The BEST episodes of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild
Every episode of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild!
Ben Fogle travels round the world to visit people who have given up the rat race.
#3 - Himalayan Foothills, India
Season 2 - Episode 2 - Aired 2/7/2014
Ben journeys to the foothills of the Indian Himalayas to live with former fighter pilot, 69- year-old Steve Lall. Steve turned his back on high society, instead opting for a simple farmer’s life in the mountains. He has fought for decades to protect his tiny private wilderness. Ben joins this mountain-dwelling renegade and his family in their remote, isolated home, a steep 2km climb from the nearest road. He gets hands-on with their harsh subsistence lifestyle, from ploughing with buffalo, chasing monkeys and human intruders, to the more surreal grave digging and naked meditation. Ben discovers that the hardships of this remote location are also the key to its beauty.
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#5 - Namibia
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 11/21/2014
For the first time on New Lives in the Wild, Ben heads to Africa and the deep desert sand dunes of Namibia. He lives with 50-year-old Gideon David and his young family in the largest conservation area on the continent. Gideon is a master bushman who quit a city career in life insurance for the dry and dusty desert. Ben embraces the harsh and relentless work of farm life in temperatures pushing 40 degrees. He tends over 150 animals, repairs baboon damage to water pipes and even learns how to castrate sheep with his teeth! Ben also witnesses the reality of life when one has to think about raising children in these conditions, from hand-washing nappies to learning vital desert survival skills and hunting and eating oryx.
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#8 - Leyte, Philippines
Season 2 - Episode 3 - Aired 2/15/2014
Documentary series in which adventurer Ben Fogle meets people who have given up the rat race to start a new life in the wilderness. Ben journeys to one of the 7,000 remote tropical islands in the Philippines to live with 'Jungle Neil' Hoag, a 45-year-old former cabbie from Florida who struggled to make a living before finding the love of his life on the other side of the world and becoming a coconut farmer.
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#9 - Utah
Season 3 - Episode 3 - Aired 12/5/2014
Bill and Bob Stone are twin brothers aged 72 who fled their adrenaline-junkie pasts for a tough subsistence lifestyle hidden away in Americaʼs Wild West. In this unforgiving landscape, even with one of them recovering from a stroke, they carve out an existence and fight the challenges associated with growing old. Ben joins these canyon-dwelling renegades in their remote, isolated home, deep inside some of the worldʼs most striking and wild terrain. There he joins the boys cattle-wrangling, rock climbing and sleeping in a cave. One of the twins even persuades Ben to do a skydive. Ben also discovers more about the Stone brothers and why they decided to cut themselves off from civilisation. Once parachute instructors, police informants and bounty hunters, they are now organic farmers and doomsday preppers.
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#11 - Tuscany
Season 17 - Episode 5 - Aired 1/31/2023
Ben heads to Tuscany to visit British couple George and Sophie who breathed new life into a Tuscan farmhouse. Ben discovers how George's adolescent desire to live a self-sufficient existence seeded an ambitious plan to create a lifelong project and how a chance encounter enabled Sophie to find what seemed improbable. Ben travels into the heart of the stunning Casentinesi Forest National Park to join his hosts and their young children in their progressive off-grid home, a three km walk to the top of a mountain. Their continuing renovations of the ancient, ramshackle buildings sees Ben put to work in return for his stay as he embraces honey collecting, tends their extensive vegetable garden, makes homemade pizza and gruelling repairs on the track up to their house so they can get a vehicle to it, and deals with their wayward cow who destroys all their crops.
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Season 16 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/8/2022
Ben journeys to one of Britain's furthest outposts, the Shetland Islands, to meet Helen and Jason, a couple just a few years into their new life on the edge of the weather-beaten island of Yell. He discovers why they needed to escape the demands of urban life, and witnesses the obstacles they now face as they pursue their wildest dreams on this beautiful, historical and remote island.
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Season 16 - Episode 7 - Aired 2/22/2022
Ben is much closer to home than usual - he's in rural Oxfordshire with a multi-generational family. Ben learns about the obstacles the family have overcome and how they've spent two decades honing their skills and living off the land.
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#19 - Sierra Nevada
Season 17 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/3/2023
Ben travels to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the USA to meet Mike Basich, a snowboarder who left the world of professional sport behind to reconnect with nature and pursue a quieter life. Ben joins him in his extraordinary hand-built log cabin and follows him as he embarks on a life changing project.
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#20 - Australia
Season 17 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/10/2023
Ben heads Down Under to meet Bette, an elderly woman living alone in a ramshackle house in the wilds of northern Queensland. She is a no-nonsense personality and refuses to cook Ben any dinner. But as the week progresses she warms to her guest and explains what drew her to the harsh Australian wilderness 30 years ago. She also talks about her complex relationship with men, and reveals how she has been seriously threatened when defending the natural world around her from development.
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#21 - California
Season 17 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/17/2023
Ben heads to Slab City in California to meet an extraordinary homeless artist called DNA, who Ben had previously met whilst in the area making another documentary. Ben joins DNA in his 'Mad Max' camp on a desert hill, an extreme place to seek refuge, but like most residents in Slab City, he discovers DNA had few choices. Ben learns the harsh reality of what it's like to be homeless in the US, and the downward cycle that people can find themselves in.
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#22 - Uruguay
Season 17 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/24/2023
Watch as Ben Fogle journeys to South America to visit Rhona, a British born actress who left the bright lights of Hollywood to live alone in a remote valley in Uruguay. Ben is instantly intrigued by the juxtaposition in lifestyle and learns that ill health, a difficult childhood and disillusionment with Tinseltown culture have all led to his host's new life. He discovers that Rhona is now committed to rehabilitating horses and the pair attend an animal auction looking to rescue any mistreated animals. There Rhona reveals that she has had to adapt to the machismo culture of rural Uruguay… or rather it to her. Rhona has also nearly been seriously injured while venturing out onto her land. Ben realises that if something does go wrong, Rhona's isolation means she has no one to call on. That night he experiences nature's fury for himself when a violent storm hits while he shelters in a fragile biodome. But despite the difficulties, his fellow Brit insists that this is the best role she's ev
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#23 - York Farm
Season 14 - Episode 1 - Aired 2/16/2021
Ben revisits Amanda Owen and her family at their remote farm of Ravenseat in the Yorkshire Dales, who have gone on to star in Our Yorkshire Farm since he first met them. Ben discovers how they get by in the tough world of farming and meeting the latest addition to their flock.
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