Leigha Drews
TV explorer Levison Wood cheated death after a Jeep which he was travelling in careered off a narrow road in the Venezuelan jungle and ended up on its side.
The adventurer, who’s travelled across at least 120 countries, circumnavigated the Arabian peninsula and walked the length of the Nile and the Himalayas, fractured his elbow in the crash.
Levison had travelled to South America with his girlfriend Ana Protasio, a model and yoga instructor from Brazil, and their daughter Maya.
They were not with him in the vehicle when the accident happened.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the former Parachute Regiment officer, 43, said he was filming a new television documentary when the crash took place in late November.
The three-part series will see him travel the length of South America, over 8,000 miles through seven countries in what is his longest journey to date.
Video footage showed Levison wincing in pain as he tried to escape from the car.
He was forced to hoist himself out of the car through the passenger door, fearing the vehicle could set alight in ‘a ball of flames’.
Levison said the team had left the Venezuelan capital Caracas and reached the coastal town of Mochima when the car slipped off the edge of a bridge.
He said: ‘We’ve been driving all day, it was a really long way.
‘We’ve been driving since the morning, it was maybe 8pm. It was already dark and we were really very close to where we were supposed to be.
‘I think the driver had got a bit tired.
‘He wasn’t fully looking around at what was going on.
‘We were driving along this rural country lane and there was a small bridge going over a dry riverbed. There was no barrier or anything.
‘I think he took a slightly wrong move and the car just literally slipped off the edge. I could feel it coming.’
Levison, who was in Venezuela filming a new television documentary, has cheated death before while in the passenger’s seat.
During his 2015 Himalayas expedition in Nepal, a taxi he and his brother, Pete, were travelling in plunged 150ft off a mountain cliff, landing in a jungle. Remarkably, they and the driver escaped the wreck with just a few broken bones.
Comparing the two crashes, Levison said his latest escape was a smaller drop than in Nepal.
He added: ‘It was maybe a meter or two meters off the side. But nevertheless, when you’re in a car and you’re flipping over, it’s a terrifying thought. Thankfully, everyone was okay.
‘It’s just chaos. The biggest fear, though, of course, because it was Venezuela and there was no fuel around.
‘We had millions of country with so much oil. You can’t get all the petrol sections are closed. We’d got maybe 80 liters of petrol on the route.
‘Of course, if any of that caught fire, then we’d have gone up in a ball of flame. The first instance was we’ve got to get out of this car, before it blows off.’
Levison sustained a fractured elbow in the crash and said it is still painful to touch.
He added: ‘But if I need to touch the elbow on the right in that spot, then it’s just agony.’
Levison revealed that two of his cameramen, Neil and Alberto, were also injured in the crash.
Alberto told Levison that he is ‘cursed’ because of his frequent accidents on his expeditions.
‘Alberto is convinced that I’m cursed because he says wherever I go, I go in these accidents’, he added.
‘Neil, Alberto, and the driver were all safe. I landed on Alberto.
‘His first reaction was my phone fell out of my pocket and into his hand, and he literally just turned the camera on as you saw the thing and started filming.
‘He’s a determined filmmaker. Instinctive.’
Levison said the car was back on the road the very next day and the team continued on their epic journey.
The team has now arrived in Brazil, where they are about to embark on a police raid going after illegal loggers.
Reflecting on his time in Venezuela in the wake of the US capture of Maduro, he said: ‘When we arrived in Venezuela, it was literally the airspace closed the day after. We knew that obviously the American Navy was already in place.
But to be honest, I don’t think anyone thought it was actually going to happen.
‘They all thought it was just this pressure that he was putting on Maduro to quit.
‘But to be honest, I don’t think anyone believed anything actually would happen.
‘When the airspace was closed and then there was a bit of mounting tension, but to be honest, on the inside of the country, I think it was hard to really tell that there was anything.’
Source: Dailymail.co.uk | Read the Full Story…
