SHE’S escaped a lion attack, been chased through the jungle by gun-toting opium dealers and survived in the wilderness by eating small lizards.

Meet Megan Hine, the Canterbury-born survival expert and adrenaline junkie who Bear Grylls trusts to keep him safe.

The 32-year-old adventurer knows how to abseil down rocky mountains, climb jagged cliff faces, catch fish with her bare hands and light a fire with a tampon.

Exploring is in Megan’s blood. Her dad was a geologist and family holidays were action-packed – she scaled Snowdonia, the highest mountain in Wales, when she was just six.

“On childhood holidays when my dad would take us off around mountains in the UK to look for rocks, I might have thought that was boring, but I wish I had appreciated the adventure in it back then,” she told Marie Claire.

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1 Adventurer Megan Hine is Bear Grylls' go-to survival expert Credit: Channel 4

“I was fortunate to join the military cadets, which enabled me to do ice climbing in Scotland at 17 and white water kayaking at 15.”

At university Megan did an outdoor education degree, which prepared her to instruct things like mountaineering, canoeing or rock climbing.

She then moved to the Swiss Alps to run an outdoor sports programme for a local school.

In 2007 she got in touch with Bear and his team, and has since worked with him on endurance reality shows such as Mission Survive, Car Vs Wild, The Island and Bear Grylls: Breaking Point.

Megan's job is to scour the earth’s most far-flung, inhospitable places for food, shelter and water before a bunch of clueless celebrities are dropped in.

Marie Claire reported Bear once saying: “My best friend Megan, at the back, is the most incredible bushcraft, climbing and mountain guide you’ll ever meet.

"She’s stronger than 99 per cent of the men I know, she’s incredible.”

Megan told The Guardian Bear is an “amazing character” but he shot down in her estimations when he made her eat a boiled fermented egg.

Dodgy wildlife grub aside, there have been times when Megan’s expeditions have got a bit hairy.

When she was 24 and filming a survival show in Thailand, she and three crew members stumbled across an opium farm.

“I was in the lead, with my head down, looking for food – we’d been out there for over a month, living off tree ants and small frogs and were all weak with hunger and exhaustion, when the dense jungle opened in front of me onto a field of blood-red poppies,” she told Stylist.

“For a second nothing happened – the poppies bobbed in the breeze and I was too stunned to move. Then I heard shouts.

"Three men with machine guns were running towards us from different points in the field.”

She recalled making the others get down and they crawled along the edge of the field and back into the jungle where they broke into a run and escaped.

As well as not washing for three months and surviving killer snake bites, Megan has also had a scary encounter with three lions in Namibia.

"I never heard the lion approach – they’re notoriously soft-footed when they’re stalking prey," she told Stylist.

"But I was woken by a jolt of adrenaline so strong that my own heartbeat roared in my ears like white noise.

“As I lifted my head, dazed, to look for what had sent my fight-or-flight sense into overdrive, there, just beyond the halo of our campfire, 50 metres from where we were curled up asleep, was a huge male lion.”

She says fighting “would have been futile given their size and power” and fortunately the fire saved them.

Megan has now penned her first book, Mind of a Survivor, explaining the life and death situations that have pushed her to the limit.

“I push myself to my physical limits, to be the best that I can be. Stronger, faster," she told The Sunday Times Style.

"My goal is to inspire others to get out and enjoy nature, to travel, to explore. Expand your horizons and then you can master your environment."