Like a caper from Scoop: inside story of race to ‘rescue’ explorer Benedict Allen ‘missing’ in Papua New Guinea
‘Find him, and bring him home,’ news editor of a UK Sunday paper told your correspondent, so off he set for the jungles of PNG to save an errant father of three, only to find himself scooped. A chat with pilot gave him a different story
Oh, to be an explorer – a fearless, square-jawed adventurer, seeking out lost tribes and taming savages, armed with nothing more than a safari suit, a pith helmet, stout walking boots, a pocket penknife and a dry, British sense of humour.
They are the alpha males of a bygone age of empire. Their feats of derring-do beguile and expose modern travellers like me for the lily-livered lightweights we are, with our predilection for air miles, business-class lounges and cocktail hours in foreign hotels.
To my shame, the only thing that linked me even remotely to the names of the great explorers was my Marco Polo Club card. Until, that is, I got a call from a British Sunday newspaper telling me to go and rescue an explorer lost in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
You couldn’t make this up (and believe me, I’ve tried). Benedict Allen, a real-life explorer who has been in all manner of scrapes in far-flung corners of the world, was due in Hong Kong on November 15 to give a talk on his way home from a solo expedition to find a headhunting tribe. He’d been dropped by helicopter on a remote hill station five weeks earlier and yomped off manfully into the wilds after sending a final adieu to his Twitter followers: “I may be some time. Don’t try to rescue me please – where I’m going you won’t ever find me.”
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And then the jungle (or something within it) swallowed him up. He failed to make his way to the capital, Port Moresby, or to Hong Kong. Britain’s Foreign Office was alerted. His family was in bits.
To make it worse, the 57-year-old father-of-three had no mobile phone or GPS. This man wasn’t just missing; he was proper lost, in a pre-SatNav way, without Google Maps to get him even more lost.