At just 22 years old, British explorer Benedict Allen set out to travel 600 miles through the remote northeast Amazon. It was supposed to be an expedition. Instead, it became a fight for survival.
Gold miners hunted him. His canoe capsized, swallowing his supplies. Malaria burned through his body — two types of it, including one that could kill him in 24 hours. Starving, feverish and alone, Benedict made a choice that would haunt him for decades.
He eventually walked out of the jungle. But something inside him forced him to confront his near-death experience and a question he needed to answer: why had he lived?
So he went back. Not to the Amazon, not yet, but to Papua New Guinea. There, he immersed himself in a culture that still held ancient rituals of manhood and underwent a secret ceremony alongside young tribal initiates — to be cut, scarred and beaten, and to try to understand what it meant to survive, to be tested and to be transformed.
This is the story of a young man running towards the very thing that nearly killed him. Of unfinished business in the jungle. Of the price of seeking answers that only survival can provide.
And of a man who has nearly died nine times.
This is Part 1 of Benedict Allen's story on What I Survived.
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