A Bulletproof Ground Sloth by Pat Spain

Author:Pat Spain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789046533
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Do All Luxury Hotels Have Jaguars?

There exists in many peoples’ minds an image of a male wildlife-adventure TV host. Along with this image is a notion of where said host sleeps most nights while filming. These images generally fall into two camps — a rugged, scruffy, battle-scarred outdoorsman sleeping in a homemade lean-to, cooking a meal of the insects he’d just foraged, mixed with the blood of a rattlesnake and maybe some single malt that he brought in his hip flask for this occasion. Or, alternately, a camera-ready male-model-type, square-jawed, lithe, with stage makeup and hair product, who couldn’t actually survive for a night without a team of handlers and who, once the camera goes off, stays in a luxury hotel.

I am certainly neither of those people — honestly, I don’t believe any host is either of those people; not the ones I’ve met, at least. Yes, I love camping and do enjoy eating bugs — but no one would ever describe me as “rugged” or “lithe”. I like a good whiskey now and then, but I prefer gin or cider. I’m also not embarrassed to say that I had oil-absorbing blotter paper in one of my bag’s pockets and wore Spanx undershirts on most episodes of Legend Hunter. I’m also not embarrassed to say I went days, sometimes more, without bathing or washing my clothes on most shoots, and it didn’t bother me one bit.

Likewise, our accommodations were not quite lean-tos, but I would not describe them as luxurious either. Most of the time, we were either camping in super-lite minimalist tents that could be set up and taken down easily, or in what could be described loosely as hotels, in that they were buildings with rooms that we could sleep in in exchange for money. Both required mosquito nets and silk cocoon-style sleeping sacs to keep bugs and diseases at bay.

For the Brazil shoot, I knew we’d be dividing our time between camping and “hotels”, and I thought I knew what to expect from both. Camping would be tents set up in a semicircle for safety, on hard ground, dig a hole for the bathroom, etc. No frills, but fairly safe and standard. The hotels would likely have a musty odor and greasy, thin sheets, possibly a functional bathroom (either in each room, shared, or outside the hotel), unreliable electricity, a mattress that would be a toss-up if it were safe to sleep on, and a number of insect, small mammal, and reptilian friends to share the room with. The crew and I had developed our own 5-star rating system:

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