A British explorer has gone missing while attempting to find an indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea, his family say.
Benedict Allen who has previously recorded series for the BBC and written books on exploration, was on a journey to rediscover the Yaifo tribe.
In a post on his website before setting off titled “I may be some time”, the 57-year-old said he was looking to meet with the tribe 30 years after discovering them for the first time.
He said: “No outsider has made the journey to visit them since the rather perilous journey I made as a young man three decades ago.
“This would make them the remotest people in Papua New Guinea, and one of the last people on the entire planet who are out-of-contact with our interconnected world.”
A helicopter dropped Allen off at Bisorio without a satellite phone, GPS or companion and he was due back in the country’s capital Port Moresby on Sunday to travel to Hong Kong.
His agent Joanna Sarsby told the Daily Mail his wife Lenka was “very worried”.
She added: “He is a highly experienced explorer, very clever and resourceful and adept at surviving in the most hostile places on Earth, and he would never give up. He may not be a young man any more but he is very fit.
“He was trying to reach the Yaifo people, a very remote and reclusive tribe – possibly headhunters, quite a scary bunch. Goodness knows what has happened.
“I just imagine he might have been taken ill or is lying injured somewhere, perhaps with a broken leg, and maybe being helped by locals. He never takes a phone with him – he believes in living like the locals. For him not to come back is really odd.”
Allen’s last tweet, dated 11 October, featured a picture of the explorer wearing a backpack and said: “Marching off to Heathrow. I may be some time (don’t try to rescue me, please – where I’m going in PNG you won’t ever find me you know…)”
His older sister Katie Pestille told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme her brother’s disappearance was “ghastly” and “out of character.”
She added: “For everybody else, it’s very exciting – all the expeditions and all the things he does, but for his sister and his wife, it’s more of a worry.”