Benedict Allen : Inside Story

“My attitude has been that readers or viewers should be free to take what they can – if anything! – from whatever I’ve produced without me interfering by trying to explain or justify. Over the years I’ve given very little explanation even of the earliest four books, which I don’t see as from any conventional mould – nor of my personal motivation for doing all these lone, madcap ventures beyond the glib and all-too easy “because it’s there” type answers. But now, twenty-five years from when I set out, and the last major expedition a few years ago, it might be time to offer up more. Personally, I think most of us spend too long dwelling on ourselves, and I’ve been sickeningly self-indulgent already in even having a website! But as I do frequently get asked what really makes me tick, I’ll try to be as open and frank as possible here and hope these thoughts are of some interest - and even of some use to others setting out on their own path.

“First some background: with a father who was a pilot, an older cousin serving in the Ghurkhas, another the distinguished writer on India Charles Allen, my childhood was steeped in tales of exciting, exotic lands. I began to fill my bedroom shelves with things my dad brought back for me - African weaverbird nests, fossils, even a stuffed baby crocodile and a snake preserved in a bottle of meths. So, not surprising that I felt intrigued by the wider world - but neither my brother nor sister were interested in travel and nor was it actually travelling that I was interested in. I was perhaps an unusual child: a bit of a dreamer, a bit confused I daresay – nothing unusual in this, but I seemed to be by nature fearsomely independent, always looking for my own solutions. What’s more, I seemed to lack something: I felt I wasn’t feeling life as much as others - or maybe I should say I didn’t seem able to appreciate life simply as it was. I found myself wanting to hurl myself at the world, get to grips with it. So, sad to say, my primary impulse to head off into the wilds was only partially to do with pleasure or curiosity: my main desire was just to try and make head or tail of the world - and venturing to the far corners and writing about it seemed the obvious way in which to process my thoughts. I became more and more certain that this was what I was going to do. This was my destiny, I thought: and importantly, my relatives had shown me that a life of adventure was indeed possible.

“After school, I headed to the university [University of East Anglia] which had, I felt, perhaps the best degree in the world-at-large. But by the final year, this strange inner compulsion to launch myself off into Nowhere was almost un-containable: rather than concentrating on my Finals, I joined two expeditions, and led a third. The university banned me from a fourth – and perhaps just as well.

“However, a problem had begun to emerge: how to carry out my expeditions without any money? My parents didn’t have any – the private school I’d been to, Bradfield [College], had been paid for out of their savings, topped up by my grandmother. “There followed a year [at the University of Aberdeen] studying for an MSc. degree in Ecology, though to be honest my mind wasn’t on it. (Perhaps I should mention right here that when my mind is on something, it’s TOTALLY on it – everything else in the world is eclipsed. I must be one of only a handful of people to have been awarded very gratifying 100% at one university for the undergraduate thesis, and very distinct zero at the next). I was pre-occupied with how to bring about my first independent journey. Furthermore, it seemed to me that now - at what was the tail end of the era of exploration and the beginning of the era of mass tourism - journeys to the far North Pole or across Borneo or anywhere else weren’t actually journeys of discovery any more. They weren’t necessary. Physical frontiers were being advanced only by the scientists – one of which I was not. So if this possibly self-destructive compulsion of mine was going to be of any use to anyone – and I had the good sense to know that I needed a perfectly clear vision of what I was going to be doing, and be able to justify it or else I’d fall apart along the way - it would have to be through my writing. Exploration is a mental, not just physical process – and the world will always need interpreting afresh, just as Livingstone explored central Africa (already actually quite well explored by the Arabs) for the Victorian world. And so there evolved a scheme to cross from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon, which would take me through what was, I thought, the least known terrain on our planet - and be the perfect context for the first of what I planned to be a quartet of books on the themes arising from remote terrain and our human impulse to explore it.

“But there remained the practical question: how to pull off what was (judged by any normal expedition criteria) a ridiculously hard journey, AND when I didn’t have any money. As I’ve just said, the venture had no scientific purpose – indeed, no useful wider purpose whatsoever (other than whatever uncertain new insights into man and nature that my books might provide) - and wasn’t going to attract sponsorship. Then it struck me that the locals didn’t have any money either! So, what I should do, I decided, was go alone and learn some of the indigenous peoples’ skills: in a sense, they’d become my sponsors.

“I worked in a nearby warehouse [sorting books for the bookshop chain Hammick’s,] to raise funds for at least a return flight, and lived with my dear, long-suffering mother and father in Alton [Hampshire, Southern England]. It was something I was to continue to do, in order to earn money between successive expeditions, until the age of twenty seven! Looking back now, I see how hard it must have been for them. I mean, they were helping sustain their youngest son’s passion – or obsession – for heading year upon year into terrain that he was ill-equipped to cope in, even when that passion had already come close to killing him. What a selfless thing they did for me; who could ask for more of a parent?

“People sometimes ask whether I didn’t have doubts, during these years, about my future – after all, by the age of thirty I still didn’t have what my mum fondly called a Proper Job – and I’d like to say a bit about this because I know there are lots of people who are like I was back then and have an idea of something they want to do, but are discouraged by the worst sort of teachers, role-models, career advisors or parents. Yes, you bet I had doubts! 12 years went by before I was making anything like a living. It was easy for me in one sense, though: I was driven. I couldn’t see any other choice. But of course if you are doing anything out of the ordinary then there’ll be those who’ll criticize or attack you, sometimes out of professional jealousy, sometimes from the best of motives – and I certainly was attacked back then. It was hard to take both because my parents had suffered so much, worrying for me while I was away doing these things, and because I had more experience of lone rainforest travel than just about anyone. This was a quarter of a century ago now, and I was an unknown upstart who’d apparently pulled off a colossal physical feat – and in record-breaking time - and then didn’t bother to explain or document it. So, maybe I was asking for trouble. In time, though, my track record did begin to speak for itself, and the self-filmed expeditions also helped show the integrity with which I like to think I approach my work. Looking back I can understand just how irritating my “daring exploits” must have been – and perhaps are - to many people. Sometimes no doubt I haven’t been vigilant enough with facts – and this becomes complicated further by journalists and TV producers, who tend to exaggerate, or at least make the most of, whatever stories I do have to tell. Besides, we “adventurers” get far too much attention. I think the likes of me – mountaineers, polar athletes, desert-trekkers and others doing treks today - should not be regarded as heroic for these feats. Self-indulgent and narcissistic perhaps, but not heroic! Now, my grandfather was blown up in the First World War while trying to rescue a wounded soldier from No Man’s Land: he was a hero.

But this is all by-the-by. All I’m saying is that you have to expect criticism if you are attempting to achieve something new, and thus are deliberately putting your head above the parapet – afterall, this ordnance flying at you isn’t going to kill. This is just the nature of things, and best just to keep believing in yourself, keep that clear vision of where you are going, and let your endeavours and good character speak for themselves in time. It IS vital to listen to the criticism of those who do actually know your faults, because there ARE bound to be many. There certainly were, and are, in my case. But that’s enough on all this.

“Until well into my thirties, then, even though I had left home, I was dependent on kind-hearted people who let me sleep in their spare rooms or sofa-beds for little or no rent. But sorry, I need to go back a bit: I’d noticed as a schoolboy that I was different – or thought I was. And I suppose every child feels they are. But three things helped me believe I was unusual, and therefore might succeed despite everything: first, I had my crystal clear idea of how my future would be – specifically, I could envisage the quartet of books that would one day result from my first journeys. Second, like my test pilot dad, I was calm in a crisis yet had unusually fast reactions – this became something of a running joke at school, where one or two other pupils would spring tests on me. Thirdly, I had an extraordinary tunnel vision at times – I’ve mentioned already how I got the highest possible marks for a university thesis, and totally blew the next. There’s an otherworldliness about me which hasn’t left to this day – I know I come over to many people as someone unbelievably absent-minded, or vague. My mind is elsewhere – but as long as “elsewhere” is the right place, this helps me zone in on an objective, switch off distractions and sensations from around me. For example, at these times (and this of course can also be dangerous) I’m hardly conscious of cold or pain – or notice very much about anything else. But I don’t want to make a meal of this : I just want to say that I think this sense of being special made me feel that my early expeditions, though ludicrously ambitious, might in my case actually be achievable. I had the great advantage of believing that the normal rules didn’t apply in my case – helped by copious naivety.

“For a start, it was a ludicrously naïve notion to think I could just turn up, hope for hospitality, and that I might somehow acquire skills that indigenous people had acquired over generations. I did have the good sense to know that it would be wrong to risk someone else on any of my ventures, thank goodness. But, as it turned out, this innocence didn’t kill me – actually, I think it was what kept me alive on that first journey. No one saw me as a threat: rather, I was seen as vulnerable, and I was handed, like a parcel, through the forest by various wonderful people (who didn’t want me to die on their hands, perhaps!). It did go wrong at the end – when I had to walk about 65 miles out of the forest (east of the Jari river), and suddenly found myself facing the reality of the Amazon without assistance. This was when there was all that business of having to eat the dog. But too much has been made of that – it wasn’t a pet, and to be absolutely frank I’m really not sure I could respect someone who wouldn’t do such a thing, indeed anything at all, in order to live to see his or her loved ones again.

“None-the-less, the general expedition methodology worked – after a fashion. And although I can see now that I was a danger to everyone who helped me, I could at least see that I had begun to learn. This formula that I’d developed out of necessity now became my modus operandi.

“It was back to the warehouse whilst I wrote the first book [Mad White Giant] of the quartet and, before publication, headed off on the second expedition. I didn’t want to return to the Amazon for a while – it might seem glamorous, reading about it, but in truth I’d had miserable and frightening times there – and pitched myself into Irian Jaya, the only other region of the planet where there were un-acculturated Rain Forest people. Eventually, I ended up in the Sepik [next door, in PNG]. This was a less physically remote place – but where cultural practices were still remote from our understanding. But what sort of person in their right mind would voluntarily go through a ceremony in which you are physically scarred and beaten for weeks? The answer is, someone who’s been emotionally scarred – you can just imagine what turmoil my mind was in, after having been alone for weeks struggling for my life in the Amazon. And all these years on, I can’t help but notice that all the journeys since have repeated a pattern - I’ve been re-living the experience of the first journey, as people who’ve undergone extreme trauma do. I seem to have been condemned, in a way that Buddhists might understand, to repeat my life until I’d got it right – Ground Hog Day.

This process only seemed to end on my last big trek, when I went to the Arctic [Russian Far East] , and almost died again – along with my dog team. In the event, I turned back from my objective, to cross the Bering Strait, somewhere approximately midway (I believe) out there. I’d decided to get the dogs safely home. Was this redemption? Ten dog lives brought back safely, after my loss of one in the Amazon? I really don’t know – and though I’ve gone on and on about myself, sharing my private thoughts here, actually none of these matters I’m used to discussing. My strict rule is not to ponder my motives or what others think of my work; I’d have lost my vision of where I’m going - or my sanity - years ago, otherwise. My close friends and family all know not to question me about these things – they only ever meet a wall, if they do. But I must confess that since my safe return from the Arctic I don’t have that same, turbulent compulsion – and haven’t physically pushed myself to the limit in the years since. There just remains the original, troubled schoolchild’s compulsion to understand the world – and any creative person has the much the same, don’t you think?

“Finally, a short word on how my writing progressed: At last, the intended quartet was written – they were not travelogues, the traditional personalized, eye-witness account of a journey, but four books written according to four different moods, and each reflecting the pre-occupations and perceptions of a young person as he or she goes about his/her journey into a faraway world. Obviously they are meant to give insight into the physical locations as well but my main interest was that together the four books might combine the themes of journeying into the unfamiliar – Homer’s The Odyssey, but rooted in very real experience.

“Maybe one day I’ll try my hand at trying to piece together the journeys – in particular that first Orinoco- Amazon journey - in a more considered way, with references to other writers, to scientists, and enriched with all manner of thoughtful observations in the way of other travelogues. But, as I said earlier, the era of geographical exploration was coming to a close and, with all the arrogance of someone still in their early twenties I was adamant that I must forge something new. I’d read about a classical composer – someone I now take to have been Brahms. He’d wondered what he could ever achieve with his music – Beethoven had already done everything! He’d reached all the heights. So he decided he must look sideways instead. And appearing on the scene long after the likes of Burton, Speke and Stanley, I thought I must do the same. The answer was to go about doing the last great land journeys – and explore the experience of doing them, the themes thrown up by each journey rather than detail the actual place I passed through. After all, there were botanists, zoologists, anthropologists and other scientists far better equipped than me to record the people and terrain. In some books more than others, it meant relegating reasoned observation – and in the most extreme case, Mad White Giant, the “firey” book, this was flagged up by the use of pastiche and satire in cartoon-like sketches. But it would be wrong to say that this book distorted or exaggerated the difficulties or course of that first journey, which – modesty aside! - I think rather a good physical achievement.

“The next, fifth, book (Through Jaguar Eyes) was designed to be a more “complete” and balanced account – an amalgam of the four styles/moods, but still interested more in the perception of the traveller, the act of journeying rather than the conveying of the geographical, historical or other texture of the land encountered.

“There followed simple diary accounts of my journeys - the “twin books” Skeleton Coast and Edge of Blue Heaven – then Last of the Medicine Men, a fairly uncomplicated overview of my experiences looking at healers around the world, again for the TV. It seemed fitting that my tenth book would feature a trek through the Arctic during which my fate would hang on the fate of the canine species - as it had on my first.

“Of course, taking a video camera along by now had given an extra dimension to the accurate recording of the journey. By the way – and I’m not sure I’ve said this before - it was Anita Roddick (of Bodyshop) who paid for my first video camera. She’d once said to me that if there was anything she could do to further my work, be sure to let her know. When I wrote one day to her saying the BBC had kindly asked me to record my forthcoming Amazon journey – but hadn’t given me any money for it! – she sent a personal cheque by return of post. What an extraordinary person... And that’s how my first telly programme, and (for better and often for worse!) a new TV genre came about.”