- Hi, I'm Les Stroud, host and creator of "Beyond Survival."

Within the scope of filming this series I circled the globe eight times in 10 months, I was never not in a state of jet lag, to embed myself with cultures who still either live close to the earth or engage in practices meant to keep their connection to the earth.

It was a chance to stretch my own skills and beliefs beyond what I knew, beyond survival.

In many cases, I had to come to these cultures in a state of humility, offering a gift and seeking permission to take part in their lives, to experience life as they knew it, I went in without pretense, without presumption, without agenda and left myself completely in their care so that I was open to learning their ways.

Hunting, fishing, eating, sleeping, the way that they do.

Sometimes it was modern influenced with much connection to the outside world and other times it was near primitive.

In all cases, I was challenged both in my own well-honed skillsets of survival and wilderness experience, but also in my own belief system about life itself.

I learned to go beyond the technicalities of hunting and fishing and shelters and fire and instead to dig deeper into what it means to be truly connected to the earth in profound ways, to go beyond survival.

(boat motor clicking) - Anchors hauled, the sun's gone down, there's a lot of pirates in the area.

Just a little while ago, a woman tourist actually got shot in the stomach by one of the pirates, so we take it pretty serious.

(dramatic music) I'm Les Stroud.

I'm on a mission to seek out the true masters of survival.

The last indigenous people from around the world.

Before they're gone.

Before the past is lost.

Before their world vanishes.

I can learn their ways.

(dramatic music continues) Located in the South China Sea, 12 kilometers off the East Coast of Saba are a chain of islands formed over thousands of years, an entire hidden culture of people spread themselves out along these coastlines.

These are resourceful and weather hardened people whose very survival is a daily concern.

To the Bajau the sea is the mother of life and we carry her within us.

I'm here to live as they live.

Learn their secrets of spiritual, cultural and physical survival.

Survival that's at the mercy of the sea.

(fire crackling) I'm in the South China Sea, living and surviving with a family of Sema-Bajau.

Night has come in and as always the shared stories revolve around the sea.

Big.

Big big sharks.

I go down under the water with my camera and film the sharks and many times I've been able to touch them and hold onto their fin.

(speaking in a foreign language) - He said, the shark doesn't bite you?

- He could but I'm very careful.

One time I had a shark, I wore a special glove made out of steel and the shark came and bit me here.

And then the second shark bit me, his whole mouth was from here to here and he bit my hand, my hand was...

I went- (Les exclaiming) I was punchin' like that.

(speaking in a foreign language) What did you say was the word for dangerous?

(speaking in a foreign language) (ominous music) To the sea gypsies sharks are to be avoided or killed and my stories of swimming with the sharks are received with gasps of disbelief.

A couple of hundred yards away some of the Sema-Bajau are busy cleaning fish for the market.

While this group is probably processing fish legally, with fish populations decreasing rapidly, they will also carry out shark finning and are fairly indiscriminate about what they catch in their nets.

This is the darker side of their world.

These sea gypsies don't really know what's coming at them.

Just how the modern world will Rob them of their livelihoods from the sea, or perhaps already has.

This is a little more orthodox method of survival here involving the market, they catch these fish by the net and then take them into the local market (indistinct) to sell and to exist, simple as that.

(dramatic music) (singing in a foreign language) Why don't they go to land?

Why don't they build on land?

(speaking in a foreign language) - He said, they already tried to build some houses near to the shore but according to this uncle, the people on the shore won't like them and then tell them, you stay back to the water village.

- Is it a better life now or was it easier 10 years ago when he was here.

(speaking in a foreign language) - According to him, before it was better than now.

- Oh.

Okay.

- Yeah.

- There was more fish before.

- Yeah, more fish.

- Where does he think his children will live when they are older?

(speaking in a foreign language) - They're son will still belong to the sea and they will be staying on the water village.

- The mother and father, like any other set of parents on the planet, are first to be up to simply enjoy the sunrise before the kids wake.

- Morning here is just like morning anywhere, everybody's sort of just getting up and shaking the night off, trying to wake up the preteens and the teenagers.

The father's already up early taking care of the engine and things like that.

Mothers up making the breakfast, the little ones are running around, just like any other subdivision anywhere else on the planet.

Well, with a few small differences.

Every movement that I make on this platform is essentially a precarious one and I've noticed that both in the boat and here that people move very slowly.

Nobody really runs around too fast.

If they get on land of course they do but here everybody moves really cautiously and slowly and it's probably a good survival mechanism to have kicked in because you move fast up here and you're falling down and it's going to be nasty.

And I'm the heaviest guy on the platform right now.

(child playing) I'm just waiting for- (wind whooshing) first, get some fresh water and second, start looking for materials so that the hut itself can be improved since this is the monsoon season and you never know when it's gonna start to bucket down the rain.

(upbeat music) The constant struggle is the search for fresh water.

When I go for water at home I turn on the tap.

(speaking in a foreign language) For them fresh water is a long trip.

It's always the irony of survival on the ocean, to be surrounded by more water than you can even imagine and then you can't drink it and you could die of thirst.

For the Sema-Bajau, the search for fresh water is part of their daily survival.

Water shortages have increasingly made headlines in the Malaysian newspapers.

The sea gypsies have strong immune systems, but in a place like this, you're never far from the possibility of parasites and waterborne diseases.

The water's not actually that bad, there's a little touch of salt to it but nothing that you couldn't get used to.

As far as how biologically clean it is, I haven't got a clue.

(speaking in a foreign language) He wants you to turn around.

(speaking in a foreign language) Okay.

(Les laughing) Now she's giving me orders.

That didn't take long.

(rhythmic drumming) This is their survival here, this is their business survival, constantly collecting fish from the sea, bartering it in other towns and other villages for gasoline or rice, whatever they need.

We're gonna head down and do some compression diving with them which is what they've been doing for years and years but it's pretty intense on the body.

It's the way they get their fish.

(speaking in a foreign language) This is it right here.

That's it.

Down to this?

- [Man] They use the belting when it goes into the engine here and when the engine start so they will release the shot here.

- So they actually use the engine of the boat to be engine for their air.

- [Man] Yeah, to create compression.

- Really, so everything relies on this engine.

Do their engines ever quit on them when they're down there?

Yeah?

Let's head out and dive.

Like the sea gypsies who live exclusively in boats, the ones who live in stick huts also find much of their personal belongings from available garbage the ocean gives up daily.

Only a small amount of clothes and housewares are purchased or traded through the market.

Now that we've delivered enough fresh water to last a couple of days, life must carry on for the Sema-Bajau, whether I'm with them or not and today I've been set aside to do some rebuilding of the stick hut.

They live with the threat of monsoons during this part of the year and their only protection is a roof of leaves.

So once again, they've got to turn to the land to find the materials that make life on the water possible.

I climbed up a palm trees in the Cook Islands going for coconuts and I can tell you, it is really tough.

He's got a lifetime of doing it.

That's incredible.

The older generation certainly has done this a million times but we train 'em young.

(tree limbs rustling) Climbing these trees is absolutely brutal.

It's real tough.

My feet are not built for this.

They're not tough enough for this.

I've got a handhold, that's the only reason I can even get up this high.

That's a lifetime of getting used to it.

All right, well, let's see if we can gather a bit more.

For now no one cares that they come to the land to pick up a few meager supplies, but the land is owned privately and it's getting increasingly difficult for them to have permission to take from the islands.

But every culture that has to get all this stuff from the land processes the materials right there in the spot, in the middle of the jungle, by the shore or whatever it is, because when you're carryin' everything back by hand extra weight is not an option.

There's no such thing as a tropical paradise without the hard work that makes it possible.

(rhythmic drumming music) Same weaving methods that I find all around the world when it comes to using palm fronds.

It doesn't change here or halfway around the world in the Amazon Jungle, jump over to Papa New Guinea, here in Malaysia, it's the exact same weaving method to make these (indistinct).

This Sema-Bajau father has admitted to me that he would prefer to live on the land but no one will let him.

So we're headed off to the other side of the island to the jungle for some more supplies to continue to repair the hut.

One of the few dangers in this otherwise benign jungle are snakes.

Compared to other jungles I've trucked in, like the Amazon, this one doesn't appear to be that dangerous, yet Malaysia has at least 40 species of poisonous snakes, both on land and at sea.

(dramatic music) I'm with the ocean dwellers called the Sema-Bajau and we're on one of their rare trips to the land.

Gotta go a long way into the jungle (Les grunting) to get these poles.

I can see why they prefer to live on the ocean.

Yeah, that's the jungle all right.

(dramatic music continues) For the Sema-Bajau of the South China Sea life is work.

Like so many cultures outside of my own, there's little time for just sitting back and relaxing.

There's no such thing as registered savings plans, no health plan, hospitals and doctors are for near death circumstances only.

And in fact, my host is the village doctor using chanting and medicinal plants to attempt cures.

Whatever you need done out here you've gotta do it yourself.

Kids are on duty as well.

You've got to kill all the cockroaches.

Hundreds and hundreds of cockroaches.

That's their job.

Mother nature is herself an architect.

The palm leaves we've harvested from the island are strong and flexible.

The water will simply bead off the leaves and the tight weaving method will protect the family from strong winds and rough seas that come with the monsoon season.

Everyone pitches in, since everyone has a stake in the security of the hut.

(dramatic music continues) - Okay?

- Okay.

- Good.

- Good.

- One wall, studs are in, electrical wiring's done, insulation's good, she passed code inspection.

(speaking in a foreign language) And now the hard part, embedding new poles into the ocean floor to add a new section to the stick hut, but there are no underwater augers here so it's all gotta be done by hand just under the hut in the water that is there tap, wash, basin and toilet all at the same time.

But even here in this idyllic setting, the sandy ocean floor is not as benign as it seems and a member of my own film crew discovers the hard way how nasty a life on and in the water can sometimes be.

What's the matter?

(water gurgling) Go and get Laura now!

Laura, one of my underwater shooters was moving in close to get a shot at the pole going into the sand when she received a painful sting to her hand.

She couldn't say from what.

The Sema-Bajau have their own methods for dealing with painful stings and injuries, none of which involve a hospital or regular Western treatments.

For them, the answer is to urinate in the ocean in the location of the accident and it'll make things right.

No matter what the problem, infection out here can be deadly.

Gotta be really careful because there's sea urchins and starfish down there and they sting bad.

In fact, one of our camera people, who was just now filming me, she got her hands stung by a sea urchin.

Bad news.

The traditional remedy is that someone needs to pee into the ocean, which is what somebody went off and did, they peed.

Right now I'm about 10 feet from the pool.

That's just lovely.

Laura got lucky, out of the numerous potentially deadly stings or bites that can occur in these waters, it was a sea urchin, extremely painful but not life-threatening.

(upbeat music) Far more life-threatening for the Sema-Bajau is compression diving for food beneath the waves and if I'm to continue to experience life as they live it I'll have to take part.

Every year people die of decompression sickness and every dive is a risk.

(upbeat music continues) This diving they call compressor diving is extremely dangerous.

Now for hundreds and probably thousands of years, they've been free diving 5, 6, 7, 8 minutes, even longer holding their breath as they go down for fishing and that's dangerous enough, but now that they can modify the engines and pump air down to them with a long, long, thin tube, they're staying down there for an hour and a half, maybe even two hours, and especially, they like to go out at nighttime.

People die doing this all the time.

They get bent, as they say when you're diving, decompression sickness or they die under the water on the way back up, back on the shore, on the boat, it's a very dangerous activity, but they do it to survive, they do it to get the fish they need to sell at the market or to eat themselves.

This is hardcore survival for them.

(suspenseful music) More modern compression engines will have an extra tank built as a backup to the engine fail, but this is a luxury most compression divers can't afford.

The diver goes down deep and fast and within minutes he's at 90 feet.

Getting bent is extremely painful.

It can be fatal.

It's like having a stroke.

Going down too fast and coming up quickly kills these divers every year.

Compression diving originated as a way to ensure the survival of their way of life.

But over time, industry has taken advantage of the Sema-Bajau by getting them to retrieve propellers and equipment dropped in the water.

They pay them little and they have them dive at night.

A few moments into the dive my diver is on his way to the top.

Something's gone wrong.

I'm in the middle of the South China Sea and the Sema-Bajau or sea gypsy as they're called, is showing me how to compression dive but he had to rush to the surface.

The engine quit and he found himself 90 feet down without air.

He's made it back up safely this time and now it's my turn.

It takes some practice to get the breathing right.

The air I'm breathing is tainted with the thick smell and taste of old rancid vegetable oil.

They use it to lubricate the engine.

It's like sticking your head over a French fry vat of grease and breathing deep.

It's every bit as disgusting as it sounds.

I think I got it.

(engine whirring) - Really?

- I think so.

Now we go down deep.

I'm surprised at the ease at which I can descend quickly.

It happens without even thinking about it and before you know it, you drop down 20, 30, 40 feet and deeper.

The sea is a competitive environment where creatures have developed strong defense mechanisms over time and I'm hunting the sea cucumber, a real delicacy in these parts.

One of the safest animals in the ocean to touch, but I've got to be careful if I upset one, an irritated sea cucumber ejects a white toxin that can cause blindness if it comes in contact with my eyes.

(engine whirring) (Les coughing) All right.

I want to find a few...

I can't even talk.

A few sea cucumber but that's some tough going.

It's hard on the lungs.

You can taste the oil the whole time.

You gotta be careful with your ears all the way down.

But, just the same, bounty.

Compression diving is a necessity to the Sema-Bajau.

With dwindling fish supplies, the divers have to dive farther and deeper and with greater risk in order to collect fish to eat and sell at the market.

They have to expose themselves to danger simply to survive.

(dramatic music) (speaking in a foreign language) They'll process the sea cucumber and take it to the mainland to sell at the market.

So their livelihood is not only hand to mouth, they involve themselves in minor market interaction.

(speaking in a foreign language) No more.

(speaking in a foreign language) So they've been getting everything ready and now it's finally time for me to have some sea cucumber.

(speaking in a foreign language) So it actually takes a few days for the sea cucumber to be ready.

When they heard that I'd never had any before they wanted to make sure I ate it, I think just so they can watch the reaction on my face.

All right, down the hatch.

(speaking in a foreign language) That tastes way, way better than it looks.

The most disgusting looking thing I think I've ever eaten.

Let me see this again.

Yeah, look at that.

Sea cucumber.

(ominous music) As my time comes to a close with the sea gypsies, they want to share with me what seems to be their one and only ceremony, the offering to the sea to ensure good health, fishing and success in life.

The theorists and biologists that paid special attention to the ocean for centuries, revealing the possibility that life first began because of the conditions of the sea.

Respect and honoring of the spirit world ensures safety for all humans in the physical world.

The Sema-Bajau knows he's bound to his natural world for survival, for this reason, there is always an exchange between the two worlds, such as rice or money, to ensure good weather and food in the ocean.

A humble offering to the forces of nature.

(soothing music) So that's it then, it's done.

That was the official offering to the sea.

There was rice, there was money, incense being burned and it's all offered and left in the sea, to the ocean.

Back we go.

(water lapping) The future of the Sema-Bajau is unknown.

With no rights, no country, no one to stand up for them, no one to fight for them against the shifting tides of change.

(ominous music) (speaking in a foreign language) - [Man] We wish to see you again.

- Yes yes, I hope, I hope, I hope.

(soothing music) (waves crashing) (upbeat music)