Top 5 Survival Tips From Bear Grylls

We’ve seen Bear Grylls in some pretty precarious situations on his show Man vs. Wild, and we’ve learned a thing or five from him. Here’s the Top 5 things we have learned from the crazy Brit:

5. Rhino dung has water in it – Who knew? But picturing myself parched in the middle of the desert and coming across a pile of dried up rhino crap, I think I might pass that up. Bear, however, just picked up the whole pile and squeezed the murky beige water out. I think I’d rather drink my urine.

4. Follow the water - If you’ve made it this far, you hopefully didn’t have to drink rhino dung water. Streams turn into creeks, creeks turn into rivers, rivers turn into oceans. And people and animals tend to live near the water. It’s also a much faster way to travel out of wherever you are than walking. Water = good.

3. Get a flint - Knives and canteens are great to have, but if I had to pick one tool give me a flint. You can always fashion a blade out of a rock or use a camel bladder to carry your water. But it’s mad frustrating to try to rub sticks together to make a fire. Especially when you know you’ve never done it before.

2. Keep eating – One of the nicest tidbits we learned from Bear is to eat at every opportunity, cause you don’t know when you’ll have another one. The tendency is to get the hell out of wherever you are as fast as you can. But bottom line if you don’t eat you’ll run out of energy and die.

1. Don’ get lost - All of these situations can be avoided if you don’t jump out of planes in the middle of nowhere. I know people get lost, but I was always taught to go back the way you came. If you’re enough of an outdoorsperson to navigate your way through the wilderness to civilization, seems like you’d know how to get back to the lodge you strayed away from.