Interview with real-life Indiana Jones and Lara Croft

Imagine Indiana Jones and Lara Croft in a reality show and you get an idea of "Man, Woman, Wild," which airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel (Channel 39 on Sky and Channel 56 on Destiny). Meet the husband and wife team of Mykel Hawke and Ruth England who are dropped into the most inhospitable locations on this planet and left to fend for themselves with just a knife and the clothes on their back for four days and nights.

Mykel, 46, is a former Special Forces soldier while Ruth, 41, is a journalist. They've been married for six years. They must use their survival skills as they explore the Bermuda triangle, the jungles of Colombia, the center of a massive cave and many other dangerous locations. Recently, I joined several Asian journalists in a telephone interview with the couple. The following are excerpts from that session:

What's it like living 24 hours a day for four days with the same person?

Mykel: Oh, man, we do that all the time anyway. That's good fun. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. But I tell you when you are out there and you're suffering, it is easy to get itchy and scratchy with each other. It's constant effort to remember that, hey, you're in this together and you're actually there to help each other, but we have our challenges. It's tough.

Ruth: Myke is so difficult when he's stressed, so difficult. Occasionally our camera men, out of decency, will go and film shots of the trees just so we can argue.

I understand you have a Medi-Vac crew on standby in case of emergencies.

Mykel No, not at all. What we have is a medic, so that if we get hurt, he can keep us stabilized, but wherever we go, however remote it is, we still have to rely on trying to get some kind of a vehicle to drive us or some kind of aircraft that can fly in, but no, we don't have any helicopters or vehicles that are just standing by ready to help us out, no.

Ruth: Before we go out, we'll locate the closest town and he'll liaise with the doctors in the hospital there and say this is filming X miles away. Something could go wrong. You know who I am. These are the people who are working, but, yes, sometimes we just get completely washed out at the end of shoots when we can't physically get to where we're supposed to be getting back to. We are in the middle of nowhere.

Mykel: We have a Special Forces medic, who is trained like the jungle doctor. He actually can do a lot more things than a regular physician and that's why we have him because he's specifically trained to operate in these remote regions.

Ruth: Yes, he can literally operate. He can slice us open. He can deal with snake bites, but the actual physical getting to the nearby hospital is not always straightforward. On a couple of shoots we were filming in the north Atlantic and that's not too far from, for example, Miami, so had something gone wrong there, it would have been a fairly easy airlift out. But there are other places when we were absolutely in the middle of nowhere and it would have been much more difficult.

Were there situations where you had to ask the medic for help and you had to be taken to a hospital?

Mykel: In the first season Ruth almost died and we had to physically call it off for safety reasons because we were in a bad state and a bad storm was coming in. In Season Two I nearly went down from basically heat exhaustion while we were out at sea. It nearly killed me.

Ruth In that instance I said I don't think it made the final cut of the show, but I said I'd like to stop this now. I want to get this over with. I want to call for medical help, but Mykel refused. He knew himself well enough to know that he could go on and he wants to remain in a survival situation and try and fix the situation himself, which he did. And that's when he made me give him an enema to re-hydrate him and that was a close call.

In this press handout, it says here that Ruth was filmed while at gunpoint. Can you give us more details?

Ruth: I'm not sure it was filmed at gunpoint. I've had a couple of interesting experiences while filming in Africa. On the edge of the Congo, there were some, I'm assuming, mountain gorillas in Rwanda and we were filming some young men that looked angry. We're filming just to get some B-roll of the local town before we headed up into the mountains. And there were about 100 young men lining the streets and we noticed that some of them had guns. This was shortly after the dreadful genocide in Rwanda. Luckily, nothing untoward happened.

I think what that press report is talking about is a different instance when I was filming in South Africa and I was standing in a river. My director said, please if you go in front of that river and deliver this piece to camera. I was standing in this river and I noticed our local South African guide had a rifle trained on me. I said, "What the hell are you doing?" And he said, "I want to shoot the crocodiles before they get you." That was just terrifying.

When you're out there in the wilderness, how much sleep do you get?

Ruth: None.

Mykel: It's really awful. Honestly you get maybe about four hours total where you're just constantly like every 15 minutes or so you get cold or you get a bug bite or something gets numb. The ground is hard and the fire is going low, so you never really sleep. So by the end of it, we're zombies.

Ruth: I'm a mother. I would say it's like having a newborn baby because even when you're in a relatively pleasant place where you're not going to get eaten by lions, you're feeding the fire and the fire will go down at least every 20 minutes or so and needs re-stoking in most instances because we're not using big chain sawed lumps of log that will burn throughout the night. We're using firewood that we've gathered and sticks and twigs just burn out real quickly. So you're constantly feeding the fire the same way you would with a newborn baby.

I watched an interview of yours with Conan O'Brien where you were discussing drinking pee. Can you tell us more about that?

Ruth: The deal is the first part is the first part, so the first time you go for pee, it's relatively safe if you're not dehydrated.

Mykel: Well, no, you'll be dehydrated. Here's the thing. Whatever fluid you had in you, the first time when you're in a survival situation that you go, you can still drink that because the body is not perfect. It lets a lot of water go that's still good. The problem and where the myth comes in is when you start drinking that over and over, it becomes concentrated. The body is more dehydrated. Then the kidneys can't process it and that's when it actually caused renal failure, which leads to death. So the rule is the first time for sure it's safe to drink. Don't waste it. After that it starts to get dangerous.

After your four days in the wilderness are over, what's the first thing that you do when you get back to civilization?

Ruth: Shower, bathe, shower and bathe again.

Mykel: Pretty much the same for me. Usually I'll shower and then I'll grab some sleep. Food is not even on my mind. Your stomach is small, you don't even care anymore.

Ruth: We'll also have this thing that we do in most of the situations and it's almost a ritual and that is we will cover each other's body in neat bleach, household toilet cleaning bleach because it's a very effective measure for removing parasites, chiggers, any poison wood.