Benedict Colin Allen FRGS (born 1 March 1960) is an English writer, explorer, traveller and filmmaker known for his technique of immersion among indigenous peoples from whom he acquires survival skills for hazardous journeys through unfamiliar terrain.
Among more famous influences in his early years were Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens van der Post, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, all of whom he in due course met.
Today Allen is acknowledged as one of the last great adventurers in the classic mould, The Daily Telegraph listing him as one of the top ten British explorers of all time, the only other living individual being Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
[14] He went on to develop the technique of self-filming, becoming the first explorer to bring the full experience of remote travel to television, and in dispensing with a traditional, more cumbersome, camera (and crew) effectively took the entire genre to its limits[15] – while also inadvertently popularizing idea of the "video selfie".
Allen's first major exploit was a first crossing of the northeast Amazon basin in 1983; he traversed 417 miles of rainforest on foot and by dugout canoe over several months – a precarious journey that covered the proposed route of the then planned Perimetral Norte Road through Brazil's Para and Amapa States.
In Siberut and Sumatra he investigated indigenous tales of an "orang pendek" ape man, this time assisted by the Mentawai and Kubu (Hunting the Gugu) – and in 1987, aged twenty-seven, made the first recorded crossing of the Central Range of PNG, helped by one of the last of the island's uncontacted communities, a small band known as the Yaifo (The Proving Grounds).
Two years later he returned to the Matses family which had adopted him, with the help of a camcorder filming Raiders of the Lost Lake, a deliberate reprise of the traveller-as-intruder themes of Mad White Giant.
The following year, Allen undertook a 3000-mile, five and a half month journey by horse and camel around Mongolia, this including a lone six week traverse of the Gobi Desert (Edge of Blue Heaven).
Two years later, Allen documented encounters with spiritual healers around the globe – including Voodoo priests in Haiti, the Mentawai of Indonesia, the Huichol of Mexico and shamans of Siberia, this resulting in the 2000 BBC book and TV series Last of the Medicine Men.
[19] It was on this expedition that Allen by chance heard that the Yaifo community that he had known more than thirty years before, and long thought disintegrated under the influence of missionary and wholesale goldmining activity, were still living in relative isolation on the mountain side.
[16] On 26 October 2017, Allen had himself dropped by helicopter at Bisorio Mission, East Sepik Province, then launched with a party of indigenous contacts for a three-week trek into the forest, hoping to track down the Yaifo, check up on their well-being, and thank those who had originally helped him over the mountain.