it was the snow leopard appearing on the mountainside. In Mexico it was dropping through the blue and suddenly finding scores of hammerheads circling below.

Those moments are pure wonder. That’s the drug. That’s why you go back.

17. Is there luxury in the wilderness?

Oh yes. Your definition of luxury just changes dramatically. Waking up somewhere with no traffic, no buildings, no phone reception, perhaps nobody else for a hundred miles — that’s incredibly rare now. Seeing the Northern Lights above camp, standing in a Mongolian landscape that seems to go on forever, or waking in rainforest to a wall of noise from insects and birds: those experiences are luxuries in themselves.

But there’s another kind of luxury as well. After a few days in the jungle, luxury is dry socks. In Mongolia it’s a warm ger and toothpaste that hasn’t frozen. In the Yukon it’s a hot drink, a stove and not having to leave your tent at three in the morning for a wee. Wilderness reminds you that human beings invented quite a lot of extremely good things. Mattresses. Showers. Central heating. Toilets with walls. You return home profoundly grateful for all of them.

Donna Richardson caught up with Simon Reeve to talk about his new show.