Self - Presenter: Today, the significance of the wilderness and a journey into it can be be hard for us to appreciate. As populations grow, and travel and communication become ever faster, we can overlook how different the world was in the past, how vast it must have seemed, and how wild. For thousands of years, most people lived and died within a short distance of the place they were born. Their existence was bounded by the wilderness, by the unyielding darkness of ancient woods, by the ice shod peaks of impenetrable mountains, and by the hostile deserts' lonely wastes. A journey to the next town was a perilous undertaking. It meant abandoning the safe and the familiar, and entering a realm that was not their own.