Join Andrew Benfield, Richard Horsey, Kunzang Choden and Sita on Thursday 9th November 1-2pm for ‘In Search of Yeti’. Together they will discuss Richard and Andrew’s journey through India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan in search of the truth behind the yeti legend as well as the importance it holds in Himalayan culture.
Mollie Parker recently caught up with Andrew and Richard to discuss what inspired them to create their podcast named Yeti, what they came to understand about Himalayan culture, and what they hope audiences take away from their event.
Click here to register for their FREE ONLINE event.
What inspired you to focus your podcast and BBC Radio show on the yeti? Where did your passion for knowing the truth of the yeti first come from?
We were actually already looking for it when the BBC came along and proposed to make a podcast and radio show out of our adventures. It all started when Andrew was living in India a few years ago and was given a book about a 1950s British expedition to search for the yeti. They didn’t find the creature, but they did turn up a surprising number of consistent local accounts of sightings. However, because the foreigners didn’t see it themselves, these were not taken seriously – that seemed to Andrew to be more than a little patronising.
Then he heard David Attenborough say he thought the yeti could exist, referencing fossil evidence that shows there was once a giant ape roaming the region. And it’s an ape-like creature that local people typically describe, not the big white shaggy snow monster which is just a Western fiction.
Andrew invited Richard to accompany him on his search, to provide a steadying influence, and as the kind of resident expedition sceptic to make sure he didn’t get too carried away!
Your podcast provides your listeners with very personal accounts of the yeti from people you met while exploring the Himalayas. Why did you choose to have these local voices and encounters at the centre of your search?
We felt that it was very arrogant to think that, in the course of a few weeks or months, we could expect to see a creature that local people living in the high mountains might encounter once in a lifetime. It seemed much more sensible to focus on finding credible local stories in the hope that one of these would eventually lead us to some physical evidence such as bone, hair or scat that we could get tested.
Local people are experts on their flora and fauna, indeed it’s their knowledge of this, as well as climate and terrain, that keeps us alive while we’re up there. Of course, that doesn’t mean we simply accept every story we’re told. Like anywhere, you find some people who make fanciful claims or relish a good story without too much concern for the facts. But, overall, the majority of people we met gave us what seemed to be credible accounts and consistent descriptions of sightings, often with multiple witnesses.
What struggles did you face while you were travelling through the Himalayas?
Different countries presented different ones to contend with. In north-east India and Myanmar, we faced challenges to reach the remote areas we needed to get to, having to travel long distances over very rough roads and tracks. This wasn’t helped by our choice of vehicles. In India, we rented a couple of very unreliable motorcycles, with Richard also being a bit of a novice rider. In Myanmar, we borrowed an old Land Rover with a host of mechanical issues and an apparent death wish! In Nepal and Bhutan, it was long, high-altitude treks which pushed our bodies to the limit.
But these rigours of travel were more than compensated for by the jaw-dropping landscapes and amazing people we encountered.
In what ways are Western views of the Yeti warped? And what impact does this have?
Both the name and the image of the yeti have been distorted in the West. A British journalist invented the moniker “Abominable Snowman” in the 1950s, purposefully mistranslating the Tibetan word for the creature to make it sound more fearsome. The white shaggy monster image was created by an American TV channel shortly after, and it stuck.
Local people instead describe a gorilla or orangutan-like animal that is bipedal, with orange-brown fur and a conical head. And they universally claim it’s very stinky!
These distortions have helped turn the yeti into a cartoon creature. As a result, the yeti is often dismissed by most people outside of the Himalayas as about as credible as the unicorn. But for the communities who live in those mountains, it’s instead taken quite seriously, believed by many to be real, and also plays a very important cultural role, for example as a guardian of the natural environment.
What do you hope audiences will take away from your event?
Previous efforts to search for the yeti have mostly ignored the stories and the expertise of local people, implying that only sightings by Westerners are worth taking seriously. We think that’s a big mistake. Local stories of animals such as the hippo, gorilla and giraffe were also previously dismissed by outsiders as mere folklore and fantasy until foreigners eventually “discovered” them by seeing them with their own eyes. So we hope to persuade people to keep a more open mind, acknowledge what they don’t know, and take local voices and wisdom more seriously.
Then there’s the Buddhist perspective on the mind. The idea is that we make ourselves unhappy by constantly chasing after things but never actually being satisfied once we attain them – instead just quickly move on to pursue the next object of our desire. It’s seen as a state of almost constant agitation and disequilibrium that’s known in Buddhism as “monkey mind”.
We eventually started to understand that this was maybe what was driving our search for the yeti and that finding it probably wouldn’t give us the satisfaction we anticipated. It was one of the thought-provoking ideas shared by Bhutanese author and cultural historian Kunzang Choden, who we were honoured to stay with during our visit to Bhutan, and who will join us in conversation at the Yorkshire Festival of Story.
More important than the question of our own fulfilment was what the effect of our quest could be on the local communities and natural environment. Many people we met in the high mountains accepted the yeti as fact and had no desire to seek further proof of it. It was something to be feared and revered, rather than captured and classified, an approach that mirrored their general attitude of existing in harmony with their surroundings.
If we helped publicise that there was a new (at least to outsiders) creature roaming around the Himalayas, it would inevitably lead to a media circus and invasion of the area. So we think it’s important to really question what the effects could be of your actions and exertions – more knowledge and exposure is not always a good thing.
