– by Benedict Allen
This is the story of an extraordinary quest by a lone explorer, one that ends dramatically, deep in the heart of New Guinea. But it’s also a story about all of us – for we all have dreams and challenges, and we are all explorers of our world.
The book tells how a little boy one day looked up into the grey skies of Cheshire to watch a plane fly overhead. That plane was mesmerizing, a prototype Vulcan bomber, and the little boy was me. And so began my life-long pursuit of a goal – because as a child I was no good at sport, nor special at anything much, but my dad was the test pilot of that Vulcan and he’d shown me that great things were possible. From that day, I clung on to my ambition of becoming a pioneer, an investigator – someone who pushed the limits of their potential, just like him.
Explorer traces the progress of that ambition, from my early days as a naïve adventurer who didn’t have enough money to pull off his often hopelessly ambitious journeys, to someone who learned to trust to indigenous communities for help – because they didn’t seem to see ‘jungles’ and deserts as a threat, as we did, but as their home.
Through the years, as I sought to discover new things about our planet, I survived numerous calamities – from being shot at by Pablo Escobar’s henchmen in Colombia, to becoming separated from my sledge-dog team out on the Arctic pack ice, to being robbed and left to die by robbers in the Amazon. But always it was skills learnt from indigenous people that kept me alive.
And so to the book’s hero – not me but a wonderfully kind and gentle man called Korsai who, notwithstanding that I was a total stranger from the outside world, helped me cross a dangerous ridge deep in the forested interior of Papua New Guinea. It was an act of considerable bravery and generosity – and one that, over the course of the next three decades, I was never able to forget.
Then, something extraordinary: returning to PNG while in search of Birds of Paradise along with BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, I heard that, despite a goldrush and associated violence, Korsai’s remote people the Yaifo were still, thirty years on, hidden away in the mists of their forbidding Central Range where I’d encountered them. More extraordinary yet, not one person in all this time had repeated my journey up the mountain to check on them. I became determined to seek the Yaifo out – see if Korsai and his people were all right.
The resulting journey, first by helicopter and then by foot, was arduous to say the least – and ended with me becoming trapped by warring communities and going down with both malaria and dengue fever. Eventually, an international rescue mission was launched by worried relatives and the dramatic story of my extraction became the subject of headlines around the world. Less reported, however, was the true nature of the quest and that it was actually successful: I had undertaken this perilous trek only in order to see an old friend, just shake his hand. And had done just that.
Explorer: The Quest for Adventure by Benedict Allen is available now for £16.99. All our copies are signed by the author.