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The Hazardous Life of Benedict Allen  

Explorer, Film Maker, TV Presenter and Author 

One of Britain's most prominent explorers, Benedict is also perhaps our most authentic – he travels without the use of satellite phones, film-crew, GPS or any of the normal backup normally used by other adventurers today. Instead he relies on skills learnt from indigenous people, setting off alone and immersing himself in seemingly hostile worlds. Few people alive have lived so long alone in so many perilous environments. By not using a film-crew, he’s allowed millions around the world to witness for the first time adventures unfolding genuinely in inhospitable terrain.

He believes in doing “whatever it takes” to achieve his objective of investigating other worlds: in New Guinea, he became the first to undergo the harrowing “crocodile” initiation ceremony, and was given extensive scars up and down his chest and back - and beaten for six weeks. Elsewhere, he’s been shot at by hit men, hunted down by gold miners, abandoned and left to die by guides. He’s even had to stitch up his own chest – without aesthetic, using his boot-mending kit!

Explorer Benedict Allen travelled across the Chukchi peninsula, the northeasternmost part of Siberia. In the town of Enmelen, one of the remotest towns on the planet, the local Siberian Eskimos put on a show to welcome him. The show included local children dancing to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush.

He’s now published 10 books, and made 6 BBC television series, usually travelling alone, and narrowly escaped death six times; few Westerners have spent so long continuously isolated in so many remote environments.

His motive over 25 years has always remained the same: to report things never witnessed before, and share other people’s perspective on the world.  

Benedict Allen was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of a test pilot, and read Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia - where he crammed three expeditions (to a volcano in Costa Rica, remote forest in Brunei and a glacier in Iceland) into his final year. There then followed a stint at the University of Aberdeen, where he tried to work out how to cross perhaps the remotest forest on earth, which lay between the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon. The idea he developed became the cornerstone for all his future ventures: instead of raising money through sponsorship back home, he would immerse himself among indigenous people and hope for their assistance – after all, they saw many apparently hostile environments, such as the Amazon and Borneo, as a home rather than threat. The philosophy offered another bonus: by travelling "light” he could be quick to take advantage of any opportunities and progress with speed (like the Alpine approach of mountaineers), and the crossing of so much formidably remote forest might actually become possible.

One of Britain's leading adventurers, Benedict Allen, is particularly known for his television programmes - occasionally made with the help of a film crew but more typically without. He paved the way for the current generation of TV adventurers.  

Uniquely in television, his philosophy is to genuinely immerse himself in extreme or alien environments, going alone and learning from indigenous people. As The Sunday Times put it: “Filming whatever actually happens, without all the hidden paraphernalia of a film crew, and whether in danger or lonely or undergoing various exotic rituals, he has effectively taken the viewers’ experience of adventure as far as it can go.”  

However, most of his more challenging journeys – depicted in his first five books – in fact took place before he began filming his exploits. “I belonged to the last generation that might pass through a wilderness for months on end and not encounter a single person of my own culture. It was a privileged time: never in all those years can I remember coming across a single other foreigner, whilst out on a trek.” Such isolation seems inconceivable today.  

February 23^rd – BENEDICT ALLEN is a real life adventurer.  To equip himself for his explorations he learned from local tribesmen, spurning such necessities as maps and compasses!  In his illustrated talk “THE HAZARDOUS LIFE OF BENEDICT ALLEN” he will regale us with tales of constant jeopardy while travelling alone and his experiences are told with wit, humour and a dollop of charm!  

Evening sponsored by FRED OLSEN TRAVEL LTD, Colchester . (Tel: 01206 760664/769005).