Hunting the Gugu

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.