Benedict Allen

Benedict Allen would, these days, have his own TV series and have put a number of others out of business. While Bear Grylls seems to shun community and forage and fend for himself, Allen’s life work has been to make himself dependent on the communities he visits to survive. I like this idea of travel and that’s why we often hitchhike and couchsurf when we travel. By making yourself vulnerable to the people you travel amongst, he reasons, you remove barriers and allow them to open up to show more you. It’s a mutual process of self-discovery for both host and guest. It’s a good thing to bear in mind as we prepare to leave the UK for Papua New Guinea on Tuesday.

The only thing I don’t understand though, is why he’s spent his life doing this kind of thing in Amazonia, New Guinea, Siberia and Alaska. Isn’t this method of travel just as valid wherever you go? It seems a bit cliched to call yourself an “explorer” and then confine yourself so narrowly. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh but there’s something quite keenly colonial about the term “explorer” as if nomadic groups who learned to live off the land somehow weren’t explorers in their own right centuries before we came along with our porters trailing along behind us.

Anyway… the book was disappointing. It wasn’t just the content matter that I found wanting but the very premise of it all in fact. There’s no doubt that he attempted participant observation that was as minimally invasive as it could be, but I’m not really sure what the point was. If he’d done it to learn about himself and the cultures he visited, fine. But to write about it and then go on to make films and write countless other books seems not a million miles from the rest of us profiting from what we take from these cultures in material terms.

In Papua New Guinea this is a particular problem because, in many societies there that are materially minimalist, one of the most precious possessions is knowledge itself. By taking part in the secret crocodile cult initiation, Allen was invited to share in the real wealth of the community. The act of writing this up into a book to share with the entire world is something I’m not sure the community, if they could understand what he’d done at the time, would not consider plunder. This would perhaps be reinforced if they could see the material benefits that Allen has reaped by doing this, especially if considered against the benefits they probably haven’t received as a result.

Let me lay the whole premise of the book aside if I can… the story begins in Irian Jaya actually where Allen fails to realise his plan to spend time with a particularly isolated group. This then provides him with the opportuntity to travel over to PNG and then integrate himself into the Niowra community who allow him to be initiated. I found the writing really disjointed once he got into the Niowra village. It certainly wasn’t as engaging or descriptive as the anthropologies and ethnographies that I’ve read and I think this may be a combination of his lack of expertise in this area and the audience he’s writing for. Bit of a shame really.

So, all in all, it didn’t grab me and left me feeling a bit disconcerted about the premise of his journey. Not great. show less

In his early sixties, Benedict Allen reflects on his life exploring. He spend a good chunk of the 1980s and later doing adventurous solo walks through places in the Amazon and PNG, relying only on the help of local peoples. Seemingly the most impressive experiences he had were in the wild forests and on the banks of the Sepik in PNG. At some point he gave up exploring and got a family and a house. Years later, just a few years before this was published in 2022, he goes back to PNG twice and show more spends time with the same people he had visited in his twenties. In between Allen gives us plenty of bemused philosophizing about why explorers go exploring, as well as a few too many dismissive comments about Western explorers. I enjoyed the book as he is describing places and situations - walking through warm tropical forests in PNG that I will probably not walk through, covered in leeches and, at the end, suffering from dengue and malaria. At the end of the book he is rescued by helicopter and instead of being profoundly grateful he tells us that he is not comfortable being saved. This all seems a little selfish considering as he was preparing himself to die in his journal a few hours before, and he has young children back in England. However he is appreciative of the traditional people of this place and is intimate with their world more than I will ever be. I enjoyed reading the book in that Allen could share some of that world of ancient Melanesian culture and its bird of paradise feathers in headdresses, its thick sense of community solidarity and its lost valleys and deep green forests where even the locals rarely if ever have been. Not a must read, but I was happy to read it as the shelf with recently published books about genuine exploration of my region is not a huge one. show less

This was, at least towards the end, a harrowing read - as the author's adventure travel in Amazonia threatens to cost him his life. Various decisions he made he questions himself, as I question some of his written judgements. In the end he made it and wrote this book but ultimately I am left with the feeling, so what? This is disappointing and unsatisfying for while I still admire Benedict Allens's flair and spirit of adventure this journey, undertaken in his youth, was not a great success.

This is certainly a tome. The text is very small, with introduction to each piece is written in even smaller font, with the notes in the smallest font I can read without a magnifying glass and my glasses. The book is about 3 inches thick, too, so getting through all 800 pages was no mean feat. This is an anthology of great texts, and for someone who is interested in, but not enthralled by, travel literature, the book is ideal. The "anthologer" is an ardent cultural "immerser" - a technique I show more enjoy - and an adventurer, so the anthology is put together rather well. Thoroughly enjoyable, and I am considerably more knowledgeable about far-off places and the extremes of geography. show less