South China Morning Post
‘I had to eat the dog’: explorer Benedict Allen on his adventures, the scars on his chest and being ‘lost’ in the jungle
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  • The explorer and writer tells Ed Peters about the time the media had to ‘rescue’ him, having to eat his canine companion and the ritual scars on his torso
Ed Peters
Ed Peters
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Wanderlust is part of my family inheritance – many of my forebears went to India and other foreign parts – but I was born in not terribly exotic Macclesfield, just south of Manchester, in England, in 1960. My father was a test pilot involved in the development of the Royal Air Force’s Vulcan bomber.

By the time I was 10, I was focused on discovering what was going on in the wider world. I was not so interested in toys per se, but I loved hunting for fossils on family holidays along the Jurassic Coast in Devon and Dorset, where there’s 185 million years of geological history, and turned our garden shed into a fossil museum.
I was also fascinated by the exploits of men like explorers and writers Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens van der Post, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl and Peter Matthiessen. I’ve been lucky enough to meet all of them, and naturalist David Attenborough, too.

I read environmental science at university, and took time off to join expeditions to a volcano in Costa Rica, a forest in Brunei and a glacier in Iceland, all of which whetted my appetite to go somewhere even more remote and – preferably – on my own.

Benedict Allen with Yaifo tribespeople. The Yaifo people are a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. Photo: Benedict Allen

Mad white giant

Aged 22, I came up with the idea of trekking through the forest between the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers, in Brazil. There were no maps, so I was going to have to navigate myself, and there was no sponsor so I worked in a warehouse to get some funds together.

I’ve been (briefly) shipwrecked off Australia, and had to stitch up a chest wound with a bootlace in Sumatra. No anaesthetic, either
Benedict Allen

I was hopelessly naive, to put it mildly. It went well to start with, and I was heartened when a stray dog tagged along with me, but I ran into trouble and had to flee a couple of rogue gold miners who were intent on doing me mischief; then my canoe capsized, which left me no option but to walk.

I caught malaria, I ran out of food, and so – to my distress – had to eat the dog. I was very lucky to get out alive. I recorded this expedition in my first book, Mad White Giant (1985). Not a few readers took strident exception to my chosen survival rations.

The important thing is that this rather madcap adventure led me to the conclusion that in future, wherever I went, rather than viewing the environment as hostile and blundering along willy-nilly, I would immerse myself among people who regarded their immediate surrounds as home.

This has pretty much been my guiding philosophy ever since, and it has stood me in good stead. I also decided I wouldn’t do any corporate sponsorship deals.

Allen in Papua New Guinea in 2002, undergoing a six-week initiation ceremony. Photo: Benedict Allen

Immersive experiences

Since then, I have ranged far and wide, but always without impediments such as a satellite phone or GPS. There have been one or two upsets along the way: I’ve been (briefly) shipwrecked off Australia, and had to stitch up a chest wound with a bootlace in Sumatra. No anaesthetic, either.

Most dramatically, I spent six weeks undergoing an initiation ceremony with a tribe in Papua New Guinea – I’ve still got the ritual scars on my torso.

I’ve been back to Brazil and spent seven-and-a-half months crossing the Amazon basin. I’ve trekked 1,600km (990 miles) through the desert in Namibia with a team of camels. An even longer expedition took me across the Gobi – a journey that was only made possible by tuning into the skills of Mongols and Kazakhs.
Allen with Matses, an indigenous person of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. Photo: Benedict Allen

Explorer extraordinaire

Back in South America, I set out to try and solve the mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 while searching for a legendary lost city. A quest to discover the secrets of traditional healers took me to Haiti, Indonesia and Mexico.

My final major journey saw me failing to cross the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska with a 10-strong dog team: we were driven back by one of the fiercest blizzards in history.

At this point, I decided I had “derring-done” enough, and resolved to go into semi-retirement, although I have not stopped travelling, I just don’t go away for quite so long.

I was delayed in the jungle, and the media promptly filled in the blanks, decided I was lost, and set out to ‘rescue’ me
Benedict Allen

That said, it is incredibly exhilarating to have pulled off these mega journeys. I’ve written about (and more recently filmed) all my travels, which helps financially now that I have a family to support, and I also edited The Faber Book of Exploration (2002), which almost did me in, it was such an effort to compile.

My latest book is Explorer (2022), which examines what I’ve learned from the isolated communities where I’ve spent a substantial amount of my life.

Greatest joys

I met my future wife, Lenka, when she was an au pair in London in 2000. She later returned to her native Prague and when I went over there to give a lecture I looked her up – possibly the best move I have ever made.

One thing led to another, as the saying goes, and we started romancing. We are based in Prague, but I pop over to London for work from time to time. Lenka’s given me stability, and although I still go away on expeditions, it’s very reassuring to know that I have a loving home to return to.

We have three children – the eldest is 16 and the youngest is eight. It may sound a bit of a cliché, but they are a constant source of joy and my happiest days are spent going off camping with them.

Allen camping with son, Freddie, and daughter, Beatrice. Photo: Benedict Allen
They take pleasure in pointing out any logistical failure, teasing me by saying that adventurer and presenter Bear Grylls could do it much more efficiently. None of them have shown any sign of following in my footsteps as far as heading off into the wide blue yonder is concerned, but time will tell.

As far as they are concerned I am “dad”, not an explorer or an author or a television personality.

The fame game

Nobody had heard of me when I set out on my first expedition. That has since changed. For a time in the noughties, I was close friends with Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger’s former partner (and who later wed Rupert Murdoch), and that was my first experience of the paparazzi.

She suggested going to the cinema one evening and it turned out that we were going to the premiere of Master and Commander (2003), starring Russell Crowe. I pelted down the red carpet, dragging her behind me. She said that that was the first time photographers had actually booed her.

Allen prefers to do his own filming on his expeditions. Photo: Martin Hartley

Another time, we’d had supper with the Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman and emerged from the restaurant to a blizzard of camera flashes, worse than anything I experienced in the Arctic. It really was not my milieu, and I was very happy to escape.

More recently, in 2017, I went to Papua New Guinea to look up some old friends. I was delayed in the jungle, and the media promptly filled in the blanks, decided I was lost, and set out to “rescue” me, with two British newspapers competing to see who could find me first.

It was all quite unwarranted, verging on the ridiculous, and for me personally rather a nuisance.

No namby-pamby

I’ve occasionally had a camera crew following me on my expeditions but I prefer to shoot myself – nothing’s staged, and there’s no namby-pamby health and safety regulations, so the filming is utterly authentic.

I’ve also made a straightforward documentary about one of the great railway journeys of the world, travelling between Uganda and Kenya, and another called Travellers’ Century, which focused on three Britons – the poet Laurie Lee, the writer Eric Newby and Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, who famously walked from London to Constantinople (now Istanbul, in Turkey) when he was not yet 21 and wrote about it in his touchingly romantic memoir A Time of Gifts (1977).

Paddy’s appearance in the documentary was his last recorded interview before he died, in 2011.

Allen says primary school pupils always ask the best questions. Photo: Getty Images
I’ve also diversified, if that’s the right word, into public speaking, team building and working as a motivator and coach. I’ve addressed major corporations such as Google and IBM, and primary school pupils – who always ask quite the best questions. My central theme is that the challenges in the jungles of somewhere like Borneo are not so different from the challenges of everyday life.

Incidentally, I’m billed to supply “amusing anecdotes” at the Royal Geographical Society’s gala ball in Hong Kong next month.

Eco anguish

The current environmental situation concerns me deeply. The lives of the people who helped me in the Russian Far East are being disrupted by global warming.

After Hong Kong, I am flying to West Papua to investigate what has happened to a community that I visited previously. From what I understand, they have been displaced by palm oil plantations. So I have a very personal view on the degradation of the environment.

It goes without saying that the world needs to act fast.

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