Benedict Allen: Exploring Papua New Guinea – A Life with Tribes & Their Traditions

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In this fascinating episode of Adventure Diaries, we welcome legendary explorer Benedict Allen, whose remarkable journeys span decades and continents. From surviving ambushes by Pablo Escobar’s men to undergoing the brutal crocodile initiation ceremony with the Niara tribe in Papua New Guinea, Benedict’s stories are nothing short of extraordinary.

We delve into his heartfelt reunion with the Yaifo tribe after 27 years, a moment of celebration and resilience that symbolized hope amidst the challenges of gold mining and environmental destruction. Benedict shares his unique philosophy on exploration—emphasizing vulnerability, trust, and learning from indigenous cultures over conquest or adrenaline-fueled escapades.

Discover how Benedict balances the ethical dilemmas of documenting endangered cultures, the impact of modern media on his work, and the lessons he’s learned from tribes thriving against all odds. He also shares practical advice for anyone seeking adventure, including the importance of dedicating sacred time to explore and reconnect with the world around you.

This episode is a treasure trove of inspiration, wisdom, and stories that will ignite your passion for adventure and humanity.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The transformative power of vulnerability in connecting with remote tribes.
• How the Yaifo thrived by isolating themselves from the chaos of gold mining.
• Insights into the brutal yet life-altering Niara crocodile initiation ceremony.
• The ethics and challenges of documenting uncontacted tribes.
• Why Benedict believes adventure is more relevant than ever in today’s interconnected world.

Episode Highlights:

• Benedict's near-death encounters and how they shaped his view of exploration.
• The Yaifo’s extraordinary resilience and how their culture has adapted over decades.
• Reflections on the media’s distortion of exploration narratives.
• The importance of balancing risk with ethical responsibility in modern adventuring.
• Benedict’s advice to set aside sacred time for personal adventures.

Call to Action:
Inspired by Benedict’s stories? Plan your own adventure, big or small! Start by dedicating a weekend to explore something new in your area.

Resources & Mentions:

• Visit Benedict Allen’s website for books and updates.
• Support the Environmental Justice Foundation and Save the Rhino Trust, two causes close to Benedict’s heart.
• Learn more about this episode and others at AdventureDiaries.com/podcast.

Let’s Connect:

• Follow Adventure Diaries on Instagram: @adventurediariespodcast
• Share your thoughts on this episode and leave a review!

Until next time, embrace the adventure and pay it

Chapters

• 0:00 A Surprising Reunion After 27 Years
• 0:34 Introduction to the Adventure Diaries Podcast
• 0:57 Meet Benedict Allen: Legendary Explorer
• 3:02 Early Life and Formative Experiences
• 5:34 First Expedition to the Amazon
• 7:58 Near-Death Encounters and Lessons Learned
• 12:04 The Brutal Initiation Ceremony in Papua New Guinea
• 21:32 Integration and Challenges in Tribal Life
• 23:59 The Path to TV Work and Further Expeditions
• 26:30 Ambushed by the Yaifo Tribe
• 28:07 A Stranger's Act of Generosity
• 29:01 Returning to the Yaifo Tribe After Decades
• 29:21 Expeditions and Adventures
• 30:02 Reunion with the my old tribesman friend
• 30:56 Changes and Continuity in the Tribe
• 33:51 A Dangerous Expedition
• 41:43 Rescue and Media Sensation
• 44:48 Reflections on Exploration
• 47:30 Closing Thoughts and Future Adventures

Transcript

 After 27 years, you know, you would have thought it wouldn't happen again, but it did. Uh, but totally different. This time they had spotted me and Michael trudging up the mountain and it wasn't an ambush of fear or aggression. It was one of celebration. They'd realized I was coming. So they were watching me and watching me and it was wonderful.

They came out with their bows and arrows, slightly scary at first again, because they had these arrows pointing at me and Michael, but this time it was a celebration and it was the most.  Glorious moment of my life almost 

in terms of expedition. Welcome to the Adventure Diaries Podcast, where we share tales of adventure, connection, and exploration from the smallest of creators to the larger than life adventurers.

We hope their stories inspire you to go create your own extraordinary adventures. And now your host, Chris Watson.  

Welcome to another episode of the Adventure Diaries. Today we're joined by Benedict Allen, a man whose life has been filled with legendary expeditions. Someone with a deep respect and curiosity for learning the ways of indigenous people in some of the most remote corners of the world. 

From near death encounters in the Amazon, to undergoing the brutal initiation ceremony of the Nyara tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.  Benedict's adventures have been nothing short of legendary.  But perhaps what stands out the most is his commitment to learning from and honouring the cultures that have shaped his journey. 

And people like the Yaifo tribe, with whom he reunited with many years on from his first encounter. Including his emotional reunion with Korsai, his guide and friend after almost 27 years. And in this conversation we get into the ethical dilemmas of this type of exploration, the environmental impacts of gold mining and also how media coverage can warp the reality of his adventures.

What a fascinating conversation and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. So settle in, enjoy this fantastic conversation with Benedict Allen. Benedict Allen, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you?  

Doing fine, thank you. Very well indeed. 

Excellent. And you're in the Czech Republic today, I believe.

Yeah, I've got a little hideaway here. It's in the back streets, there's lovely cobbled streets in the center of Prague. And if you can see, I don't know if I'm allowed to do this, I'll just swivel around my little, actually you can see war shields behind me. Various hats from different expeditions up there.

And so it's lovely because I'm surrounded not just by my things from different expeditions that remind me of other times, but also thousands of books here from other explorers. And some of them are very different tradition for me, but it's still great to be. I feel like these are feathers in a nest, all these wonderful things. 

volumes, you know, that just remind me of other people out there. 

Fantastic. So to frame up today, Benedict, really want to get into your three expeditions in Papua New Guinea over the decades, 1987 through to 2023, essentially, but Before kind of jumping into that, to give a little bit of background and context for anyone that may not know who Benedict Allen is, you want to kind of set the scene a little bit about being an explorer at heart by profession, but what was your formative experiences and what led you into becoming an explorer?

I think I was just one of those very curious children who just wanted to Find out about the world and I think all children are like this really at heart, but I was encouraged by my parents They're very tolerant of me. I Want to go and look for fossils So they let me go off looking for fossils that we had a family camper van Not we went to the south coast of the UK south coast of England and we used to go along the Dorset coast I used to collect my fossils.

So I was that sort of child who just filled his bedroom Full of stuff and I suppose that was the beginning, that was my initial impulse, but then my dad was a test pilot and as a child I remember him flying this Vulcan bomber, an extraordinary sort of charismatic aircraft, flying it over our back garden.

I mean our back garden wasn't that big, but if you know what I mean, it wasn't just our garden, he was just flying over and he used to tip the wings of this plane and just to say it was him at the controls and I think it just made me feel it's possible to do something a little bit different maybe. My dad was a rather forgetful man. 

And no one could quite understand how he could be testing these aircraft that were carrying the UK nuclear deterrent. But anyway, in the cockpit he clearly got his act together. Or at least he didn't crash or anything. So it seemed like he could do this job and it made me feel like I could do something.

Because I wasn't top sports person at the school. I wasn't Tickly academic at least at that stage. So there's nothing obvious that made me look like a sort of natural leader character, sort of. There are other explorers of the time. I mean, the big names that are still with us are Bonnington, the Mountaineer and so on.

But I thought, Oh, I can't be like that. I think I just hung on in there and I collected more and more of these fossils and. Developed more and more elaborate dreams about being some sort of explorer and people said you can't be an explorer now And it's all the world's been explored. This is way back in the 70s But I thought i'm just going to give it a go and my mum and dad again really good They just supported me because they could see I was obsessed, you know, it wasn't just a whim I mean, this is from the age of 10, I mean, so I'm going to try and be an explorer.

And I worked in a warehouse in Hampshire. My dad had to be near Farnborough for his flying, the airfield there. And I worked in this warehouse. I got enough money to get myself to the Amazon, because that was my first dream, really, to try and be an explorer in the Amazon. I had no idea what I was doing. I was so naive.

You know, I was that lovely age, my early 20s, like all of us, perhaps, I just thought I can do anything. Well, perhaps we don't always think that, but we certainly don't. I don't necessarily have a sense of our mortality, and I didn't think anything was going to go wrong. I just thought I'd go out there and maybe local people would look after me.

And they did, but it rapidly went wrong. I don't know, it's not rapidly, that's a bit unfair on myself. After about five months of being helped through the forest, I was attacked by two gold miners, and lost pretty well everything, got sorts of malaria. Staggered out of the forest. But anyway, I had got off the bottom level.

I'd accumulated a huge amount of experience. And I think this is now where drive kicked in. Because I really wanted to understand why I hadn't died out in the Amazon. You know, as I said, I knew nothing very much. I've been helped to get out there and to understand a little bit about the rainforest by Frontiersmen, indigenous people, just kindly people that I now really want to understand.

And so that led on to more and more expeditions, really, as I began to realize indigenous people didn't see the forest that I'd almost died in as a threat. They saw it as their home and they'd give them their food, their medicine, their shelter. And I thought, I've got to try and learn from them. 

What did your parents think when you said, I'm off to the Amazon?

back in the 70s? 

Well, yeah, I suppose I had different views.  My father being the test pilot, he just thought, yeah, great, off you go. Having said that, test pilots are not quite how you imagine. I mean, they're very steady people in those days. These are the people who landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong, for example, was a test pilot.

So they're very steady in a crisis. And I recognized that in myself, and maybe my parents saw I had that. But my father, he just thought it was great. I was going to push myself, perhaps as he had pushed himself. They must have been a bit worried though, because I had no experience. My mum was terrified. I mean, my dad was just reaching retirement age and was just stopping doing dangerous stuff with aeroplanes, testing them to the limit.

And now I was going to go out there and test myself to the limit. So I feel for her, but she's stuck by my dad and now she's going to have to stick by me. To this day, I feel guilty about all the worry I've caused people. But anyway, yeah, very different views. But my, both of them supported me, which was such a, such a wonderful thing.

I think that's really my biggest bit of luck in my career.  Because you know, there've been bad times and good times, but having supportive parents. 

I think it's well documented, Benedict, about some of the highs and the lows, like you talked about the Amazon there, you know, you've had near death experiences robbed.

I think you were shot at as well with Pablo Escobar's armies in the jungle and stuff. You've had some right hairy situations. And at such a young age, and then you've gone on to do even wilder expeditions in Papua New Guinea. Was that excitement or that danger, is that what drives an explorer? Because for some people that would have had enough of this.

I'm not going back to any remote environment or trying to contact any sort of tribes, but you've continued to do that throughout your career. 

Yes, I like to think it isn't. That I'm an adrenaline junkie, that I'm not just searching for the next big hit. Because actually my life, most of my expeditions are not exciting.

It's months and months and months of living in a remote village,  learning quietly from little old ladies, or, or anyone who'll, you know, Kindly give me time and so it's most my life isn't like that and there have been bad times. Yeah, Pablo Escobar. That was a classic  Pablo Escobar hiding away in the forest.

This is six months I don't know around six months maybe a year or two before he was finally killed and I was just paddling by You know, I wasn't looking for Pablo Escobar, but I paddled past his camp, as it turned out, and he sent two people to kill me. And yeah, I got away with it because, well, I was a better paddler than the He had these two hit men, but they couldn't paddle a canoe and kill someone at the same time.

I'm not being boastful. All I meant was, these were the people from the Medellin cartel, the highlands of Colombia, and they were not  And although I wasn't a very good paddler of my canoe, they were trying to shoot and paddle at the same time, which is obviously harder. So I had a simpler job. I got around a river bend and jumped into the forest.

But again, that experience reminded me the skills that I needed already were possessed by the indigenous people. So I thought, what I've got to do is learn from the local people. So again, that sort of message was reinforced. in my mind. But no, at university I was in, read environmental science, then I went on to Aberdeen University, UEA in Norwich, then Aberdeen, uh, read ecology.

So I was a scientist, I suppose, by training, just spurred on by curiosity, and then these near death experiences, they made me determined to try and find out more. I think this is me looking back now, I'm not someone who dwells on these things, but I think I needed to come to terms. With the world that had almost killed me and I think it seemed to go going about it going back to the local people who they understood even if we didn't as explorers. 

What was, when you go to somewhere like the Amazon at such a young age, maybe one of your first big explorations, what are your objectives when you go there and did they change throughout considering some of these near death experiences and such? What were your objectives?  

As I said, very naive at the beginning and it was purely to cross through areas, I suppose.

That first expedition anyway, there's a road that hadn't been completed across the northeast of Brazil and there were the two ends of it, the engineers had come from both of them. ends of the forest, and they hadn't completed this road and it still has not been completed to this day. But there it was, and I thought, wow, who has really surveyed out there in the forest what we're going to lose whilst this road has been driven through?

Has anyone crossed through there? It turns out no one had. And so I thought, oh, I'll do that. So that was my first objective. So it's very naive, but nonetheless sort of valid from my an environmental point of view, as I saw myself as a champion of the environment in my naive way. That was a very simple expedition in terms of concept, and then it became more complicated because, as I said, I felt the locals were people who could really teach me about the place.

So it became less about crossing through an area and more about Learning about that area. And I went to New Guinea and underwent an initiation ceremony, a traditional initiation ceremony. Become a man as strong as a crocodile, as it was said locally. And that was more about trying to understand this place.

And this is why I think it was psychological. I sort of needed to feel. I could cope with that environment. And so from then on, really, my experiences were with indigenous people. It was about going in, learning from them, and then I would leave them and sort of put myself to the test. And this is probably where the test pilot background came in.

I sort of felt I needed to push myself and understand how much I had learnt. And also, I suppose, try and convey to the outside world the experience I was having. I was beginning to realise that So few people were having these experiences. At first, I just thought, Oh, this is something anyone could do. But then gradually through my career, these different communities would be marginalized or the forests or the deserts or so on would be destroyed.

So I began to realize there was a sort of record I should be taking. So it became more through my career about communicating back to people who didn't have a background. Privilege or their skills or the desire, frankly,  to risk their lives or undergo, you know, I've had malaria six times, for example. So I was someone who was prepared to put up with that for the reward.

And I suppose the reward was just learning so much and also a sort of compulsion somehow to get it better, to learn more and understand better about these environments. It's like everything, you know, once you learn about it, you realize how little you know. 

Yeah, kind of share the wonders of the unknown, really, isn't it, to explore and bring.

So switching into Papua New Guinea then, you're actually one of the earlier pioneers of that type of documented exploration, considering when you started, and filming it back in the day with the first handheld camcorders and stuff like that. So, You know, that's how far back that goes, which some people may or may not know.

How does someone of your size and stature, cause you're a big imposing guy, contact a remote tribe and have that first interaction and make your motives known because there's well documented cases of people being killed when they approach uncontacted  tribes and such. North Sentinel Island is a good example.

And that's still happening to this day. So how does someone like Benedict Allen approach and get into these tribes in the first place? 

Yeah, the filming came along later, I ought to say. I wrote about five books, then the BBC said, can you just take along this little camcorder thing that's been invented, and I just had this wonderful opportunity of just carrying on being a proper adventurer, as it were, without a film crew.

Because as soon as you have a film crew, it becomes set up, essentially, and it looks great, but it's not reality, generally. So that was a wonderful thing. But that aside, the answer is that I do it very very carefully and slowly. I approach communities that I don't know very gently. I don't sort of blunder in.

When I went through that initiation ceremony, for example, in New Guinea, the one made me in theory a man as strong as a crocodile, I'd been in New Guinea for five months. So by then I could speak Neo Melanesian Tok Pisin, which is the local, it's a sort of lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. So it's a language that people communicate with.

And I was Guinea speaking Yara, which is the local language. And I would go along to a community and be trying to learn from how to make fishing nets or this and that. In this particular case, so an old man said, Oh yeah, yeah, you ought to go to Kandenge. He said, Kandenge, they're the most traditional village.

It turns out that Kandenge hadn't had an initiation ceremony for 10 years. My presence there sort of tipped the balance. The young man wants to go through this initiation ceremony. to be tested and to have the scars that were going to run up and down their back. Scars of a crocodile skin, you could say.

There are lots and lots of little bumps, permanent bumps on your skin that made you have some sort of resemblance to a crocodile in a way. That sort of just happened, but I was only allowed to be integrated because I suppose I wasn't imposing. Yes, I'm big, I'm six foot four, but already the presence of an outsider was enough to make me strange.

I don't think my height would make much difference, but I'd already began to learn that Really, if I wanted to learn anything from anyone, I couldn't be a threat. If I was a threat, not only would I die quite soon, but I would also not get anyone to teach me anything. I mean, why would they teach me if I was a threat?

So I was going in there very much like a child, really. They saw I was incompetent, despite my size. And for children, it was hilarious. You know, he was this huge white bloke, but he couldn't paddle a canoe without falling out. And I couldn't hunt as well as they could. So often on my expeditions, children would be the ones who would teach me.

stuff. They'd be so proud to show you how they use an arrow or whatever. So I began to realize this is a really important thing actually to make a virtue of being vulnerable. Allow yourself to be vulnerable and then people will help. There were only two uncontacted tribes I've ever come across. I justify to myself that they were being wiped out.

There were gold miners moving through in Papua New Guinea and then in West Papua, which is Indonesian Papua.  Missionaries were moving in, loggers were moving in. As it turns out in both cases, the only record we have of their culture as it was. The notes and photos that I took, but I, yeah, I still feel uneasy about that 'cause I'm still, yes, I was invited in in both cases.

Did I have a right to, I don't know. I was so young. I was 24. 23. 

You can see the pros and cons of that. You know, obviously the threat that you see of illegal farming and logging and illegal goldmine. brings its own threat and fatalities. So I can see that, you know, there's a delicate balance and I can see from both sides, because I know sometimes it does court controversy with people trying to contact and contact their tribes.

But by all accounts, you were welcomed in and you've been back numerous times. Can I just touch on again that ceremony to bring that to life? Because I have heard you talk about it before. It seemed really brutal what you had to go through for a period of time. Could you just talk through what you had to endure?

Yes, it was brutal.  I didn't realize how bad it was, but again, I was 24. I was very earnest, you know, I was an environmental scientist. I wanted to understand the world and document it. I could see their world were changing. I'd already seen it before in the rainforest. I thought I'd just try and make a record of it.

I was sort of up for anything. And I thought this is the right way to do it. Not being imperialist. There's so much of exploration in UK history and around the world has been about people imposing.  And I thought I'd just quietly go in and learn. And I had this extraordinary chance. The elders said, take part in the ceremony.

And no outsider had ever taken part in it. They knew I wanted to understand their forest. And they said, this is the way. This is how we learn about our forest. This is how we survive out here. Amongst the swamps and crocodiles of New Guinea. So, a big fence was erected around the spirit house. And it was the so called Wark Gumba, which means crocodile nest.

Big 15 foot high bamboo fence around the Spirit House. And I was lined up with the other initiates. I think there were about 13, 14 of us at first. Heads were shaven, we were given little grass skirts, and then we were led into the crocodile nest. And the elders were calling out to the Avut Gwark, the great crocodile ancestor, saying, please help this next generation grow strong.

Help them in this ceremony, this stuff they're going to go through. So they can help the village in the future. Then we were led into this arena and kept there for as long as it was going to take. And it took six weeks.  But that first day was noticeable because we were led to upside down turned canoes and cut repeatedly with bamboo blades.

And we lost, I suppose, about a litre of blood. A couple of pints of blood. I mean, you couldn't stand up after this. It's been cut repeatedly. Down, all the way down your front, all the way down your back. With lots and lots of little cuts that were like stipules, like a sort of crocodile skin. But that was only the first day.

And I do remember thinking, Wow, this is bad. What have I got involved in here? I mean, the infection risk, for a start. But, the funny thing is that I also thought, Wow, this is the worst thing. day of our lives probably. It can never be as bad as this again in our lives and that's a great sort of feeling to have.

You're through the worst of it but we were totally wrong  because we didn't know that the main part of the ceremony really was about earning those marks and now we were told to sing happy little songs and all the old men came out and thrashed us with sticks and day after day after day we were beaten as we had to sing these songs.

I know precisely it was five times a day. Because five was a sacred number. And so five times a day we were sent out to be beaten. And after a few weeks of that, you know, I just thought, no, but I couldn't let down the, you know, these people, the Nyara have been so good to me, letting me go through their sacred, secret ceremony.

I couldn't just walk out on them. And furthermore, I didn't really want to, well, yes, I did, but I, I wanted to escape this, But I also didn't want to do anything different from my peer group, as it were, the other initiates of my age. We had realized the reason why we're going through the ceremony, what the ceremony was all about was working together.

And when we had shown that we work together, that we thought as one, as a tight group, we knew our strengths, we knew our weaknesses, then we'd be awarded our freedom. And so we wanted to do everything together to help each other. I was one of the bigger ones, so I had to sort of protect the smaller ones with my own back and sort of take the blows for younger ones.

But then that was something we all did as the bigger boys. And it was, strangely enough, an extraordinary privilege. Yes, privilege to learn stuff, document stuff for the future, for that village and for that culture. But to be pushed to the limit to such an extent, day after day, I learned about myself so much.

Yeah. After all that was concluded, Benedict, how long were you with the tribe after it and did they accept you and did things change in the day to day? What was it like after? Because that sounded pretty gruelling. 

That ceremony ended when we were let out of the crocodile nest, this arena, and pushed off into the water and released, just like mother crocodiles do with their young.

They give them their freedom. And for me, that was an end. I thought, I don't belong here. I'm not a nyara. I'm someone from the UK and it's not my culture. So I sort of stepped away, but then I thought, this is ridiculous. I've got to go back and have that extraordinary chance to have an insight into another world.

And so I thought I owe it to the Nyara to go back. So I went back to the village a couple of years later. I needed that time to recover,  and I stayed with the Nyara, and I stayed in New Guinea, but I began to feel uneasy about the whole thing because I was being drawn more and more into Nyara life, life in a swamp effectively, a lot of malaria there, it's a very tough life, so the locals obviously as well as myself.

But I began to feel, hold on, I'm being invited to have a home here, which is an extraordinary thing, a wonderful thing. But psychologically, you know, I couldn't do it really. There would be young ladies who'd be sort of ushered towards me at night.  The Niara wanted me to settle down amongst them. I think they found it incomprehensible that having gone through that ceremony, why would you not want to stay and build a family and so on?

But I felt I can't do this. And so I was weighing backwards and forwards in my mind, where is home I thought I've got to, in the end, break away from that life in the forest. I didn't really belong there in the end. And after a few years, I decided not to go back to that particular village, that community.

And I thought what I've got to do is always come back to the UK, because to do the sort of high risk stuff I do, or the dangerous stuff, or just to be away from home for so long, six months, nine months. Immersed in other cultures. You've got to have a very, very clear sense of who you are and what you are.

And so I thought I would always go back to the UK. And it could have been anywhere in Europe really, but I did need to centre myself again. And also do the other part of my job in a way, which is to communicate. So I'd be writing books, eventually I was doing TV series, my little camera by myself. But it's all about communicating, and it kept me sane really.

Having a little camera to talk to, having diaries to write. I'm probably the last person who could really settle down in a remote community, because I'm too restless. But also I think probably would challenge anyone's ability to cope with another world where you don't really belong.  

Is that what led to your TV work?

The Papua New Guinea expedition? Because you've done a lot of stuff on BBC, haven't you? 

I think it was in the Amazon. In fact, I know it was in the Amazon. Later on, I was sort of avoiding New Guinea by then. I just went off on a little expedition to look at the wild lake. There was said to be a lake that I had come across while crossing the Amazon basin.

I'd been told about this wild lake. I thought, wow, what's in that wild lake? Why is it called wild? So I went back and simply recorded. What I found there, and it was the first time this had happened on telly. Someone not knowing if they're going to live or not, is filming himself going deeper and deeper into another world, deeper and deeper into this forest.

It was an extraordinary thing. I suppose it was about 1994. And so the BBC said, do more of this. So I went, I walked up the skeleton coast, which is Namibia, my camels, and then across the Gobi desert in Mongolia and so on. And amazing thing to, to just carry on your profession as it were, and just film it as you go along, as opposed to just setting things up.

It was just sort of a lovely reel. And I think it's time, time ended. I wasn't a presenter. I didn't want to set things up, stage all these cultural activities, the sort of anthro trash, as it was called by anthropologists, that came along afterwards. I mean, people just pretend to go through ceremonies or, I mean, this wasn't me, you know, but I did have this extraordinary time just recording these journeys and sharing them.

Just to go back to New Guinea, that ceremony prepared me for the world, as it was preparing all the young people for the world. For the locals of the Niara, it was about going off into the forest to look after your own people, hunt and do brave stuff. For me, I'm equipped now to be a better adventurer or discoverer or environmental scientist.

Basically, that's what I wanted to be, the person that I was trained to be at university. That's when I heard about the YIFO.  And the IFO were further into New Guinea, and there's a huge gold rush happening. There's a gold fever everywhere. And I was just living in the interior, trying to understand different cultures, very aware that these cultures had been wiped out by this gold fever.

Gold miners coming in like anything, helicopters all over the place, people incredibly excited about this, gold everywhere. And I'd heard about people called the Ifo, and I thought, these people are going to be gone. They're the last people staying up on the central range. Everyone else had come down from the mountains, missionaries had called them down, learned about Jesus, and now the gold miners moving in.

And I set off for a little expedition to record the last days of the Ifo. This was an extraordinary thing. Because I went up there and found myself ambushed by the Yifo, who thought I was a gold miner. It was terrifying.  The Yifos leapt out and sort of ambushed me. I was being led into the village by a Yifo, but these two men disappeared. 

And suddenly other Yifo jumped out with, covered in paint, covered in feathers. And with bows and arrows ready to fire at me. They were just about to kill me and my friends, local people, indigenous people, when they realized I was pathetic. This is the thing, you're talking about my height.  I am six foot four, as I said, and very big, but I'm not necessarily imposing because I just walked up this mountain.

It was so tiring. It was really, really tough, this walk, because we're trying to keep up with our two Yaifu guides. And I must have looked pathetic. The Yaifu were all ready to kill me. confront these gold miners expecting them to have spades and have guns maybe and said this all me  and they stopped dancing round and round clapping their bows and arrows and they just sort of stared at me and eventually they started talking to me and my friends these indigenous people who've been sort of bravely come along with me they understood I just want to know about Their life before it ended and I had this extraordinary week or so of just trying to record as much as I could about the Eiffel.

The most extraordinary thing was, they wanted to get me to safety. At the end of this time, rather than me going down to the gold miners where I'd come, a man called Corsai volunteered to walk with me over the mountains. To the interior of New Guinea, where it was actually easier to get out once you had crossed the mountain.

They had never crossed the range. Certainly, this particular group of people, the Aifu, had never really gone more than a mile or two up the mountain. It's very misty, very cold. And this extraordinary act of generosity for a stranger, this person who'd come, I wouldn't say uninvited, but I was certainly, you know, I just wasn't one of them.

I was just this, this, this, this. representative, as it were, of the outside world that was about to destroy the Eiffel. You know, these gold miners were my people, western people, white people. And of course, I still decided it was better to take me to safety and he took me over this mountain. We had to light fires to warm his feet.

It's getting colder and colder. He only had any wool leaves, no clothing, no blankets. You had to shelter in caves, light a fire against the cave wall to give him heat, to get him through the night. I mean, it's a wonderful, wonderful act and it stayed with me decades really. I kept on thinking on future expeditions, what happened to this man in Corsai?

What happened to the Eifo with all these gold miners descending on them? I thought, oh my God. What an amazing thing to take a stranger over a mountain, a great risk to yourself. So eventually I did go back to seek out the IFA, but quite a few years went by as he sort of just stayed in my mind, this wonderful man and these people who welcomed me in.

Yeah. Is that when you went back in 2017? Because I think you, was it like a 30 year difference or something between you? 

Yeah. So I had done other things in this time. TV had come along, as I said, and I was filming expeditions. So I walked up the Namib desert, I was given special permission to do that because it's through a diamond area.

So I had three camels, including Nelson, who's this marvellous little camel that didn't really He had a very sheltered life. He didn't really want to go on an expedition, but he reluctantly came along with me. And that led to another expedition with camels and horses through Mongolia, then the Gobi. And so I did done other things, looked at witch doctors or medicine men, healers around the world.

Again, filming for the BBC as I went along. But, Yeah, he stayed with me. He's the iPhone, this extraordinary man called Sy and this act of generosity. So I went back there, 2017, after all those years risking myself, I suppose, but certainly seeing a huge amount of the world. And I went back with a friend called Frank Gardner, who's the BBC security correspondent.

He had always wanted to see Birds of Paradise and he's in a wheelchair and it's quite hard for him. And we had this extraordinary expedition. This time it was filmed by a BBC film crew. And wonderful, wonderful time seeing these birds of paradise. But even more wonderful for me was that I came across someone who'd been on my original expedition up to see the iPhone.

He said, 

Benedict, 

do 

you recognize me? It's Michael. I said, I'm Michael. Uh, it's been 27 years. Oh, who are you? He said, I'm Michael. I did that terrible trek up the mountain with you. And do you remember those terrible people called the IFO? Almost killed us. I said, yes, they were your relatives, Michael. 

Anyway, it was 

an extraordinary reunion. Just luck. He said, you know what? The IFO are still there. They changed their mind. Gold turned out not to be in that part of New Guinea. The gold rush sort of stopped. It started up somewhere else. Now on largest open cost. Gold mines on the planet, just beyond the Ipho on the mountain.

But the Ipho are up there. We know they're up there. We hear them singing and that sort of thing. So I set about the Southern Expedition and went back to New Guinea with Michael. We trudged up this mountain again.  And the funny thing is, there were the Ipho and they again sprung out and ambushed me. After 27 years, you know, you would have thought it wouldn't happen again, but it did.

But,  totally different. This time they had spotted me. And Michael trudging up the mountain. It wasn't an ambush of fear or aggression, it was one of celebration. They'd realised I was coming, or they spotted me. There weren't that many, even now, you know. I don't think anyone else has climbed over that mountain twice.

So they were watching me and watching me, and it was wonderful. They came out with their bows and arrows, slightly scary at first, again. Because they had these arrows pointing at me and Michael.  Uh, this time, it was a celebration, and it was the most glorious moment of my life, almost, in terms of expeditions.

It was just to see that the Jaifo had endured, these people who, a generation before, have been on their knees. Everyone else had gone from the mountain, the Jaifo were the last people, and all these years later, they're here. While I've been in deserts and mountains and all around the world, they have endured there.

And that thought was wonderful. You know, there's so much bad news in the world, if you're an environmental scientist, or even if you're not, there's the destruction of habitat, destruction of this and that. But here was a mountain that hadn't been destroyed. There was the forest and there were the Eifo.

And they were doing very well because they hadn't, all their neighbors had gone, all the people I used to live with, and they used to be their enemies, you know, they were neighbors. And So on, but there were also people who used to attack them at night. So their gardens had expanded because the women didn't need to worry about being captured or killed.

So they gardened in their gardens. The men hunted more. So the Ifu had actually done very well. Their population maybe tripled, I suppose. But the most extraordinary thing of all, perhaps, was that Korsai was still alive and he came up to me. 

Oh, that's ridiculous. It's 

a lovely moment. He just hugged me. It was as if time hadn't moved on.

He was now old. I was getting on a bit as well. But he just hugged me. And, you know, we didn't have anything we could say to each other. I couldn't speak Jaipur. I talked to Sin, the national lingua franca of the island, because they were so isolated. And he just said, 

Benedict, Benedict. 

And I just said, of course I, of course I.

I kept on saying it backwards and forwards, and it didn't matter that we couldn't talk. Speak any other words because we had something special in a moment in time in history moment of friendship and there he was this man who'd done this wonderful thing for me all those years later taking me over the mountain and Just to be able to see him alive was a wonderful thing.

I crossed that mountain again unfortunate  Then I got trapped.  

Oh, come on to that because it would be remiss not to touch on that. Can I ask, did you notice any other differences or adaptations in the tribe over the 30 years, like in the way that they looked or hunted or gathered? They have, you know, insignia.

Was there any noticeable differences for good or for bad? 

Yeah, very good question. I was very keen to try and note this down because they hadn't had visitors. It is true one missionary managed to get to them and then he went down the mountain, but in terms of outside witnesses, really no one else I think apart from me.

There were all sorts of things that they had purloined or they got one way or another from the gold miners. So gold mines hadn't actually been into the settlement, but this big place that I mentioned, Porgra, one of the largest gold mines and copper mines on the planet, they had been not into that area, but they had A lot of stuff had arrived from there.

So now they had quite a few machetes, bush knives, and they had all sorts of scraps of clothing. So they had quite a lot of stuff, but they didn't have medicines. They didn't have a lot of the stuff that would really help them. They were simply just too far away and they weren't. in the sort of consumer economy or the financial economy.

It just wasn't worth wearing clothing, for example, because it'd just rip apart after a month or two. So people were still using traditional clothing, which were leaves. And yeah, there were odd things, you know, someone had a car spring in his headdress, um, little bits of plastic and so on. In terms of the way people These were just decoration anyway, but the way people used the land was the same, but with the addition of steel blades.

But no, they were so isolated. And I think they had come to a decision, because the choice was, do we leave the mountain as everyone was expecting, go down to be with lowlanders who had been neighbors? Is their life better, actually? Well, they had decided that it was really chaotic and bad down there because of this gold mining.

time. There was booze, there were women, a lot of problems. And so they thought, we'll just stay up here. At the same time, in my absence, what's going to happen, Paul Grose's huge mine had opened up on the other side of the mountain and that wasn't good either. There's a huge amount of social unrest, a lot of people with homemade guns, a lot of people with anger, feeling that their heritage was being taken away by people like me, white people, because of all this money that was clearly around.

So a lot of social disruption and the Alfred side, just as they put. One of the big things they wanted to know from me was, is this the right decision? We've stayed up here. We haven't got hospitals, we haven't got medical treatments, we haven't got a nurse, a doctor, anything. What are we missing out on? It placed me in a difficult position.

I thought I can't decide for them whether they should stay or not. All I could do was present a few facts. But, I also wanted to reassure them in a way, that I've seen so many communities, isolated communities, have been pushed off.  And their heritage, their resources, gone. And at least they had that. Even if you decide to leave the mountain, this mountain is yours.

This bit of it. is your heritage, your culture,  your knowledge. So it wasn't for me to say what they should do, but it was an interesting moment in time again. 

It sounds like they're thriving still though, you know, the population, if it's doubled or tripled and they're integrating some of the findings and machetes or ironwork or whatever.

So yeah, that's fantastic. 

Yeah, well, it was very reassuring. And after this expedition, once I recovered from it,  I went off around the world. And as I said, and we all know this, it's so much destruction. of rainforests of various other habitats, and I found it so reassuring that these people somehow have made a go of it, somehow they'd survived despite the world, because the world had sort of forgotten about this bit of them.

So they still have their forest, And they had more of it than before, because the neighbors had gone away, drawn away. So I went off to the Amazons, people I knew, called the Matses. I went back to Mongolia, went back to Indonesia, last year. And again and again, I've been quite reassured, actually, at the resilience.

Because we're told indigenous people are sort of fragile somehow, always the victim. And very much they have been attacked and assaulted, as we know, through the centuries. But there is this wonderful human resilience there that I've seen as well. And that's, I find that so reassuring. 

In Papua New Guinea, in its isolation, there are about 40 or 50 uncontacted tribes that still exist, I believe, you know, from my research.

So there's still, by all accounts, thriving populations that are completely disparate from each other. And those high lowlands, I believe. So  

yeah, there's certainly isolated peoples. Yeah. I think pretty wide where New Guinea has pretty well contacted. But the extraordinary thing about New Guinea is that the range of peoples, there's people argue about it all the time.

There's maybe 800 different language groups in Papua New Guinea, 800. There's so much to learn. And this is a thought for later. Really. People often say to me, I want to be an explorer now. Yeah. But it's obvious in a way. I mean, there's so much up there that we need to understand about the world. And we're just skimming the 

surface.

So rolling back a little bit, Benedict, as you say, it'd be a bit remiss to kind of skip over it. What happened in Parthenon?  Was that because you didn't have Corsi to take you over the mountain? Or, so talk us through that and your reflections. Yes, 

Corsi  said, I'm too old to do this journey. I can't take you over the mountain again.

And that's, of course, fine. But he passed me on to Parthenon. The next generation, there's a young person called Akai who helped me climb over the mountain. So there were in the end about maybe half a dozen people who took me over the mountain. But this expedition had always been a sort of race against time.

Because of these gold miners, there's a lot of dengue fever now in the area, increased amount of malaria as well. I'd already had malaria five times, so it seems like I have a propensity to get it. Dengue fever's not much you can do about it anyway. There's no cure for dengue fever. It's a day flying mosquito that carries it, so it's a trickier one.

So the expedition was always going to have to be quite quick, and now I've been with the eye for a few days, I carry on. over the mountain as quickly as we could. And then suddenly as we approached Porgyra, 

big 

old mine with a lot of this social disruption around it, we discovered we were stuck because there were two warring factions there and very, very angry fighting.

I suppose all fighting could be considered as angry, but there's a lot of this burning resentment of People who weren't even involved in the fight. People like me, the outsiders, who seem to have caused a lot of social unrest because of this gold mining, this extraction of their heritage. So, essentially, I couldn't get out, nor could the people who come with me.

We'd started to get to the outside world, the first communities amongst the Heiwa. And Haber said, you can't go any further. We're fighting with the Paella. Basically, I had to find a way of getting out. And I retreated to an airstrip where the missionaries had also fled. So it was an empty mission ship.

The radio had been smashed up in the last enemy raid. And, uh, I stayed there for a few days, the people who come with me decided to split into three groups to try and look for help because I'd suddenly started to get a fever. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, it was either dengue fever or malaria, what I didn't know was I had both.

So I was rapidly going downhill in this abandoned mission house. My friends divided into three groups, one went south, one went west, one went east. And, yeah, I waited. For the end, really, and time went by and no one came. I was thinking, get a radio signal outside, a passing airplane would come in, land at the airstrip, but nothing happened, and time went by.

It's still not clear what really happened, why no one came, but eventually, finally, it turns out one of the groups of people who'd been with me had managed to get a signal to the outside world, alerted the outside world, and by now my relatives were also getting a bit worried. Very worried in some cases, um,  and the Daily Mail stepped in and they sent someone all the way from Kensington High Street, 

a 

reporter in fact, and arrived by helicopter and I was extracted in the nick of time. 

Fantastic story, if not, you know, scary for everyone involved. 

Well, the funny thing is that I was the last person to know about this. It became an international story. There's an explorer lost out there somewhere. People are saying they're headhunters and wild stories going around. All I knew was, it's rather strange that an airplane just didn't come down into this airstrip.

A passing missionary plane didn't. But,  It became very bewildering afterwards because I realised that the world had been talking about this Lost Explorer and some people, sort of silly thing really, everyone had their opinion, everyone had their idea, depending on what newspaper they read really. 

I hate about this because it gets twisted a lot.

You know, there's probably things that you might have done differently, like any situation, you know, it's just human nature. You don't know what you don't know. Reflection's a wonderful thing. But sometimes these stories, they're just, they've got to sell newspapers, haven't they? They've got to sell advertising spots.

And also these snap judgments. So, I was a white, middle class bloke, and male. So, I must be a blundering imperialist, to use the phrase that was used. And, you know, what was I doing there? What right did I have? How competent was I? You know, this was an island I'd lived on for years now, if you added up all my expedition.

Also, people I cared deeply about and the idea that I was sort of just blundering in. 

Well, that was my confliction with it because it never really draw comparisons with the previous expeditions and the fact that you had lived there for a while. So it didn't really pick up the thread on why you were there.

And it was just sensationalized. Like you say, this white imperialist is going on a, you know, colonial type. Explanation to uncover these indigenous, it was just, it's just newspapers being newspapers, unfortunately. 

Yeah, it was sad for me because in the end, I had just gone to say thanks to a wonderful man called Korsai.

It was a very simple thing. I told no one about the expedition before in terms of press, you know, I didn't do any interviews. I just went off there and it cost a lot of money for me to do it. I had to hire a helicopter, get into the lowlands because there's risk of dengue fever, Do this very quickly, but it was just a quiet thing I was doing and suddenly it was not about indigenous people at all.

You know,  for the newspapers around the world, it's all about me and some of a pro saying, this is plucky Brit doing what we used to do in the old days. It was, I was used as a sort of pro Brexit thing. And then other people were anti Brexit saying, yes, we should be doing this sort of thing, but  it's everyone else's agenda.

And it was never about the truth, which was simply, it was just me.  

Everyone has to be up. They just look for pantomime villains every so often, and that's all it really was. 

Yeah, but the Daily Mail were great, actually. Funny enough, I know a lot of people criticise them, but actually, they had come and got me out.

Ah, yeah. And they told the story fairly in a straight way. But it was very odd. It taught me quite a lesson, which was, in this day and age, we're so interconnected. And Yet here was someone who doesn't take a phone, doesn't take a GPS, because for me it's all about learning from indigenous people. So there was a blank, you know, three weeks I had been gone and suddenly everyone had to fill that space with their own ideas.

And as I said, the Daily Mail were great, and it was very odd that everyone else had to sort of pile in. But anyway, it made me realize how actually it's more important than ever for us to disconnect. You know, as I said earlier, I'm seen as a sort of throwback to another era. There's no relevance in being an explorer, but actually it seems to me it's even more relevant than ever.

If you think of exploration over the centuries, we didn't have GPS in the 1700s, you know, so I can see arguments on both sides, especially when, you know, family.  

It's true. I have a family. I have three children of various ages, 16, 14, 8, and my lovely wife. So I have a duty to them. This is a personal decision, really, how I work it out with my wife.

What is a risk? What is not? I like to think I'm a professional after all.  I can evaluate risk. It is very different from when I first set out as a young bloke, just wanting to understand the world. 

What did your wife say to you when you wanted to get back to Papua New Guinea last year?  She wasn't jumping up and  

down with joy.

She sort of still has faith in me, weirdly. And I've always said, actually, if you want to rescue someone from rainforest, The best people to turn to are the local people. They can get you out of rainforests quicker than any helicopter can get in, for example. And it's the same in the Arctic. You know, death comes very, very quickly from a polar bear falling through the ice.

So, weirdly, it doesn't make that much difference having a phone or anything like that because it's very quick. So it's not as simple as people think. And, of course, a phone,  It's a great trap, in a way. You feel you can get help quicker than you perhaps can. But for me, it's about a philosophy. If you don't want to take the risk, don't take them.

And for me, there's that risk taking element which is justified because I'm doing things on the terms of local people. One of the things I felt bad about in New Guinea was that I was whisked away by helicopter.  taken to the hospital, but the local people who'd helped me were still there, you know, so it felt like I was sending the wrong message to the local people, so that's why I want to go back  saying thank you from the bottom of my heart what you did for me, but my actual expeditions I feel should be done on the terms of local people not my people.

And so, you know, they don't have a phone, they don't have a GPS, and I won't because I'm there to learn. 

Fantastic. And you still manage to share it with the world on your return, which is wonderful. We've got kind of a couple of closing traditions on the show, Benedict, one of which is a pay it forward suggestion.

And now there is a call to adventure. So the pay it forward as your opportunity to raise awareness for any worthy charities or organizations or causes that may be important to you. So what would you say is a recommendation for a pay it forward? Oh, 

well, I'm patron of a few charities, but there's an environmental justice foundation, which I'm really fond of because it's very simple.

It's about trying to get justice for essentially people who are out there, communities who are in touch with. their environment. So Environmental Justice Foundation, but I'm also a patron of Save the Rhino Trust, and, you know, we all know the rhino, I hope.  But, you know, it's an emblematic animal, but of course in saving the rhino you save a habitat as well.

So those are two causes that are very close to my heart. But yeah, it's also the charities I belong to. Yeah. 

Wonderful. And finally, a call to adventure. So an opportunity for you to recommend something adventurous, a place, a trip, an activity, a person, whatever, a resource. 

Yes. I think in the end people have got to Find their own goal.

The reason why I've managed to keep going through these years is because I'm driven by passion, and it's just come from my own curiosity and drive. And I think people have got to find their own destination, really. But what I would say is that I've noticed over time how time goes by so quickly. And before you know it, another year's gone, and I'm particularly worried because I'm a family man now.

It's all that time, and I've got to go and pick up my little daughter in a minute. So I'd say the big thing is go to your diary, find a weekend, and blank it out. It doesn't matter if it's June, July, August. Make it sort of sacred and tell people about it. I am going off on an adventure. Then, that weekend, it doesn't, not a big expedition.

It's the highest point in your area. Or go and look for a special bird, at random go through a bird book or something. It doesn't matter what you do. But isolate that time, because that's a time you won't get back again. And it's so, you know, difficult. Time just goes by and the good thing is if you tell lots and lots of people about that weekend You'll feel you have to do it  

Yeah,  fantastic a sacred weekend get it diarized fantastic  Actually, you've got to ask any unrealized adventures or places of exploration that you want to do at some point 

Not so much new places.

Yeah, I'd love to go to Greenland. I'm more interested in places with people That's my specialism because they can introduce you and tell you about their world. So Greenland, Antarctica, not so much because of the no indigenous people, but there's so many people. I just want to thank, I'm so grateful for those early days when I didn't know what on earth I was doing and yet people kept me alive.

So I want to go back to Papua New Guinea again and thank those people who saved me a few years ago when the helicopter came in and took me away. So it was thanks to them. 

Wonderful. Excellent. Well, I've thoroughly enjoyed this, Benedict. I love following your work. I love your stories. I love everything you're doing to illuminate everything that goes on with these indigenous peoples and everywhere in the world.

So thank you. 

Yeah, it's good to talk to you, Chris. I should do it again one day. Tell me about your adventure. Yeah, 

absolutely. So where can people find out about Benedict before we wrap up? 

Oh, I suppose, you know, I've written 11 books, but my website, benedictallen.  com. Yeah. And I Twitter and I do Instagram.

Yeah. Excellent. 

Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. For the show notes and further information, please visit adventurediaries. com slash podcast. And finally. We hope to have inspired you to take action and plan your next adventure, big or small, because sometimes we all need a little adventure to cleanse that bitter taste of life from the soul.

Until next time, have fun and keep paying it forward.