Benedict Allen: Lost and Dying in the Amazon | Lost in the Amazon P1

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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