New kind of Indiana Jones
With a prosthetic leg, travel host Albert Lin treks jungles, scales mountains and rides helicopters to explore lost cities.
WITH his science and technology background, explorer Albert Lin represents a new kind of Indiana Jones - and with his prosthetic leg, a bionic one too.
The American researcher hosts the new six-part National Geographic series, Lost Cities With Albert Lin. In it, he uses cuttingedge techniques such as satellite imaging and ground-penetrating radar to uncover the mysteries behind places such as the fabled El Dorado in Central America and Stonehenge in England.
At a recent press day in Beverly Hills, Lin – whose expertise is using technology for field research – reveals that the 1981 to 2008 Indiana Jones films starring Harrison Ford as a swashbuckling archaeologist were, in fact, “an inspiration for me as a kid”.
He has had adventures rivalling those of the fictional character, from encounters with deadly snakes and killer bees to surviving a road accident that led to the partial amputation of his leg and the fitting of a bionic limb.
And making this show for National Geographic has upped the Indiana Jones factor even more, it seems.
“This last year has been one of the most intense but amazing years of my life,” says the 38-year-old, who has a PhD in materials science and engineering and works at a University of California, San Diego think-tank that uses technology to address social issues.
“I started out in Israel, then I was high up on these coastal mountain ranges in Columbia and last week, I was hanging out of a Black Hawk helicopter in Jordan looking for traces of lost roads. And next week, I’m in Peru high up in the Andes,” he says.
The technological wizardry involved also takes nothing away from the sheer romance of exploration and, occasionally, the danger.
“The thing that has taken me aback is just how much that storybook image of an explorer truly exists today. With the places that we’re going to, we’re making real discoveries and we are helicoptering into the most remote places.
“And we’re fighting off deadly snakes – a fer de lance (pit viper) almost bit my cameraman and I was right there looking at it and thinking about that (Indiana Jones) line where he’s, like, ‘I hate snakes’,” Lin recalls with a laugh.
On the show, the modern-day explorer deploys many of the noninvasive archaeological tools he is known for – including satellite and thermal imaging as well as groundpenetrating radar – to discover more about so-called lost cities.
He travels to Acre, Israel, to learn about the 12th-century Knights Templar military order; to Colombia to uncover the truth behind the legend of El Dorado, the city of gold; and to Petra, Jordan, to dig into the origins of the civilisation that built the city.
“There’s something very powerful about what’s happening now in the age of discovery.
“We are applying technologies to moments of discovery that are fundamentally changing how we see ourselves, the world and our history,” says the scientist, who first used these methods to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan, the 12th-century
Mongolian conqueror.
He did not find it, but ended up popularising the use of online crowdsourcing in this field, recruiting thousands of people to help analyse millions of satellite images of possible archaeological sites.
Lin – who is in a relationship with Brazilian life coach Bruna Bortolato and has two children – is also determined to keep telling these stories.
The fact that he now has a prosthetic limb is not going to stop him.
The explorer had his right leg amputated from the knee down after an off-road car accident in 2016 and now describes himself as “partially bionic” because of his prosthesis.
“I’m very proud of National Geographic for taking a pretty bold risk.
“They didn’t even ask, ‘Can you climb that mountain or go through that jungle?’ It was, ‘Let’s just go do it.’
“What’s been really powerful for me is going, like, ‘Let’s never think about the physical limits, let’s always think about the story and how we get there’.”
His story is encouraging others. “I get messages from other people who have lost a leg, or their child has.”
And Lin does not feel any physical limitations.
“I feel like the mind is the place where you find limitations, and if you have a good relationship with your mind, then you can be essentially limitless.” – The Straits Times/ Asia News Network
Lost Cities With Albert Lin premieres tomorrow at 10pm on National Geographic (Astro Ch 553/unifi TV Ch 508).