Benedict Allen

Benedict Allen

I spoke to Benedict about the lure of remote places and accidentally discovering seven new species of fig wasp.

I’ve visited so many countries and far-flung locations that it’s sometimes difficult to recall where and how it all began. As a child, I was an avid fossil collector after discovering the Jurassic Coast on a trip to Dorset. Aged 11, back in 1970, I went on a safari trip to Kenya and Tanzania to see the Maasai Mara, which really sticks in my memory. It was quite an unusual thing to do as a family in those days, and only possible because my father was a pilot and able to fly us part of the way.

It was then I understood that it was possible to travel to locations not always sold as ‘holiday destinations’ and was determined to be an explorer. I set my mind on South America and the goal of crossing perhaps the most remote length of the Amazon - a stretch of 960 km that is almost uninhabited. I had little money, but that naive optimism that everything would somehow be all right.

The final leg of that adventure will always stick with me. Some 95 miles from the outside world, heading to Macapá on the Brazilian Amazon, I was attacked by gold miners. The reasons are still not clear to me. Perhaps they thought I’d taken some gold or were scared I’d report them for being there illegally. Certainly, they were drunk. I crawled along the forest floor for three to four weeks - delirious, starving and suffering from two strains of malaria - and escaped. I was eventually picked up by a local man, who rested me in his hammock and spoon-fed me a bitter antimalarial liquid. Throughout my life, I think I’ve needed in some way to replicate that, to push myself to the limit.

I’ve been at my very lowest during some of the expeditions, but that has been balanced with some extraordinary highs. I’ve met and learnt so much from indigenous people, whose knowledge and skills have helped me see ‘hostile’ places as home.

Recently, I’ve been back to Borneo. I went there as a student and accidentally discovered seven species of fig wasp by randomly shoving a few passing insects in a tube, then popping them in the post to the Natural History Museum.

Given that the passing years brought so much destruction to the island, I felt guilty I hadn’t lingered longer in the trees and found more. I took an excursion upriver and into the Ulu Temburong National Park. The memories of seeing the forest for the first time came back to me, complete with the whooping gibbons and hornbills.

Royal Brunei Airways has kindly offered to fly me out to see it again and, who knows, there may even be another opportunity to find yet more new species of fig wasp.

This interview first appeared in The Quarterly magazine, 2013