What jungle? ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here’ is filmed on the South African ‘veldt’, which is very different vegetation to a jungle.

IT’S the great jungle bungle.

For weeks while the show was in promo phase, Channel Ten told us that I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here would feature 10 celebrities dropped in the African jungle.

Now that the show has gone to air, the hosts remind us that the show is happening in the “jungle” about 73 times per episode.

(Not that this reporter has watched more than about an eighth of one episode on Tenplay, but even watching for a few minutes, you can see they say jungle an awful lot. Jungle, jungle, jungle, jungle, jungle.)

Hmmm, maybe there’s a jungle under here. Source: Supplied

This reporter HAS, however, been to South Africa’s magnificent Kruger National Park, where I’m a Celebrity is filmed, and he can assure you there is no jungle there.

What there is in abundance is veldt, a South African term for (mostly) grassy countryside with (usually) not very many trees.
In South Africa, they talk about the high veldt, which is dry and grassy, and the low veldt, which tends to be more treed and a little wetter. The show appears to be filmed in a deep valley amid the latter landscape.

But jungle? Forget it.

You know what they have in REAL jungles? Gorillas, that’s what. The closest they have in this show is one or two of the contestants who shall remain nameless. Source: News Limited

Not that you should take our word on this issue of arboreal importance. To lend weight to our theory, we contacted a leading Australian academic who specialises in African woodlands. Yes, such a person exists.

Unfortunately, she declined to put her name to this story but she did state, completely on the record, that to the best of her knowledge, the Kruger National Park is a landscape entirely devoid of jungle.

“I’ve been there so I know that there’s no jungle there,” the academic said. “At the southern end of Kruger there actually is some quite lush forest, but you have to be in the tropics to have jungle.”

Aha! The tropics! Now it just so happens that Kruger National Park is not in the tropics. The tropics, officially, are the regions that extend 23-and-a-bit degrees north and south of the equator. Kruger National Park is around 24 degrees south, which means it just misses. It is on roughly the same latitude as Carnarvon in WA, or Bundaberg in Queensland, both of which are decidedly unjungly.

Clue: the jungle’s the darkish green bit. Not the red blob where the show is filmed. Source: NewsComAu

In truth, the jungle of our African imaginings lies thousands of kilometres further north in countries like the (not very) Democratic Republic of Congo.

It was here, and in surrounding countries through which the Congo River runs, that Joseph Conrad set his famous novel “Heart of Darkness”, in which the ever-deepening jungle served as a metaphor for the darkness that lies within every human soul. (Movie fans will of course know that Apocalypse Now was an adaptation of the same tale.)

So who knows, perhaps the whole jungle thing in I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a great big metaphor for what’s happening inside the celebrities’ heads as they endure elephant poo baths and Merv Hughes’s jokes (not that there’s much difference).

Then again, perhaps the producers are just hopeless at geography.

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