Kiwi twins Amber and Serena Shine were in a bivouac made of sticks deep within the South African wilderness when they were ripped from their sleep by what Amber says "sounded like Godzilla or a Tyrannosaurus rex on a rampage through the night".
The noise, it soon transpired, was coming from a lone bull elephant tearing trees from the ground and thrashing them about with its trunk – a sound, Amber says, "of pure destruction".
"We were in horror as we realised it was coming in our direction and we urgently pondered whether to make noise and try to scare it or whether to stay quiet and pray it didn't find us," the 28-year-old civil engineer from Waiuku says.
Hyper aware that the thorn bushboma(traditional African enclosure) that surrounded their bivouac wouldn't keep out a bull elephant seemingly hellbent on destruction, they made a split second decision to try to stand their ground and "hearts beating out of our chest, started to make a noise".
The elephant got to within 20 metres of them before appearing to have a change of heart – or strategy – and veering off toward a nearby waterhole. Frozen in fear, the sisters held their breath as the clearly still agitated elephant continued to bash branches back and forth.
"We thought we had dodged a bullet until, to our horror, it came at us again from a different direction," Amber says. "This time it was much, much worse and we watched in the moon and firelight as it came closer and closer."
Picking up flaming branches from the fire, the twins waved them around their heads in an attempt to look bigger and scarier.
"But to our shock and disbelief, it didn't even check its step! Just grunted and kept coming. It got to within three metres of us and we thought, 'This might be it.' It felt as if it could almost reach us if it stretched out its trunk. And we had no protection."
Still waving their makeshift torches, they responded to the elephant's squeals and grunts with screams and, eventually, it backed off – although it continued tearing trees apart for the next hour or so. "The adrenaline kept us awake for the rest of the long night."
The Shines, who describe themselves as "typical Kiwi country girls with an extreme love of the outdoors", have long been hardcore adventurers. Between them, they have scaled North Africa's highest mountain (in Serena's case just nine months after breaking her back in two places), crossed "crazy seas" on a 25-day voyage from Hawaii to San Francisco in a small sailboat, entered the world's highest marathon "by fluke", climbed mounts Cook and Everest, raced a dogsled for 322 kilometres through the US state of Oregon, and climbed trees with howler monkeys in the Amazon.
Naked And Afraid is one of the most extreme survivor-style reality shows around.
But they describe their latest escapade – spending 21 days in the wilds of South Africa's Limpopo province stark naked and with nothing but a machete and bow and arrow to hunt for food and fend off predators – as their biggest challenge yet.
The sisters were invited to take on the extreme survival challenge by the makers of American reality TV show Naked and Afraid. Aired on the Discovery Channel, the show sees contestants – usually two total strangers – fight for their lives in some of the world's toughest environments with no food or water and just one item of their own choosing to aid them.
While the Shines, the only Kiwis to have starred in the series, were initially reluctant about appearing on TV nude, their appetites for adventure trumped their anxiety.
"At first we really hesitated with the whole naked part of the show," Amber says. "It's not something we were used to or would [usually] consider doing. The survival part really appealed to us however. The fact that you are put in the wilderness in a random country with nothing [and are] totally dependent on yourself to survive is a true test and was really exciting to us… We were curious to see how far we could make it…"
After undergoing testing to ensure they had the physical and mental ability to complete the challenge, the sisters began brushing up on their survival skills, which – as seasoned mountain climbers, hunters and fisherwomen – were already pretty advanced. They taught themselves to make fire with sticks and took to walking around barefoot to toughen up their feet – "although it was the middle of winter so that in itself was a challenge", Amber says.
Amber and Serena Shine are no strangers to adventure and extreme challenges.
"We also took the time to find out about all the animals we might encounter. Especially the predators. Which may have done more damage than good to our mental state."
Arriving in Limpopo during the dry season, which also happened to be winter, they were surprised by how cold and barren it was.
"Water was extremely scarce… It was dry and dusty and appeared as though nothing was living. We knew straight away it was going to be tough. We had been relying on finding edible plants for food, so instantly there was a spanner in the works. Also, the small animals we had planned to eat – like snakes and scorpions – were hibernating."
Being in the buff didn't make things any easier.
"It was extremely hard trying to survive in Africa in winter with no clothes. Everything was uncomfortable and usually painful. Little things like sitting down with your bare bum on hard dirt or gravel, or lying down on super hard ground really get to you after a while."
In their bare feet, every step was painfully slow and, given the prevalence of thorns and razor grass, often actually painful.
"You had to move carefully as your skin would get shredded to pieces if you tried to bush bash like we would in New Zealand."
"With only fire for warmth, being naked was a huge challenge," Amber says.
With foraging not an option, they had to hunt to eat. No easy feat when you have just a machete and bow and arrow and a camera crew consistently thwarts your attempts at stealth. After eight days of making and setting traps and trying out every hunting technique in their repertoire, they had caught – and consequently eaten – zilch. They were, Amber says, surprised to still be alive.
Late on that eighth day, with darkness descending (many predators' preferred hunting time), Serena, the owner-operator of Glam Camping at Waiuku's Castaways Resort, made their first kill: an impala. But dinner would be a long way away yet.
"Our machete was too blunt to cut up our impala so we had to use our arrowhead and quickly break it up into pieces," Amber says.
Fearful the carcass would attract predators overnight, they threw it into the thorn trees, later retrieving it to make jerky "that kept us going until the end", supplemented by the odd scorpion, caterpillar and other small creatures they came across.
"We also used the [impala] skin to make shoes, and the brains as a curing agent for the skin."
With night-time temperatures dropping to freezing level, the sisters struggled to keep warm in the hut they had built from branches and sticks and encircled with a thorny boma. They'd get so close to the fire, they burned their skin – but, at the time, that seemed preferable to slowly freezing to death.
"We tried several different techniques [to keep warm]: sleeping on buried coals, sleeping back-to-back with fires on each side... But it was that cold, nothing seemed to help."
With the frigid temperatures, ground so hard it bruised their shoulders and hips, "constant taunts from cackling hyenas and roaring lions" and a leopard that stalked them night and day, they got very little sleep.
Of the leopard, Amber says: "Each morning we would wake up and look at the tracks and see how close it had got to us in the night."
They often woke to find hyenas sniffing around the boma, just a metre or two from where they lay.
Quickly realising foraging was not an option, the Shines had to hunt to survive.
"We would think to ourselves, 'OMG there is literally only a pile of sticks stopping us from being eaten by a pack of hyenas right now.' We would stand up and wave our handmade spears (logs off the fire) at them and attempt to scare them off. We ran into elephants and rhinos on several occasions. You realise pretty quickly how small you are. It was amazing to encounter these magnificent animals, but we were very aware we were in their environment and had to be on guard the entire time to ensure our survival."
They had built their hut beside a water hole and dug another beside it so they could wash without contaminating their drinking water – although Amber says the water could hardly get any dirtier. That, combined with the lack of food, left them constantly exhausted – "every little task seemed hard".
Contestants are able to "tap out" if they don't want to continue with the challenge – or producers don't think they should – but Amber and Serena lasted the entire 21 days. By the end, Amber says, they felt "on top of the world. And also a bit like cavemen. On one hand we were over the Moon to have actually survived and so proud we had pushed through the extremely hard times. On the other, we were extremely fatigued, hungry, dehydrated, very thin and needed a good shower!
"It was one hell of an extreme survival challenge and… really showed us how far we can physically and mentally push ourselves as human beings. [We returned] to the real world with a totally different perspective on life and what was important to us and really appreciate the little things – like a shirt on your back or a pillow!"
In New Zealand, the Naked and Afraid episode featuring the twins will air on Discovery Channel at 8.30pm on August 2.
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