Into the Abyss - Tapa dura

Benedict Allen is one of the UK's most prominent explorers. Wherever possible, he prefers to travel alone, immersing himself in alien environments having first learnt survival skills from indigenous peoples.$$$He read Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and in his graduation year joined expeditions to Costa Rica, Brunei and Iceland. In 1983, aged 23, he crossed the remote rainforest between the Orinoco and Amazon, on foot and by dugout canoe: a journey that became the subject of his first book Mad White Giant: A Journey to the Heart of the Amazon Jungle.$$$Following this, he underwent a gruelling 6-week initiation ceremony in Papua New Guinea, chronicled in his second book Into the Crocodile Nest. Subsequent expeditions have included a search for ape-men in Sumatra (Hunting the Gugu), a trek through New Guinea and to Australia's Gibson Desert (The Proving Grounds) and a 3600-mile journey across the Amazon Basin (Through Jaguar Eyes).$$$In recording his third Amazon expedition for the BBC, Benedict developed a filming technique new to television, his use of just a hand-held camera allowing millions of people to share the ups and downs of remote travel for the first time. There followed his pioneering series 'The Skeleton Coast' (a journey with three camels through the Namib Desert), 'Edge of Blue Heaven' (from Siberia across the Mongolian steppe and alone through the Gobi Desert), 'The Bones of Colonel Fawcett', and 'Last of the Medicine Men' (a study of shamanism in Haiti, Siberut Island, Siberia and Mexico). Recently he returned from Siberia with frostbite having undertaken his latest BBC project, 'Ice Dogs', filming a 1000-mile trek with a reluctant dog team.Find out more about Benedict Allen at his website.

Benedict Allen is one of the UK's most prominent explorers. For the past twenty-five years he has conducted solo expeditions through the Amazon jungle, along Namibia's Skeleton Coast and across Mongolia's Gobi Desert without the use of GPS, satellite phone or other means of outside support, as we as having written ten books of his adventures and editing The Faber Book of Exploration.He was the first explorer to bring the full experience of remote travel to television - taking the genre to its limits by not using a camera crew and so bringing an immediacy to his experiences. Allen regularly gives lectures at the Royal Geographic Society.