Hunting the Gugu

by Benedict Allen

Since the 1980s, Benedict Allen has traversed the globe in the enquiring spirit of the great Victorian explorers, pitting himself against nature and frequently hostile environments. On each of his expeditions, which generally involve daunting months alone with the world's remotest "tribal" peoples, he has turned his experiences into a publication that has enriched the reader's understanding of places that would otherwise remain inacessible to surely even the most hardy traveller. The world is brimming with legends of missing links, from Yeti to Big-Foot. It was these kinds of strange travellers' tales that lured Benedict Allen to the vast green island of Sumatra, in this exploration of myth, reality, and our place in the great scheme of things. His inspiration was Theodore Hull, a muscular octogenarian survivor of Japanese prison camps, who encouraged him to set out on the trail of the lost ape-men known as the Gugu. Through a tangle of folktales, Allen found the aboriginal Kubu people, who offered him guidance into the highlands where the ferocious ape-people were said to gibber and screech all night long. And so, knowing that to find the last of the black-manned ape-men would add to a crucial piece to the jigsaw story of human evolution, Allen ventured into the dark and living forest, watched by unseen eyes.

Genres: Travel

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Benedict Colin Allen is a British writer, traveller and adventurer known for his technique of immersion among indigenous peoples from whom he acquires skills for hazardous journeys through unfamiliar terrain. In 2010, Allen was elected a Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society. He has recorded six TV series for the BBC, either alone or with partial or total use of camera crews, and has published ten books, including the Faber Book of Exploration, which he edited.[1]

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a bit of an underwhelming read for me. Some spoilers below, so decide before reading on...




I have a number of Benedict Allen books in my shelves, and read his famous Mad White Giant years ago, and enjoyed that. I had relatively high expectations for this despite the whimsical subject matter.

For me this read more a a book about Allens journey than any results, and not necessarily his physical journey, perhaps more his lack of foresight for what this expedition turned into - a bit of a farce...

Basically, Allen falls is enticed to accompany Theodore Hull (not his real name) on an expedition into Sumatra to track down ape-men - common in the native folk-tales. Hull's health, however, takes a turn for the worse, and Allen is left feeling committed to go on the expedition alone. Armed with a list of names from Hull, Allen tracks down some of these people, many though, are no longer in Sumatra. These people offer varied levels of assistance, but eventually Allen spends some time deep in Sumatra with the Kubu people, an animist aboriginal tribe, and tries to find eye witness accounts of sightings, and goes in search of the ape-men, or Gugu as they are known.

There are some interesting parts, but there is a lot of predictable description of the travel, the jungle and the obvious disappointment of finding nothing to support the existence of anything other than the known monkeys and ape species.

The book also ends strangely, with him being abandoned by his guide in the jungle, and in a fit of panic cuts his chest open, leaving him to self-apply five rough stitches to seal the wound. There is no explanation as to how he finds his way out, we simply get a postscript saying that 'In the end, before I came down from the mountain, I recovered my backpack, the bow and arrows.'

Overall a short but strange book. Struggle to pitch up more than two or two and a half stars.

[Muhammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't see the road with trouble. Rasullah sent an advice to stronging ukhuwah Islamiyah with hunting the animal, horsing, and swim. Routine it!