• …walking for 460 straight days, covering over 1,200 miles, shirtless and wearing the same pair of shorts the entire expedition? About 180 of those days were in torrential downpours.

• …32 foot worms burrowing in your feet at one time?

• …being bitten by 5,000 filaria flies? (These are similar to tsetse flies that carry parasitic worms.)

• …engaging in face-to-trunk encounters with more than 100 wild elephants, which charge first and ask later, while collecting information on them by counting more than 20,000 dung piles?

• …drinking only murky, stagnant swamp water for three weeks?

• …using 12 rolls of duct tape just to protect your feet from chafing sand?

• …living off manioc, rice, salted and smoked fish and freeze-dried camp food for 15 months? Manioc, a food staple in the tropics, is derived from the root of the cassava plant and is similar to grits.

• …crossing through the Minkébé region of Gabon, where the Ebola virus is known to have struck?

• …sleeping in a tent covered with thousands of carnivorous driver ants?

• …kicking off the millennium by spending New Year’s Eve in a nearly impassable swampy thicket, where it took one and a half hours to progress the distance of a New York City block?

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