Some guys in the NFL spend their summers lifting weights, vacationing, partying, getting arrested, or doing various other things.
I’m not sure I remember an NFL player spending his off-season time eating rats and hiking through the bush. That’s exactly what Detroit Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy did this summer.
levy and a friend went to Peru, spending five days hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu and then they spent another week slogging through a remote area of the Amazon rainforest in Peru’s Loreto province.
The group was five hours from the nearest town, it was just Levy, his friend, and a couple local guides, living off the land. And for Levy, this was paradise found.
“Ever since I was little I’ve wanted to go to the Amazon,” said Levy, a 26-year-old Milwaukee native who says Mount Kilimanjaro and Kenya are next on his to-do list. “And the way I went about it — I didn’t want to go on a cruise or to a resort or anything like that — I was just out there.”
Levy reportedly ate rodents, and other not so pleasant things.
“Yeah,” Levy said, “there’s a little jungle rodent we had to catch with a spear.”
“Most of them think it’s crazy,” he told the Detroit News. “They found out I went skydiving, and they thought that was crazy. They thought the Amazon was nuts, eating frogs and rats and piranha and stuff like that.”
Levy was drafted in the 3rd round of the 2009 draft out of Wisconsin.