‘I had to eat the dog’: explorer Benedict Allen on his adventures, the scars on his chest and being ‘lost’ in the jungle

The explorer and writer tells Ed Peters about the time the media had to ‘rescue’ him, having to eat his canine companion and the ritual scars on his torso

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Explorer Benedict Allen in Namibia. Allen prefers to do his own filming on his expeditions. “Nothing’s staged, so the filiming is truly authentic,” says Allen, who looks back on a life of adventure with the Post’s Ed Peters. Photo: Benedict Allen

Published: 4:00pm, 20 Oct 2023Updated: 4:07pm, 20 Oct 2023

Wanderlust is part of my family inheritance – many of my forebears went to India and other foreign parts – but I was born in not terribly exotic Macclesfield, just south of Manchester, in England, in 1960. My father was a test pilot involved in the development of the Royal Air Force’s Vulcan bomber.

By the time I was 10, I was focused on discovering what was going on in the wider world. I was not so interested in toys per se, but I loved hunting for fossils on family holidays along the Jurassic Coast in Devon and Dorset, where there’s 185 million years of geological history, and turned our garden shed into a fossil museum.

I was also fascinated by the exploits of men like explorers and writers Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens van der Post, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl and Peter Matthiessen. I’ve been lucky enough to meet all of them, and naturalist David Attenborough, too.

I read environmental science at university, and took time off to join expeditions to a volcano in Costa Rica, a forest in Brunei and a glacier in Iceland, all of which whetted my appetite to go somewhere even more remote and – preferably – on my own.

Benedict Allen with Yaifo tribespeople. The Yaifo people are a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. Photo: Benedict Allen

Mad white giant

Aged 22, I came up with the idea of trekking through the forest between the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers, in Brazil. There were no maps, so I was going to have to navigate myself, and there was no sponsor so I worked in a warehouse to get some funds together.

I’ve been (briefly) shipwrecked off Australia, and had to stitch up a chest wound with a bootlace in Sumatra. No anaesthetic, either

Benedict Allen