RESCUED!
Mail saves malaria-hit British explorer from jungle as he is caught between warring tribes
explorer Benedict Allen begged his wife’s forgiveness as the Mail rescued him from the jungle yesterday.
Weak from malaria, the veteran adventurer had become trapped between warring tribes in one of the most remote spots on Earth.
After the Mail found the father of three yesterday and handed him a satellite phone to call his wife Lenka, he told her: ‘I’m so sorry I’ve put you through this, Linky.
‘I’ve been missing you and fighting every inch of the way to get back to you and the family. I never quite gave up. Thanks for not giving up on me.’
On learning that he was being rescued, Mr Allen, 57, exclaimed: ‘I can’t believe it. Hell’s bells.’
The Mail launched the mission after a frantic Mrs Allen, 35, raised the alarm, saying her husband was missing. Following tip- offs from tribal chiefs, we hired a helicopter and found him deep in the jungle amid towering volcanic peaks.
The explorer, who has six BBC TV series to his name, had been trying to reach a lost tribe called the Yaifo – the ‘last people on Earth’ with no contact with the outside world.
He spent three days with them but ran into trouble trying to make his way back to civilisation, apparently contracting malaria and finding himself stranded in the Hewa valley. Dubbed ‘the land that time forgot’, the valley has become a war zone, with the Hewa people and their Paiela neighbours fighting with bows and arrows.
Mr Allen said last night: ‘I’m known as a survivor, but things were not looking good. I didn’t think I’d make it.
‘But I had to believe somehow that something would happen, and you came out of the clouds.’
MISSING explorer Benedict Allen’s first words to his wife, Lenka, after disappearing into a hostile jungle three weeks ago, were: ‘I am sorry, so very sorry I have put you through this.’ Then, feverish with malaria, this inveterate adventurer broke down in tears.
Benedict, 57, was speaking via satellite phone at a deserted missionary base in the remote Enga province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) five days after Lenka, the mother of his three young children, Natalya, ten, Freddie, seven, and two-year- old Beatrice, had reported him missing.
She has barely slept for worry since. Benedict had set off on an expedition to reach the remote Yaifo tribe — which is thought to be one of the last on Earth to have no contact with the outside world — with no satellite phone, no GPS device and no companion. Benedict might still be there now were it not for a rescue mission by the Daily Mail which involved hiring a helicopter and airlifting the stricken explorer from a war-torn and very remote area of PNG.
Speaking for the first time since news of his disappearance made headlines around the world, he said: ‘I can’t thank the Mail enough. I am so grateful. I’m known as a survivor, but things were not looking good. I had this terrible dilemma: do I stay out here in a remote village and believe that, somehow, a miracle would happen and a plane would come — or do I try to control my destiny somehow and head out to find help when I’m weak?’
Lenka, too, is grateful her husband is safe — but also angry with him for worrying them sick — and for not taking a phone with him.
When the Mail finally found him in the early hours of yesterday morning, it was immediately clear that everyone’s worst fears were well-founded.
For Benedict was fast giving up hope of ever seeing his young family again after finding himself caught up in a tribal war and struck down by malaria.
He’d embarked on a hellish trek through jungle aiming to cover 30 miles in an unsuccessful bid to reach the pick-up point, and just 24 hours before the Mail arrived, his fever — which comes and goes in cycles — had such a desperate hold of him that he was too weak to stand.
But Benedict had survived thanks to kindly tribesmen who’d found him and looked after him, feeding him sweet potato to build his strength as he lay sweating and confused for ten days. Overnight, his fever abated. He awoke realising that if he remained there he would surely die, so was preparing to take his chances on foot through the jungle when he saw our helicopter circling.
‘It’s still just an illusion you’re here,’ he said, after we landed on the remote Hewa airstrip near the abandoned missionary station where Benedict was being cared for. Ashen-faced and disorientated, he said: ‘I’ve had to focus so hard and hold myself together so much. I just thought “forest, forest, I’ve got to get out, got to get out,” so you’re just a dream to me.
‘It wasn’t looking good. I knew deep down as an experienced explorer that the calculations were bad. I didn’t think I’d make it.
‘But I had to believe, somehow, that something would happen.’
His survival is nothing short of a miracle. Benedict set off to the jungle on October 26 after working as a guide to a private party of tourists for two weeks in PNG.
He phoned Lenka, to whom he has been married for ten years, at the family home in Prague while he waited for the helicopter that was going to drop him in the jungle. It was to be the last she would hear from him for 22 days.
Lenka, 35, who met Benedict when she was studying in London as a 19-year- old, had argued long and hard against his going — with good reason.
After becoming a father, Benedict — who as a single man was forced to eat his dog to avoid d starving in the Amazon, was s shipwrecked canoeing to o Australia and has been shot at by y drugs hitmen — vowed to settle e down and put his family first, but t then temptation got too much.
Benedict was actually setting g out to rediscover the ‘lost’ Yaifo o people he first encountered as a 23-year-old, during which time he underwent a brutal initiation n ceremony with the Niowra tribe to become ‘as strong as a crocodile.’ .’
He told Lenka the tribe, with th whom he lived for six months, s, were like a family to him. Today, ay, he carries hundreds of tiny scars rs on his back and front from the he bamboo cuts administered during ng the ceremony. His legs are also so covered with tribal tattoos. ‘
‘I had settled down,’ he says. ‘It It was all going very well until I agreed to take [BBC reporter] Frank Gardner to PNG last year to make a programme about birds of paradise.
‘During that trip I met one of the people I’d walked with to find the Yaifo. He said: “Benedict, they’re still there and no one has seen them since you saw them.”
‘That made me want to go there — I just woke with this impulse impulse. No one paid me to go. There was no TV commission.’
Yesterday, after a meal and some sleep, Benedict conceded he was, perhaps, too impulsive. ‘I’m driven by dreams and this irrational passion,’ he says. ‘It’s good and bad. As we can see it gets me into trouble.’ Indeed.
Benedict arranged to be dropped
‘When you are pushed to the limit you feel more alive’
by b helicopter at Bisorio abandoned missionary station deep in the jungle. It took ten days of hard trekking to reach the tribe, through torrential rain and flash floods.
‘The ants literally rain down on you. They get really angry when it rains. They bite the first thing they see. But my biggest concern was always disease. It distorts your mind so you can’t think straight.
‘But when you are pushed to the limit you feel more alive. That’s why I go to the jungle.
‘You’re setting off into your own world. You are in charge of your destiny. It’s very different from when you’re in a family and you’re besieged. This is your own thing.’ When Benedict eventually reached the Yaifo people on November 5 it was just as he remembered all those years before. ‘They did the same dance. Last time it was threatening but this time it was friendlier because they remembered me.
‘They settled down around me and there was Korsi, the man who guided me out all those years ago, embracing me. He looked exactly the same — the headdress, the spines sticking out of his nose, the canes around his waist — but a bit older, as I do.’
His expedition had been a success so, after three days with them, Benedict, armed with his video camera, set off back into the jungle to return to civilisation, aiming to head back to Bisorio abandoned missionary station where he’d been dropped off. He planned to fly to Hong Kong from PNG’s capital, Port Moresby, and give a talk on his adventures. But that was when it began to go wrong. For as he made his way across the Central Range of mountains he had warnings from locals of ‘fierce fighting ahead’.
Unbeknown to Benedict, a violent bow-and-arrow feud was raging between the Paiela tribe and Hewa people. Then, hampered by torrential rain, he began to recognise signs of malaria, which he’s had five times before.
‘Every night I made a shelter out of palm leaves, but each night there was a terrible tropical storm which tore through my palm leaves and left me completely soaked through. I was spending four hours each night out of my sleeping bag trying to repair the shelter in the mud.’
When he did sleep, biting centipedes and poisonous spiders the size of fists crawled around his sleeping bag.
But he said the worst peril was electrical storms that sent whole trees crashing down ‘ like a hammer’ at night — pulverising everything in their path.
‘I was very wet and cold. By now I was walking through the territory of the Hewa tribe, and met people telling me I couldn’t go on. I was still trying to brave it out. But my legs were bad — I had deep cuts from hacking through thorn trees. The forest was wearing me down.
‘Then the fever kicked in, and I remembered when I had malaria before and the horrible feeling.
‘I didn’t want to turn into a zombie again. I reached some huts called Yaowi village and stayed there a night, but the people said the war was closing in on us and people were dying.
‘By now I had piercing headaches and pains in my spleen.
‘I’m not sure the Hewa people realised how ill I was — they just thought no white man ever walks over those mountains and he looks knackered.
‘I was really dehydrated. I was spent. I really needed water. I set off along a trail but began fainting — that has never happened to me before.’
Concerned villagers told him to head to the Hewa mission station — which was where he eventually met the two brothers who were to be his saviours.
‘I had a gruelling march over a ridge. I was going ten steps and then having to stop. The Hewa thought I was ruined. To my humiliation, they were carrying all my bags to the missionary station.’
Benedict cannot recall much after this. He knows he was there for days, and that without the kindness of the Hewa tribespeople, he would be dead.
‘I’ve always found my way home and this is the first time it looked like I really wasn’t going to.’
As for not taking the satellite phone, he says: ‘To me, exploration is about being honest and mentally immersing yourself.
‘My objective is simply to go and listen to local people so if I want to do that I’ve got to leave my world behind and be prepared to deal with the consequences if things go wrong. ‘It’s not until
‘I needed water, but I began fainting again’
you’re a father that you start to think: “what if something goes wrong at home?”
‘It begins to eat away at you. There I was lying in that Hewa mission hut thinking, “I’ve got malaria.” Yesterday morning, my head felt like it was in a vice. I was trying to keep my head clear, but that’s when the family photos I carry started to haunt me.
‘These people who are your life, your legacy — they’re what you live for — and you’re in a terrible trap. This is the first time I’ve had to face that. There was nothing I could do.’ He looks desolate for a moment.
Meanwhile in Prague, where his older children are at school, Lenka was beginning to panic.
‘I was waiting to hear from him on Saturday and didn’t. On Sunday I checked his emails and saw one saying, “we are expecting you in Hong Kong tomorrow, are you OK?” Then there was another on the Monday saying, “we are at the airport where are you?”
‘I began to get desperately worried. I’d just had this sense over the weekend that something was wrong, then when everyone else started to worry I realised he was missing.’
Lenka contacted Benedict’s agent, his sister Katie and a TV location producer in Hong Kong, Steven Ballantyne, who began co-ordinating a search.
‘When I discovered from Steven that he didn’t have a satellite phone I was cross,’ says Lenka. ‘I understand that’s the way he does things. He doesn’t like fakery. He is always determined to be authentic. But, I felt: “How dare he risk his life when he’s got three kids?”
‘How am I going to cope if something happens to him? How will we survive?’
Lenka barely slept and also had the terrible task of telling the children. ‘Freddie said, “I think Daddy is probably just walking. He’ll be fine.”
‘But Natalya was anxious. When she saw what was being written about him in the papers she kept hugging me and saying, “Mummy he will be OK, won’t he?”’
Unbeknown to Lenka, though, her husband’s rescue was already beginning. Two brothers from the Hewa tribe who’d rescued Benedict set out on a two-day journey to get out the message that their fellow tribesmen had found him.
Eventually, they came across a village with a solitary mobile telephone, then walked 30 miles to climb a mountain for a signal.
It is unclear who they spoke to but word reached Christian missionary Keith Copley who passed on the news and Benedict’s location to Mr Ballantyne.
In co-operation with Lenka, the Mail flew to the city of Mount Hagen in the highlands of PNG, where helicopter pilot John Russack took us on a 55-minute flight to Benedict’s location.
Meanwhile, below us, he prepared to leave his missionary refuge. As we soared over a 4,000ft mountain ridge, our pilot spotted movement.
He threw the helicopter into a circle and made three circuits of the valley before the unmistakeably white face — atop a particularly tall body — emerged from the long grass. We landed on the deserted Hewa airstrip and I stretched out my hand to him, saying, ‘Mr Allen I presume? Your wife has sent us to collect you.’
Had we arrived half an hour later, Benedict would by then have set off into one of the most hostile terrains on the planet — which doesn’t bear thinking about.
‘I wasn’t expecting it. You were like angels. One minute I was thinking, “I’ve got one last chance at this,” then you dropped out of the sky,’ he says.
That emotional conversation with Lenka via satellite phone follows: ‘I would have found a way home, Linky,’ he said. ‘I had my doubts in the middle of the night, I have to say, but I’ve been fighting every inch of the way to get back to you and the family. I never quite gave up. Thanks for not giving up on me.’
The call ends. His blue eyes dance. ‘It’s difficult to say I won’t do it again and not cross my fingers. I guess boys will always be boys, or explorers will always be explorers.’ He laughs. Alone.
‘You were like angels, dropping from the sky’