The famed explorer who went missing while searching for an isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea insists he wasn’t lost — and didn’t need rescuing.
Benedict Allen, 57, was reported missing by his family last week after he didn’t take his planned flight home. He was airlifted out of the rainforest while suffering from malarial fever last Thursday in a helicopter paid for by the Daily Mail, the BBC reported.
“I didn’t get lost. I always knew exactly where I was,” Allen told the outlet, describing how his expedition to find the lost Yaifo tribe took an unexpected turn for the worse.
His trip to a remote mountainous area of the rainforest hit its first snag after a powerful storm swept away a vine bridge over a river, slowing him down.
“Then I started to feel the symptoms of malaria,” he said. “My mosquito net wasn’t functional, my [malaria] tablets were all sodden so I wasn’t able to get the treatment.”
And the final straw was realizing the tribe was at war.
“They were fighting ahead and I couldn’t get out,” he said.
The plucky Brit made his way to a remote airstrip in hopes of getting a plane, when “suddenly a helicopter came from nowhere.”
Allen claimed he could have walked to safety had the helicopter not arrived.
“I wasn’t expecting to be rescued, I never asked to be rescued, but when it came, for the sake of my family, I thought: I’ve got to do this,” he said.
The father of two said he’d also filmed a final video for his wife and children to be taken to the British embassy should he have died.
“Perhaps the worst moment of all was when I had to say to the camera: ‘If you don’t find me and you find this footage take it along to the embassy.’ I showed photos of my children.”
Allen is now back in the U.K. and recovering from malaria, which he’s contracted six times.
He denied that the search and rescue effort was a publicity stunt.
“I videoed all of this and you can see me deteriorating with malaria,” he said.
The explorer also defended his decision to travel without a GPS or satellite phone.
“For me exploration is not about conquering, it’s not about planting flags…. For me it is not about asserting yourself it is about the opposite. It is about being vulnerable … to immerse myself,” he said. “And that means being on a level with the local people and that means not being able to be whisked away whenever you feel like it, because you’re feeling a bit ill. So I didn’t take a phone. But I’m a professional; I’m an expert in survival.”
Allen has filmed multiple documentaries of his travels for the BBC and once crossed the Amazon basin on foot and in a dug-out canoe.
He said he might take a satellite phone on future expeditions so that he could be contacted by family and joked that he needed “a good florist,” to help apologize to his wife.