Our brilliant bird-brained jungle quest
One is wheelchair-bound, the other has VERY painful memories of Papua New Guinea. So Frank Gardner and Benedict Allen’s hunt for the elusive bird of paradise was never going to be easy...
IN A persistent, whining swarm, mosquitoes clustered around us, undeterred by our swipes as we slapped ineffectively at our arms and necks. Four days after arriving in Papua New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, we were deep in the swamps, on our way to meet a tribe known as the ‘Crocodile People’.
The muggy heat was intense. There was not a breath of wind to cool our faces, no respite from the open-air sauna that is the Sepik River valley.
So why travel 9,000 miles just to get attacked by a bunch of bloodthirsty mosquitoes? There was method to our madness. I had always yearned to see birds of paradise in the wild. After I got shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia 13 years ago (the injuries left my legs largely paralysed), I lay on my hospital bed thinking: ‘Damn, why didn’t I go to Papua New Guinea when I could have? Now I’ve left it too late.’
But then a chance encounter with explorer Benedict Allen made me realise it wasn’t too late. Undaunted by my wheelchair, Benedict offered to take me to a country where he had spent months living among a remote tribe in the 1980s. Not one to
do things by halves, he had volunteered back then for their gruelling scarring and beating fest, a rite of passage for boys becoming men.
The BBC was intrigued by the prospect that our impossible jungle quest might make good TV. And so, as we emerged from the swamps, another sound replaced the whine of mosquitoes: drums. Word had reached the Crocodile People that Benedict, their long-lost son, was coming home. Two large wooden dugout canoes came from the village to meet us.
Faces were daubed in a ghostly grey paint made of clay; many wore sharply curved boars’ tusks in their hair and the men’s black headdresses were piled high with feathers plucked from the cassowary bird. They were chanting, swaying their half-naked bodies from side to side and stamping their feet in the shifting canoes.
Benedict did not look happy. This was ‘the beating song’, a terrifying throwback to a time of pain he had put himself through. The drums were opening up old wounds.
We slept in palm-thatch huts, alert to the constant scuttling of animals above our heads. Once, Simon the cameraman awoke in the middle of the night and hissed: ‘P*** off!’ A rat had just fallen from the roof on to his face.
The food was dire: cold, congealed sago, which had all the appeal of damp wallpaper, and Spam. Yes, Spam. Then Benedict tried to get me interested in a pile of live sago grubs he had foraged: great fat, squirming maggots with pussfilled heads. Even though I managed to resist, both Benedict and I still went down with food poisoning for a day.
And yet, despite all the hardships, it was worth it. The Papuans were goodnatured, taking care and patience not to drop me on the steep, muddy trails they carried me over. The scenery was spectacular: there were mud-filled ravines and towering fruit trees, and one night we camped out at over 10,000ft in the highlands inside a grass hut, our breath frosting in the chill air as we roasted sweet potatoes in the embers of a fire. But did we see the birds of paradise? Ah well, that would be telling… I REMEMBER the moment clearly. Six years ago, Frank said the one thing he regretted was that he’d never get to New Guinea’s highlands to see birds of paradise. ‘Oh, I can easily fix that!’ I said, without thinking.
I hadn’t been to Papua New Guinea for three decades. I knew nothing much about Frank, let alone his birds, except they had magnificent feathers and that I’d eaten three.
I could only hope some old mates would lend a hand – and my mind turned to Kandengei village. It was there, aged 24, that I’d gone through a brutal initiation ceremony: that must count for something. The Kandengeis might help us out.
The idea of turning this into a documentary sounded flimsy but to my surprise the BBC said ‘yes’ and it was then I learnt the extent of Frank’s injuries. If he were dropped even once it would be ‘game over’, as our beefy expedition medic said.
Thankfully, the Kandengeis remembered me. Indeed, two canoeloads of dancers came to greet me. It was an extraordinary scene. ‘These images will stay with me for ever,’ said Frank. ‘Same here,’ I muttered, as unfortunate memories resurfaced. The initiation had been designed to make me ‘a man as strong as a crocodile’. I was thrashed every day for six weeks.
Only once I’d caught sight of the familiar faces, the thatched houses and excited children, did I began to appreciate the welcome. It was as if the Kandengeis had been waiting all this time – and indeed, they have no word for ‘goodbye’. No one ever leaves.
Days later, we were being escorted through the jungle. By night Frank was racked by pain but there was a sense of mounting excitement too. This quest had started as a remark between two blokes at a bar, and now whole communities were involved, handling my companion, poised magnificently in a glorious sedan chair. Did we find the birds? I’m sworn to secrecy. But the journey was never entirely about them. It was about the highs and lows of a joint quest in a most
spectacular land. Birds Of Paradise: The Ultimate Quest will be screened on BBC2 on February 3 and 10 at 9pm.