MANILA, Philippines?He?s a cross between fictional film characters Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne?except that his adventures are for real.

Like the daredevils played by Harrison Ford and Matt Damon, visiting British journalist-explorer Oliver ?Olly? Steeds has a penchant for globe-trotting exploits.

He has traveled to more than 100 countries and led expeditions in several of them?Mongolia, Mauritania, Niger, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, China, Syria, Jordan, Papua New Guinea, as well as the Amazon, among others.

?In his explorations, Indiana Jones is famous for discovering things, stealing stuff and getting into trouble,? says the 35-year-old Steeds, who arrived in Manila Friday to promote his new Discovery Channel documentary ?Solving History with Olly Steeds.?
?Two of those?discovering things and getting into trouble?I can very much relate to. And Jason Bourne, like me, has great survival skills.?

7-part historical docu

Steeds, who is on the second leg of an Asian tour, showed snatches of his seven-part historical documentary in a press launch Friday at the Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center at SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City. A preview of the series became a simulated experience of meeting secretly with smugglers and trekking to remote locations in search of relics, courtesy of Steeds? hidden cameras.

A graduate of Radley College in London, Steeds is founder of iNOMAD, a nonprofit organization that ?works to promote exploration as the basis of our progression.? As an investigative journalist, he has covered wars, environmental affairs, human rights, indigenous peoples, politics and development.

Steeds says he has done, and will do, anything for a good story: Live with cannibal tribes; walk 1,250 km across the Gobi Desert; run six consecutive marathons across the Sahara. Once he drove around Red Square in Moscow in a borrowed limousine in the fashion of James Bond only to be picked up and jailed in Mongolia.

In the episode ?Devil?s Island,? he escapes the penal colony in the French Guiana by swimming across the Maroni River, braving anacondas, caimans and piranhas.

There are no definitive answers to the mysteries he is trying to uncover, he points out, as they remain riddles to be resolved. ?I?m an academic historian looking at the mystery from the outside. A lot of the evidence is conflicted. But I challenge the experts: Where is the end of the truth??

In his series premier, Steeds is on the case of the mysterious disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant, the golden chest that was built to hold the Ten Commandments. He retraces the route taken by the religious artifact that disappeared over 2,500 years ago.

Steeds also goes on a quest to resolve the puzzles behind the Peruvian Desert?s Nazca Lines; the ruins behind El Dorado; Nazi Germany?s hidden treasures; Hitler?s mummies; the fabled city of Atlantis; and the notorious and vicious Devil?s Island prison.

Among the episodes, Steeds got his adrenaline rush in the ?Lost City of Gold,? which he considers ?a great journey rooted in culture and history.?

Courting danger

He says he discovered something new when his team followed the El Dorado trail along a road of ruins into the remote Andes Mountains in South America. ?I believe there are still lost cities to be found hidden in the jungles.?

The series will air Mondays at 9 p.m. beginning June 28 on the Discovery Channel.

The explorer admitted courting danger in his ventures, to the point of having neo-Nazis pulling guns on him. He also confessed to going undercover at certain times to protect his crew and get his subjects to talk and face the cameras.

?Sometimes we have a big crew with us but other times we scale our team down if we need to go to dangerous areas,? he says.

?Into the West Bank in Palestine, for instance, I had to come in with just my cameraman who was from Egypt. It was good he spoke Arabic and he was very good in operating in that kind of environment. The key here is to operate in small teams so you keep a low profile.?

Steeds says he discovered the explorer in him at the age of 5, the same time he learned about gravity. ?I was a bit of a stupid child so I climbed up a tree with a brick to see what would happen,? he related. ?I landed on the ground with the brick hitting me on the head. I ended up with a big scar.?

Youngest leading explorer

His ?Jack and the Beanstalk? experience only piqued his curiosity. Years later, he would be the youngest among 50 of the world?s leading explorers featured in the book ?Faces of Exploration,? with the likes of such luminaries like Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Jane Goodall, Sir Edmund Hilary, Jean-Michel Cousteau and Steve Fosset.

During his two-day visit, Steeds conducted a documentary photography workshop at the Nido Fortified Science Discovery Center, which hosted the event. The science museum has just forged a partnership with Discovery Channel to bring famous personalities in the field of science to the country. The center?s next expected guest: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon.

Steeds, who was in Manila for the second time, considers his new TV series a bounty hunter?s dream come true. ?I think we?re all explorers,? he says. ?We all have something we need to learn. And it?s all right to make mistakes. We made a lot of them in the show and viewers will get to see them in the making of the series.?

Asked what Philippine mystery he would like to uncover, Steeds has a ready answer: ?The one behind Imelda Marcos? shoes.?