Major Levison James Wood, FRSA FRGS FRSGS, VR (born 5 May 1982)[1] is a British Army officer and explorer.

The expedition was inspired by the explorers John Hanning Speke, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.

The expedition was commissioned into a four part television programme for Channel 4 that aired in January 2015, and Wood detailed the trip in his book Walking the Nile.

[11] In 2015, Wood embarked on another challenge: to walk the length of the Himalayas from Afghanistan to Bhutan, filming a documentary series and writing another book about the experience, which was published in January 2016.

[7][12] In September 2017 he began his most ambitious challenge to date: a full circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula: travelling from Syria, through Iraq, the Gulf, crossing part of the Empty Quarter desert in Oman, traversing Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Holy Land to finish in Lebanon; an expedition totalling 5,000 miles (8,000 km).

During the course of the journey, he was embedded with Iraqi troops fighting ISIS where he witnessed the liberation of Sharqat and also encountered Palestinian guerrillas and Hezbollah operatives.