THE explorer-adventurer Benedict Allen has crammed several lifetimes’ worth of experiences into his 57 years, but he has never forgotten his first encounter, made when he was 26, with the remote Yaifo tribe of Papua New Guinea.

Two of their members descended from their mountain home to visit a store in an area where Allen was staying. He recorded: “They have strong bodies that look even stronger under cowrie-shell headbands, the black quill earrings hanging to their shoulders, the quiffs of white pandanus fibre in armbands and cassowary skin sheaths down their backs.”

Intrigued, he entered the store. “As I squeeze past, their feathers tickle me. They have a plumage like a cockatoo, red parrot and banded hawk feathers shooting from grease-clogged hair and stacked up and held with a leaf band and … feathers”. The two men had bone bars through their noses. They were aware, Allen adds, of their warrior status.

That passage comes from his fourth book, The Proving Grounds, about a visit he made to PNG and Australia in 1988-89. He never quite forgot the Yaifo.

Last year, he and his friend, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, visited PNG to make a documentary, Birds of Paradise: The Ultimate Quest. Allen made a “chance, extraordinary discovery”: that the Yaifo, whom he had last seen 30 years earlier, were still living in the country’s remote Central Range. Furthermore, he added, “no outsider has made the journey to visit them since the rather perilous journey I made as a young man … This would make them the remotest people in Papua New Guinea, and one of the last people in our entire planet who are out of contact with our interconnected world.”

On October 11 he headed back to PNG via Heathrow with the aim of finding the Yaifo in their remote abode and creating a “brief record of their lives.” He tweeted: “I may be some time (don’t try to rescue me, please – where I’m going in PNG you won’t ever find me.”

Allen’s family, however, raised the alarm last week after he missed a planned flight home on the Sunday. Family and friends were critical of his trademark decision not to have gone with a GPS device or satellite phone. But on Friday it was reported that he had been rescued, with suspected malaria. Gardner tweeted that his friend “is now recovering from fever, poss. malaria, in Papua New Guinea capital having got disoriented on remote jungle trek".

Shortly before Allen was found, his agent, Joanna Sarsby described the Yaifo as “a very remote and reclusive tribe –possibly headhunters, quite a scary bunch”.

Given that Allen has taken the trouble to befriend the Yaifo, his Proving Grounds book is a compelling insight into this little-known tribe, which lives in the crocodile-infested jungles in the province of East Sepik.

The book details the long trek he made to reach the Yaifo village, in the company of the two tribe members, and others. He carried some of the Yaifo’s spare arrows – some of them “were multi-pronged, for fish, some with long smooth blades, for pigs and people, some heavily barbed, for birds, pigs and people.”

In time, he reached the village and received what he would later describe as a “terrifying show of strength, an energetic dance featuring their bows and arrows.” In the book he writes: “We see the feathers first, the flapping reds and whites; and then red paint, and then the bows, each drawn, with an arrow in place … They would have done something nasty to us with their arrows by now if they had wanted to … Several men are coming up through the gardens, joining in the party, slapping their bow strings, encasing us in a whirling smell of musk.”

One older man approaches Allen: “He’s wearing the closest I’ve ever seen to a white man’s idea of ‘warpaint’. Many an evangelist has probably woken in the night, screaming from a nightmare that looked just like this.”

The Yaifo had not seen shoes before, let alone anything approaching Allen’s American jungle boots. The women, meanwhile, “were like a different race: shy, small.”

Some of the elders took him down to a brook so that he could soak his aching feet. He shared some of his porridge with his hosts but they accidentally spilt most of it: “The Yaifos could tightrope along branches, but they couldn’t keep liquid on a plate.”

In his time with them he grew accustomed to their habits, their food, the watchful women. At one point he acknowledges that they “are about as far from knowing about the West as anyone on the planet.”

He took a photograph of three young boys as they patted a balloon made from a pig’s bladder. He could hear the men giggling indoors, “probably having their hair chewed through by dogs, who seemed to adore lice-hunting.”

When he left, they staged a “goodbye festivity”, with dancing, a march beat played on drums, and chant sounds – “a single yodel line which jogged along to a falsetto exclamation as the beat gathered”.

On his website in September Allen wrote of his wish to track down one of the young boys who had played with the pig’s bladder. He pondered whether the Yaifo would greet him as they had done 30 years ago, whether they would run off, or “be wearing jeans and T shirts traded aeons ago from the old mission station.”

Quite how far he got in his latest trip, whether he found the tribe and, if so, what they were wearing, is not yet clear.