Wanderlust that’s served up with an endearing dollop of self-deprecation
★★★★ ★
In the “I’ve Got a Big One” tribe of travel writers, Benedict Allen stands out for the authenticity of his self-deprecation. You really believe he thinks he’s a bit of a git as he eats his dog (in the Amazon), sews up his thoracic cavity with a boot-mending kit (in Sumatra) or picks away the leeches which have destroyed the insoles of his feet (in Papua New Guinea, as recounted in this new book). Entitled Explorer, it addresses the question: why bother?
Allen sets the scene with a canter through early years in which he venerated his test-pilot father, took a degree in environmental science and scattered leaves on the floor of his student digs “to replicate a jungle floor”. Twenty years of adventuring, including submission to lengthy, disfiguring initiation rites in Papua New Guinea, eventually ushered in television fame when Allen made six series for BBC Two, pioneering the camcorder selfie to film solo expeditions without a crew.
Marriage, three children and semi-retirement followed, then, in the middle section of Explorer, Allen describes two trips back to Papua New Guinea with Frank Gardner, the BBC security correspondent paralysed by terrorists in 2004. The aim, eventually fulfilled, was for the twitcher Gardner to observe a bird of paradise in its
natural habitat. Allen apparently hated the whole stuntish endeavour (“I’ll never be induced to watch the film”), though he got on well with the heroic Gardner.
Allen’s long-standing credo, his USP, is that “exploration is not about planting flags or conquering Nature or going somewhere to make your mark. It’s about opening yourself up, and allowing a place to make its mark on you”. The last part of this new volume comes to life like a mosaic splashed with water as our man wakes as if from a reverie and, in his late fifties, takes off again for Papua New Guinea on “a serious lone expedition”.
This was in 2017, before the plague descended. Allen chartered a chopper
in Wewak, capital of East Sepik province, and then over 18 punishing days he and a group of hastily assembled Papuans (not quite “lone”, after all) battle through ‘sumps of creamy mud” to reach a tiny settlement of Yaifo people above the forest canopy.
There Allen is reunited with a dear friend of his youthful initiation-rite days. Explorer, he says, is actually, “a book about friendship – the value of disconnecting from our own world and the importance of connecting with another”. Further contemplation of the point of life itself precedes ignominious rescue by two men from a tabloid newspaper. This is fresh, new material, set out diary-style, and Allen maintains the tension until the final pages.
He is an engaging writer, adding dashes of exploration history to the mix as well as quotations from the usual suspects, from environmental activist Wendell Berry to travel writer and indigenous champion Norman Lewis. Even his unintended humour is endearing: “I had occasionally met HRH Prince Philip, along with Premier League footballers and other interesting celebrities.”
To a certain extent, the book is a love song to the Yaifo and all peoples struggling to maintain dignity and culture in a world gone wrong, or at least a world determined to drag every last remote group into the cash economy and hack out their hard metals and hydrocarbons. “This was the way of the white man,” Allen summarises. “First they came for your soul [missionaries], then they came for what lay beneath your land, and finally they came for the land itself.”
“To traverse a landscape is not necessarily to explore it,” he writes, and it is a theme which recurs; indeed, it could be the subtitle of the whole book. The actual title, Explorer, is therefore odd, exemplifying the contradiction at the heart of Allen’s endeavour: he’s made a living out of seeing how dead he can get under the “exploration” banner, yet the inner man rebels. The tension is not new. Allen’s first book, Mad White Giant (1985), was supposed to be, in part, “an angry attack on my own kind”. But who among us is not a mass of contradictions? I think more of him for his doubts and muddles, not less. The travelling sisterhood will cancel my visa, but I enjoyed this book.
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