India and Southeast Asia have crocodiles. A whole bunch of my family is on Borneo and they're a pretty common sight. There are indigenous people in Borneo (and I'm sure other places) who traditionally hunt crocodiles. I do not think they are endemically insane or desperate. People hunt wild boar too which is not exactly the safest enterprise. Other dangers or nuisances include venomous snakes, tiger leeches, parasites, and of course mosquito-borne diseases like malaria or Japanese encephalitis. There's plenty of weird fruit- rambutan, tarap, and everyone's favorite, durian. Some interesting ethnographic information and anecdotes (and, to be clear, plenty of racism) can be gleaned by Carl Bock's travelogue The Head-Hunters of Borneo.
That's true, of course, if you know about them. But unpeeled rambutan, for example, really doesn't look like something you should eat. Durian is probably the most important one for survival - you can hit predators over the head with it.
I forgot another great book for rainforest survival information- FS Chapman's WWII memoir The Jungle is Neutral, which recounts his experience as a British commando embedded with communist guerillas in Japanese-occupied Malaya.
