BBC star brands himself 'absolute fool' as he’s injured by whale shark

ok.co.uk:

Simon Reeve has survived dangerous moments while making TV travel documentaries, but an encounter with creatures he thought were harmless could have proved fatal.

Simon, 51, was filming off the coast of New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, as part of his new series about some of the world’s great wildernesses, when he jumped into the water to swim with a shoal of whale sharks. “I’d seen them from a distance and thought they were cute and lovely – even if they were the size of single-decker buses,” remembers Simon. “I reckoned they would be soft and rubbery but actually it was like being hit by a ton of concrete when one of them collided with me.

I suffered a very large scar across my leg and it could have been so much worse. I’d been an absolute fool for getting so close.” The programme about the Pacific Ocean’s Coral Triangle is the third film of four in a series that features areas of the world where nature is still largely in control.The first, on TV this week, was filmed in the rainforests of Congo, the second amid the dramatic, mountainous landscape of Patagonia in South America, the last in the vast emptiness of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. “It’s the most important series I have ever filmed because it’s about parts of the world so huge they help govern and shape our weather systems and climate and yet there’s a danger we might lose them,” says Simon. “I drove down roads in the Congo in the almost certain knowledge that within a couple of years 20 kilometres either side would be cut down for profit.Trees are the lungs of the planet, so for the sake of its future we have to find a way of stopping that happening.” Wilderness With Simon Reeve airs on BBC2 on Sunday January 21st at 9pm..