Felicity Aston

Lone Ranger

Benedict Allen’s misadventures read like a Hollywood script. He has been shot at by drug hitmen, robbed and abandoned by guides, chased by hostile tribes, poisoned and most recently stranded without his dog-team in the Siberian Arctic.

‘Someone once actually took the time to go through my history and worked out that I’ve faced certain death six times,’ he admits, ‘but I don’t really dwell on these things.’ It is no wonder that he is often portrayed in the media as an Indiana Jones figure; a comparison that he insists is a long way from the truth. ‘Actually what I do would be incredibly boring and tedious for most people’ he claims. ‘There are some exciting moments but it is mostly months and months of hanging around a village trying to understand the community and learning their skills. It is the simple idea of immersing yourself in a place rather than riding roughshod over it.’

The extraordinary lengths that Benedict takes to immerse himself in a foreign environment is what sets him apart from other modern-day explorers. Spending months at a time living with remote indigenous groups he has written over nine books about his experiences and recorded five of his expeditions for the BBC. His unique style of travel was inspired by his first solo expedition. Aged just 22, he set out alone to cross the Amazon rainforest from the mouth of the Orinoco River to the mouth of the Amazon. ‘The trouble was, I didn’t have any money,’ he reflects, ‘but I decided that if I could just get out there then I should be able to learn from the local people. I got some fishermen to take me out to the Indians. The elders couldn’t understand a word I was saying and shoved me with the children. Clearly they were saying, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, you look after him as he is about your standard, if that’.

The experience taught him a valuable lesson that has since evolved into the philosophy behind all his expeditions. ‘If you really want to learn then you’ve got to be like a child; to start again and think afresh,’ he explains. ‘Time and again vulnerability and childishness have helped me. The local people are more likely to look after you if you are not a threat to them and in almost every situation it helped that I was harmless. That is what has kept me alive.’Nevertheless his first expedition to the Amazon ended in disaster. Attacked by goldminers he was forced to flee and walk out of the forest alone. (In order to survive Benedict had to eat his dog - an event he still recalls with sadness as ‘tragic’.)

Two years later he returned to the jungle, but this time in Papua New Guinea, where he persuaded the remote Niowra tribe to let him undergo their sacred initiation ceremony. A ritual they believe makes ‘men as strong as crocodiles’. ‘It seems obvious to me now,’ he says, ‘that going through this initiation ceremony was a way for me to come to terms with the forest that had almost wiped me out at such a young age. In the Amazon I had been alone, scrabbling for my life and I felt traumatised.’

The Niowra initiation ceremony involved being regularly beaten for 6 weeks and left him with permanent initiation scars that snake across his chest, back and arms like the markings of a crocodile. The scars have faded but they still provoke a reaction from those who notice them. ‘Women tend to think they’re quite exciting,’ he confides, ‘men think it’s a bit odd and some people are just repulsed by the whole idea.’ But strangely the scars have been useful on some of his subsequent expeditions. ‘I settled down with a group of aborigines in the Gibson Desert,’ he remembers,’ and when they saw the marks they said ‘Wow, you’ve been through a ceremony too.’ It made all the difference. I was seen as a person who had been accepted by another group of people and suddenly I had a way into their world.’

Benedict has learnt to cope in a variety of hostile environments. He always travels alone and without backup. ‘In one sense what I do is very old-fashioned,’ he observes,’ in that for me it is not about technology. I don’t like backup, I don’t like Satellite phones or GPS. To me these things are great for saving yourself but if you are really trying to understand a place you’ve got to let go of home, immerse yourself and really fathom out what that environment is all about. Maybe these things can’t happen in the future and it will become more and more silly for someone like me to go off and immerse myself in a place.’

Benedicts latest adventure offered the challenge of a new climate. After living with local Chukchi reindeer herders, he drove a team of dogs across the Bering Strait in Arctic Siberia. Explaining his decision to tackle such different territory he says, ‘I just knew there was this other environment that I didn’t understand and there were indigenous people out there just as there were in other places and I wanted to learn how they coped.’He found the Arctic to be a much more dangerous place than any environment he had encountered before. ‘In Jungles you can survive for 10 days with absolutely no skills at all if you’re sensible. In hot deserts you dry out in about 3 days if you don’t get help. In Siberia, fall through the ice and you die within a few minutes.’

In true Benedict style the trip had its fair share of misadventure. ‘On the first day of training I didn’t know the names of the dogs or the commands so they just ran amok,’ he recalls, ‘They took me over the ice which was cracking and groaning and I thought we were all going to die. I just hung on to the sledge, I was not going to abandon my dogs on the very first day of training, but I got frostbite in all my fingers – quite literally a white knuckle ride.’Travelling for 3 months over 1000 miles with his dog team he eventually earnt their respect and took his place as ‘top dog’. The experiences he shared with the dogs made it difficult to leave them. ’Dogs are very good at saying hello but they just don’t understand goodbyes,’ he muses. ‘These ten little dogs which had carried me through the Arctic, battled with me alone out there against wolves and polar bears, who looked after me and saw me as top dog and now I had to say goodbye. It was really, really hard.’

Currently writing about his Siberian adventure it won’t be long before the call of the unknown and new adventures lures him away. ‘I’d rather be shot in the back by an arrow in the jungle than die in my sleep in Hampshire,’ he confides, ’but perhaps not yet; when I’m 90 or 100. I feel there is still an enormous amount to do and I’m not ready to stop.’



(This article was first published in Outdoor Enthusiast Magazine Vol. 2 Issue 3 in March 2006)

‘In jungles you can survive for 10 days with absolutely no skills at all if you’re sensible. In hot deserts you dry out in about 3 days if you don’t get help. In Siberia, fall through the ice and you die within a few minutes.’ - Benedict Allen