Halong Bay is a dreamscape. Endless emerald waters punctured by hundreds of limestone towers rising up like bony fingers from the deep. In a place this mysterious and enchanting, it’s easy to understand how people could believe in a fantastical sea creature.
We’ve come to search for Vietnam’s version of Nessie. Extracting the zoology from the mythology is one of the most challenging aspects of making Destination Truth, and this case is about as tough as it gets. Vietnam’s history is laden with rich and imaginative folklore, including the elegant notion that a dragon descended from the heavens, his tail splitting the earth to form the jagged towers in the waters of Halong Bay. Even the name “Halong” means “where the dragon meets the sea.” An alternate version has the dragon spitting out jewels, which formed the many islands here. Either way, these people have serpents on the brain, and reliable accounts are hard to come by.
Our boat, a massive wooden live-aboard on its maiden voyage, steams steadily between the monolithic karsts, a dragon’s head rather appropriately carved into the prow. On deck, we set up cameras and equipment, prep dive gear, and scan the horizon. I glance back over the stern and furrow my brow at the sun, which is dropping like a heavy marble in the western sky.
Without warning, a series of hits on our sonar system sends us scrambling to get wet. Tapping the glass on the pressure gauge of my scuba regulator, I look down into the water, which I can already tell is going to be murky as hell.
My father spent the lion’s share of his career as a commercial deep-sea diver, and I was tinkering with scuba tanks, weight belts, and wetsuits as far back as I can remember. Add to that a childhood by the sea in New England, and nautical exploits were something of a foregone conclusion for me. I’ve been diving since I was about ten years old, so young that after completing the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) open-water diving course I didn’t qualify for a certification card. My earliest dives were icy shore excursions in Massachusetts, where the water perpetually feels like it drifted down from the Arctic Circle. My best friend Jon and I would don thick wetsuits to search for sunken treasure and undersea intrigue along the coast of Cape Ann.
One day, inspired by my father, I even tried to build a submarine out of a box fan and a metal firewood rack. Needless to say, my personal Nautilus suffered an inglorious end, promptly disassembling and sinking at her modest launching ceremony. Even at the age of twelve, Jon wasn’t one to pull punches as we watched my Vernian contraption gurgle to the bottom of the bay. “Idiot,” he quietly muttered. Little did either of us know that professional sea monster hunting would end up on my résumé.
Jumping into Halong Bay feels like a bad idea from the start. The dire reminder from the director of the zoological museum that these waters are populated with venomous sea snakes engages me in a mental battle as I imagine what exactly triggered the sonar beneath the boat. Visions of tentacles dance in my head. It doesn’t help that we’ve got limited control over our environment, with curious boats recklessly swinging by to get a better look at what we’re up to. It’s not exactly an ideal dive profile.
Casey and I jump down into the warm waters and are immediately engulfed in a blinding broth of mud and silt.
We try to get our bearings, but the fact of the matter is that neither of us can see jack shit. After a few minutes of blind disorientation, we clumsily feel our way to the stern and ascend to reassess the situation.
Just as we surface, however, I feel my legs being forcefully sucked down and away from the boat. It’s not the grip of a creature, though; it’s the pull of a powerful undertow.
The ensuing drama unfolds quickly and is only partially documented by our cameras. The drag is being generated by the propellers of a behemoth ship that has drifted toward our position, churning the surrounding waters. The current drags both Casey and me along the surface and toward a rusting mooring nearby bobbing violently and threatening to smash our skulls. Despite kicking wildly, we’re being pulled underwater and into the tangle of metal and chain that is now listing violently toward our heads. Casey and I choke in the turbulent waters and wave our arms frantically. Our teammates quickly bound up to the highest point of our boat, issuing a flurry of screams to alert the vessel, which promptly shuts down her engines. It’s over quickly, and Casey and I are hauled back onto the deck, exhausted and shaken.
This isn’t my last brush with catastrophe while making Destination Truth. Rather, it’s merely the opening act in a cabaret of close calls, all in the name of exploration. I’m not saying that making D.T. is dangerous; it’s not, per se. It’s just that when you go out of your way to find adventure, sometimes adventure tries to bite you on the ass. The key is figuring out how to walk away in one piece.
I’m not talking about survival skills. That’s not my domain. If you want to learn how to drink your own pee, eat maggots, and sleep inside animal carcasses, you need to talk to Bear Grylls. Incidentally, a few years ago, Bear took some heat for sleeping in hotels while his show depicted him as roughing it outdoors. Bear and I have never met, but I will say this to his group of small but vocal detractors: When was the last time you received a black belt in karate, survived a free-fall parachute accident, and became the youngest Englishman to summit Everest? Jesus. What’s a guy got to do to get a little respect?
Oh, and his name is Bear. As in, “I’m a bear. I will eat your goddamned face off.”
No, my tips for cheating death are entirely more accessible. Little nuggets of advice learned the hard way. In the case of our Vietnamese dive trip, Casey and I would have wound up as fish food in Halong Bay if not for the fast thinking (and loud swearing) help of our colleagues. The incident is a reminder of a lesson best vocalized by the Beatles: I get by with a little help from my friends. Never travel with people you aren’t willing to depend on. Remember that.
Additional words of wisdom are hereby presented in a series of unfortunate parables.
Machine gun to the face: Senegal
Okay, this was my bad. I drove our crew across the border from Gambia on a bit of crummy advice from a local. I’m a shameless country-counter, and I wanted to get a toe into Senegal so that I could add one more to my irrelevant list of visited nations (yes, a toe counts). I was told that a dirt road off the main highway would lead us to a sleepy Senegalese village with no border patrol whatsoever. Once again: no border patrol whatsoever. A few miles later we round a sharp bend to see a group of soldiers jumping to attention. One of them drops down into a foxhole and swings a .50 caliber machine gun toward my head. Another guard quickly loads an AK-47.
Calamities like this resolve in milliseconds; there is no room for trial and error, no second rounds of negotiation. History tells us that the delineation between those who survive disaster and those who do not is very often drawn by one’s ability to make sound decisions in the face of acute danger, and do it quickly. You get it right, or you get dead.
1. Get your bearings. People frequently report the sensation of time slowing down during moments of disaster. This phenomenon may be caused, in part, by a rapid acceleration of the brain’s processing of vital information. Use this momentary heightening of awareness to take a snapshot. What do you see? In my case: running soldiers. Panicked expressions. Guns. A narrow road.
2. Fight or flight. This phrase, coined nearly a century ago, refers to an animal’s snap judgment to engage or wuss out when faced with conflict. Make no mistake: running away is usually the right decision at least half the time. Being a dead adventurer is, in my humble opinion, overrated. You can always run away and embellish your bravery later. However, running away under the wrong circumstances can be more disastrous than standing your ground. In this particular instance, the nearly overwhelming instinct to flee would be a terrible mistake. The guards are on the defensive, and trying to evade them would only confirm us as a threat. Also, my ability to turn the car around on this dirt path is no match for a few fully automatic machine guns.
3. Make a move. One of the biggest mistakes people make in high-pressure situations is to simply do nothing at all. To freeze. It’s important to commit to a decision. In this case, my instincts tell me that the smart money is on defusing the situation as quickly as possible. I stop the car, put my hands in the air to illustrate my utter defenselessness, and smile. Big smile. Smiling helps 90 percent of armed conflicts. Proven fact. So I do my best to stand there like a grinning American idiot (not difficult). Because if there’s one thing that people around the world can get behind, it’s feeling superior to Americans. Especially people who speak French. Oh, they love it.
We’re marched out of the car at gunpoint. I don’t speak three words of French, but I manage to understand that these gentlemen would like to see our passports. We produce them slowly and just keep on smiling.
In the end, with the temperature of the situation much cooler, the guards realize that my ragtag pack of monster hunters is a threat to national security; they send us back from whence we came. As I start up the jeep, I point to the ground and ask the guard, “Is this The Gambia or Senegal?”
He looks up with a smirk. “You are in Senegal.”
Perfect. Country number seventy-eight.
Lesson: Make decisions calmly, quickly, and accurately.
Black hole of death: Chile
Descend into a centuries-old mine to search for an alien entity believed to live in subterranean darkness. You know. Just another Tuesday. In my head, the mine was going to be something I could simply walk into. Maybe a thick-timbered arch and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad tracks leading into a dusky tunnel. Definitely horizontal. Not this. This is the scariest damn thing I’ve ever seen. A slumping pit in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert that dates back to the time of the Conquistadores. Various splintered logs and heavy burlap bags are struggling to restrain the sandy embankments, and I can’t even get close enough to look down the hole. It’s essentially the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi (before Lucas went back and ruined it with that potted plant).
According to a local source, this particular shaft should be about sixty feet deep, allowing us to rappel down inside and access the maze of tunnels below. When climbing, our policy is to rig redundancy lines for each climber. One line allows an individual to self-descend. A second line is controlled from the top in the event that the climber releases his primary line.
Our director of photography, Evan, and I are going to lead the group. Evan goes first so that he can film me from below. He lowers himself down, using about half the length of his rope, and then yells up for me to begin. I can tell from the timbre of his voice that he’s nervous, which is a very bad sign. Evan is a longtime D.T. veteran who surfs, climbs, scuba dives, and is generally up for just about any insane activity I throw his way. In all his seasons of making the show, this is the only time I’ve ever heard genuine fear in his voice. Hooked in, I back toward the rim of the pit and gaze down into a void. Evan is hard to see hanging only fifty feet underneath me. I rappel down about thirty feet. Small rocks hail down and bounce off of Evan’s helmet and into the darkness. He calls up at me: “Something’s wrong, dude.”
I look between my dangling legs and see the flicker of his headlamp below me. “What?” I yell down.
“It’s too deep. Listen to the rocks.”
I dislodge a small stone from the wall and let it drop from my hand. It sails past Evan and into the nothingness. Silence. The rope creaks. More silence. Evan shines his light down hopelessly. The sound of the rock hitting the bottom is so distant, so small, that it immediately turns my stomach over. This mine shaft is hundreds of feet deep.
This is a problem. A big problem. First of all, our ropes are only 100 feet long. What concerns me more is that the rigging at the surface doesn’t offer enough leverage to pull us back up. We were planning on resetting the lines from the bottom. Now we’re screwed; we have to go back up. I try to use a device called an ascender to hoist myself up the line, but the walls are sheer; there aren’t any footholds. I kick off the wall a few times with a grunt before giving up, spinning quietly in the void. Evan and I yell up to the team at the surface that we’re stuck. After what feels like an eternity, they call down that they want to hoist Evan up first, since the position of his rigging makes it easier. Great. Inch by inch Evan rises up toward me. Though I can’t hear or see what’s happening at the surface, I know that the team is digging their heels into the ground in a gravitational tug-of-war. It’s laborious and slow work. Eventually, Evan and I are eye to eye. There isn’t much to be said. We put our hands on each other’s shoulders as he begins to pass upward. “Get me out of here,” I whisper.
Night sets in just as Evan clears the top of the shaft. I can no longer tell where the mine ends and the sky begins. I’m in utter and complete blackness. “Josh!” Evan calls down from above. “They need to re-rig your safety line and add some pulleys for leverage. DO NOT let go of your other rope.”
I watch as the safety line in front of my face goes slack. The only thing keeping me from falling into the abyss is the grip of my right hand. A hand that is sore and turning numb. There’s nothing to do but wait.
I shine my light at the wall and notice the faint grooves of chisel marks made by the workers who originally dug this pit of despair. Do you remember that scene in The Silence of the Lambs where the senator’s daughter is down in that well, and she has to put the lotion in the basket (lest she “get the hose”)? As Buffalo Bill hoists the basket up, the light illuminates fingernail marks on the walls of the well, and she completely and utterly loses her shit. As though before this moment she thought that maybe this situation was going to shake out okay for her. That’s me. I see the chisel marks in the wall, feel utterly helpless, and begin to panic. I’m never getting out of this place. I’m going to die here.
I turn my headlamp off with my free hand. The darkness is everywhere now. I picture the bottom of the shaft. How long would the fall take? What would I land on? Skeletons? Fear begins to unhinge my mind, and I picture alien creatures clinging to the walls or ghoulish miners reaching up at me from the tenebrous depths. The dread moves into my body, paralyzing my muscles. I feel the rope slip an inch through my fingers. I’m very close to tears.
Then I stop. I take a series of deep breaths, lean my forehead against the rope, and tell myself to calm down. I turn the light back on and stare at a groove in the wall, focusing on it with every scrap of concentration that I can muster. I hold fast to my line. In time, the safety rope tightens, and I begin to rise. I let my grip relax and am hoisted toward the surface.
Lesson: Never, ever panic. It helps nothing and makes the rope slip.
Hippo attack: West Africa
We decide to take a boat into hippo-infested waters. This turns out to be a bad idea. The lesson here is pretty straightforward: Leave hippos alone.
Waterfall of doom: Madagascars
Charging through the cloying, black jungle, I swat at menacing vines and oversized leaves that whip by my face. Madagascar’s flora is so otherworldly that I may as well be reenacting a scene from Avatar. We’ve come here looking for a mysterious jungle creature known as the Kalanoro, based on dozens of eyewitness reports generated from this patch of wilderness. Just ahead of me, an animal is getting away, and I want to know what it is. Behind me, our camera operator, Gabe, and sound guy, Mike, are keeping pace. We’re running alongside a fast-flowing river.
Suddenly there’s nothing ahead of me, and I wave my arms in backward circles to stop my momentum. I slide to a halt at the top of an abrupt cliff. The river plunges over the lip in a spectacular waterfall that cascades down with a roar. I look down into a shimmering lagoon, surrounded on all sides by jungle.
It’s an intoxicatingly beautiful place. So much so that I’m drunk with impulsivity. And at that moment, I almost jump. I almost just sail off the edge into the humid night air and the darksome waters below. I don’t, though. I feel my muscles relax and the moment pass. “What are you doing?” Mike asks as I squint down at the bottom of the falls.
“Nothing. I was going to jump. I’m not sure how deep it is, though.”
“Are you nuts?” Mike asks. “It must be a fifty-foot drop.”
“I know, but I think it’s deep. Don’t you just want to jump off this thing?”
Mike looks over the edge and beams. “Totally.” This is the type of people we hire.
The animal we were after is long gone by now. Mike and I hike down to the water’s edge to determine the depth of the pool. Gabe stays at the top for a well-earned cigarette. If the water is deep enough, we can scramble back up the ridge and jump.
The hike down is miserable. We slip against crumbling ledges, ensnared by hundreds of plants. At the bottom we draw near to the water’s edge, which is choked with vines and spiderwebs. I’m sure there are snakes here, and I’m praying there aren’t crocs. Mike and I look at each other in a way that silently conveys: We’re going to take our clothes off now and go swimming in a tropical lagoon together, but it’s not going to be weird.
We strip down, dive into the water, and begin paddling toward the falls. By the time we reach the center of the pool, the sound of the crashing falls is deafening. Still swimming, I look up at the cliff and the cloud-cradled moon beyond. It would almost be romantic if I weren’t with a naked Mexican dude. We count to three and submerge. We’d need at least fifteen feet of freeboard here to make the jump viable. Instead, I immediately feel my feet hit the bottom. In fact, I can stand. There are jagged rocks everywhere, and most of the lagoon can’t be more than five feet deep.
There is a hardwired function in our minds designed to keep us out of harm’s way. Sometimes it’s worth overriding that instinct, and sometimes, like tonight, it decidedly isn’t. The takeaway here is tried and most certainly true.
Lesson: Look before you leap.
I’m sweatier than usual, if that’s even possible. Rivulets of water are streaming off my forehead as I walk by torchlight through the jungle ruins. The flickering flame illuminates the basalt walls of an overgrown tomb and the outline of a narrow path beneath my feet. I’m alone and trying to get back to our base camp; I’m not sure that I’m going to make it. A small GPS receiver in my hand illuminates directions for me. But I falter, dropping to my knees, letting the torch be extinguished on the wet ground. I reach into my pocket and grab a headlamp, turning it on with a click and banishing a cone of darkness. Suddenly a thick column of vomit shoots out of my mouth.
Our executive producer, Brad Kuhlman, loves to trot out the Boy Scout motto. Before we leave the country each season, he sits the whole group down and says, “I used to be a Boy Scout, and the Scout’s motto is: Be Prepared.” I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the fact that while I’m “being prepared,” he’s back at home golfing, eating sushi, and kicking back in the Hollywood Hills. But that’s beside the point.
Back at base camp I am looked over by our paramedic, Shawn, who administers an IV. Over the course of the next few hours, I will vomit eighteen times and receive three bags of much-needed fluid through my arm. I won’t even begin to tell you what’s happening below my waist. The point is that without the electronics that led me back to camp or the medicines waiting for me there, I might have found myself in an even worse situation.
Now, I’m all for being whisked wherever the wind blows, but when it comes to adventure travel, you need to have the right tools for the job. If you’re headed to the ice planet of Hoth, you need to bring a winter coat. If you’re hiking across the Sahara, you should carry a canteen or two. And if you’re going to muck about in the jungles of the developing world, you need a GPS, headlamp, and access to medicine (in my case, administered by an actual medic).
From pocketknives to granola bars, I hone my travel kit every time I leave the country, learning from my mistakes and adjusting the items I need for the journey at hand. The Boy Scouts (and Brad) are right.
Lesson: Be Prepared.
Roof rips off airplane: Romania
The pilot adjusts the flaps and begins to bank around toward an open field. Time seems to slow down, and I think about the circumstances that brought me here. . . . I manage to catch the pilot’s gaze for only a moment; above the din he looks at me and yells, “We must go back!”
Indeed. We must. With the roof torn off, the aircraft is difficult to control. If the pilot can’t land this thing soon, what’s left of the plane is going to take a much more direct route to the ground. There’s absolutely nothing that I can do to help this situation. I’m powerless, which in itself is the lesson. Sometimes you just can’t sway the forces of the universe to better your situation. It’s out of your hands from time to time.
Lesson: Let go and enjoy the ride.