Q: In the first episode we saw Mark and yourself trying to sleep in crowded huts surrounded by men, with you enduring an epic mouth harp song followed by an unusual whistle song. Did you find it any easier to sleep on subsequent nights?

Olly: Sleeping never got easier. So I got more tired. The main problem was actually the altitude - it got chilly at night, so everyone woke up every hour or so to keep fires alight to give heat, and so once awake it was hard, often impossible, to return to the land of nod. Many hours of night were spent awake, laying in the dark on hard planks waiting for
dawn to warm through and reawaken the spirit. Having said that though, there’s nothing quite like waking up to a penis gourd inches from your face to realize that you are part of the family.

So I suppose what I lost in personal space and sleep, I gained in being a part of the community and learning more about the Mek’s way of life. I will be forever humbled by just how tough they are – man, woman, child. It doesn’t take me too many sleepless nights to remember just how pathetic I am.  Luckily we can all adapt - slowly slowly catch the monkey – but I found out that that stupid theory only works if the monkey wants to get caught…so it was that I began to take on two characters…

As Stevenson wrote in Jekyll and Hyde, ‘It was thus rather my exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was...if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both”.

Luckily for me, the camera crew had to sleep or this may have been a very different series of films.

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