He has been exploring the wilderness of the Earth all on his own, and it changed his vision of the world. Meet Eliott Schonfeld-Aventurier.
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TravelTranscript
00:00I understand that in Alaska, to survive in the wild, there are rules and you have to
00:12obey these rules to hope to survive.
00:15I was completely outraged by the behavior of bears, which were breaking my house,
00:19etc.
00:20It made me angry and I wanted to retaliate.
00:24I tried to scare them, you have to make big moves and be stronger than you are.
00:28I threw rocks at him and I used my pepper spray.
00:31It lasted half an hour. I put some pepper spray on him.
00:34He was going to rub his eyes in the forest for 5 minutes,
00:36he came back, etc.
00:37And it lasted, frankly, a long time.
00:45But in fact, thinking about it, I have no...
00:47I don't blame this bear at all,
00:49because in fact, he reacted completely normally.
00:52If you come home and you see a tent planted in the middle of your living room,
00:56I think you will react exactly the same as this bear.
00:58So in fact, I made a mistake and I didn't do it again afterwards.
01:01And I didn't plant my tent in the places,
01:05in the territory of bears.
01:07So I went further, higher in the mountains,
01:10or further from the rivers.
01:27Like many young people at that age, I was lost.
01:29So I decided to take a year off,
01:31like my sister had done, so I did the same.
01:33And I went to Australia.
01:34I walked for a week in a tropical forest.
01:37And that's where I discovered loneliness, silence, space,
01:40life with other animals,
01:41the fact of having to take care of yourself, of being self-sufficient.
01:45And it was pretty overwhelming.
01:47And from that moment on, I decided to continue
01:49to go into the wildest spaces in the world.
01:57Alaska, Alaska
02:01It's the region of the world where there is the largest concentration of grizzlies on Earth.
02:04And I dreamed of seeing grizzlies, so I went there.
02:07I bought a canoe and I went down the whole Yukon River for a month and a half.
02:11Then I sold the canoe and I walked to the far north of Alaska,
02:15to the North Coast on foot.
02:17It also took me a month and a half to walk.
02:19And the difference of this expedition in Alaska with all the others
02:22is that for the first time, I really wanted,
02:24and absolutely, and as much as possible,
02:26to go into the wild, to adapt.
02:29And that meant not following any track,
02:32really going as far as possible from any infrastructure
02:35of the human civilization.
02:37And so it's the first time, really,
02:39that I found myself in a wilder nature than there.
02:42I just saw my first grizzly.
02:45First approach, very cordial.
02:48Oh!
02:52Holy shit!
02:57And that's tonight's dinner.
02:59It's the first time I've ever caught a fish in my life,
03:01so I'm a little excited.
03:03I had to, in spite of myself,
03:05simply because I had miscalculated my food reserves,
03:08find my food by myself.
03:11So that's when I learned to fish,
03:13and I learned to welcome bays, grizzlies,
03:15walls, blackberries, mushrooms.
03:18And so I was able to be self-sufficient in food
03:21for several days in Alaska,
03:23and that was a pretty fundamental discovery,
03:25because it meant that I was now more limited by time,
03:28and I didn't need to go back to civilization
03:31to buy food and then return to the wild.
03:33As the days went by,
03:36we ended up understanding the rules
03:39in which we find ourselves, so of the wild nature,
03:41and we end up submitting ourselves to it,
03:43and by submitting ourselves,
03:45we end up adapting to the place in which we find ourselves,
03:48and it ends up being much easier.
03:51For example, in Alaska,
03:53it was only after two or three weeks
03:55in the wild that I understood
03:57that I had to follow trails created by animals,
03:59by grizzlies, wolves, reindeer,
04:01in the forest to make it easier for me to walk.
04:03I understood how to cross a river
04:05without being carried by the current for 160 meters.
04:08And all these things end up coming back,
04:11showing themselves,
04:13and it's full of details that you have to take into account.
04:16I have to take all the products that smell,
04:18and put them on top of a tree
04:20quite far from my tent just in case,
04:22because I don't want to run into grizzlies,
04:25I don't want to attract grizzlies,
04:27I have to try to be as far away as possible from them.
04:29I spent a period of three weeks
04:31without seeing any man or any human infrastructure,
04:34that is, no footsteps,
04:36no planes in the sky,
04:38no roads, no waste, nothing.
04:40And so it was a bit like
04:42I was going back to the origin of the world.
04:47It gave me a vision of what the world could be
04:50before modernity,
04:52which destroyed it in huge parts.
04:54Before Alaska, I had the impression
04:56that nature was really hostile,
04:58and after Alaska,
05:00I realized that what was barbaric
05:02was to detach from nature,
05:04to move away from nature.
05:18I had always lived in a Parisian suburb,
05:20in Paris,
05:22so I had always been surrounded by buildings,
05:24by concrete.
05:26For me, food, even unconsciously,
05:28I had the impression that it was born in stores,
05:30the same for clothes, etc.
05:32To be able to move away from the origin of things
05:34and meet people
05:36who lived with the things
05:38they created themselves,
05:40only the things they created themselves,
05:42it completely changed my vision of the world.
05:45The goal during this trip
05:47was, as days, weeks, months went by,
05:51to carry out a kind of metamorphosis
05:54by separating myself from all the industrial objects
05:56in my backpack
05:58and replacing them with natural alternatives.
06:00There, I learned how to build a backpack
06:02by weaving bamboo.
06:09I managed to get out of my duvet
06:11by making a coat out of goat skin.
06:14I managed to get out of my tent
06:16by building shelters and sleeping in caves.
06:18And I managed to get out of my lighter
06:20by managing to make fire by friction
06:22with bamboo.
06:24My goal in expeditions
06:26is to succeed in my expeditions,
06:28to realize the dream I had
06:30by going to these places
06:32and to continue to do so,
06:34to continue to explore the world,
06:36to continue to know how to adapt to it,
06:38to understand it, to know it.