Bruce Parry on returning to the jungle, hallucinogenic drugs, and why he wants to start a tribe of his own

I was 17 when I watched Bruce Parry attempt to push his penis back inside his body. I suppose it's fair to say he's been a hero of mine ever since.

Parry was in a remote part of West Papua for the BBC documentary series Tribe, which ran from 2005 to 2007. He was embedded with the Kombai people, who are known to have practised cannibalism, when he was persuaded to take part in the initiation ceremony (by this stage, a whacking great thorn had also been shoved through his nose).

To his enormous credit, Parry gave it a heck of a shot before succumbing to the pain and nearly fainting. "It was a very strange sensation," he later said, "like your foreskin is a sausage roll and your penis is the meat that is shooting back inside your body." 

Later in the series, while in Gabon, Parry ingested the strong hallucinogenic plant iboga. "For a moment, I'm sure I'm going to die here in the jungle, thousands of miles from home," he said in the voice-over. Undeterred, the following year Parry went crocodile hunting with the Dassanech tribe in Ethiopia.

Over three series, this rather rakish professional trekker and former lieutenant in the Royal Marines (at 23, Parry became the youngest officer ever to be made Head of Fitness and Training and later served in Iraq) embedded himself with 15 indigenous tribes. He lived exactly as they did, including eating everything he was offered, from rats to locusts. "The secret to drinking blood," he once said, "is to do it quickly. If you don't, it congeals and becomes stringy going down the throat, which is very unpleasant."

It was terrifically exciting stuff and, to my mind, Tribe remains the benchmark for adventure documentaries. Simon Reeve? Levison Wood? Nope, lightweight by comparison. That said, for all the moments of derring-do, Parry also observed the tribes quietly. He was open-minded, never patronising, and was ready to learn from the people he encountered. Parry won a thoroughly deserved Bafta for his efforts in 2008. 

Two more series for the BBC, Amazon (2008) and Arctic (2011), followed but we haven't seen Parry on our screens since. Throughout this time, Parry partied hard. He had moved to Ibiza in 2003 and his crumpled, private school charm (Parry attended Wells Cathedral School) made him a serious hit on the White Isle, where he admits to having lived a "hedonistic lifestyle". In 2005, he turned up to one interview having not been to bed; he had apparently only shed his dinner jacket two hours previously. "I think I used the partying as a way of seeking refuge," he explained recently. 

There were also well-documented periods of abstinence, notably when Parry twice gave up sex for year-and-a-half periods. Speaking to Parry on the phone about his new project, a feature-length film about the effects of globalisation on the environment and on our collective state of mind, you'd certainly think his party days are behind him: he is totally charming but these days he seems focussed on altogether higher (no, let's try that again) altogether more worthy ideals.       

But then again, he did tweet a photograph from Glastonbury earlier this year, with a caption paying homage to the inventor of LSD, and remains a staunch advocate of hallucinogenic drugs.

"[They can be] f--king scary," he says. "You're being invited to look at yourself and you're like, 'okay, am I ready?' You know you're going to go and face that but all I can say is that the experience of reflecting on yourself is never anything that you're not incredibly grateful for.

"All that ayahuasca [a hallucinogen found in the Amazon] does is open the door and allow you to see something else. Now it's up to you if you want to walk through that door or not but [before taking ayahuasca] that door is quite often fully closed or invisible.

"We have medicine for all sorts of things but they're mostly for dealing with symptoms. Ayahuasca is a medicine for the psyche and we don't have that over here."    

So why is our society so wary of these drugs? "With natural hallucinogens, it's no surprise that they've been looked down on by society as drugs to be very fearful of because we exterminated the practitioners, the people who understood them a long time ago, most notably when the witches were burned. That was when the people who probably had the greatest understanding of the plant world were eradicated."

But we digress. A few years ago, Parry heard about the plight of the Penan tribe in Borneo, one of the few remaining nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet. The Penan, which Parry first visited in 2007, has been forced to move into permanent settlements, embracing conventional agriculture, because of the destruction of the jungle they call home. Parry, who is now 48, decided the time had come to put his rucksack back on.

The result is TAWAI: A Voice from the Forest, a quietly astounding film, in which Parry confronts the on-going issue of deforestation, and asks what we can still learn from peoples such as the Penan, whose lives are so different from our own. "They are terrified for their future," Parry says. "The forest has already been logged once and they are feeling the pressure of these external forces." It's not just the Penan. The world's rainforests could be gone within 100 years if deforestation continues at the current rate.  

Since 2007, the Penan's way of life has changed considerably. There is one particularly striking scene in the film, in which a member of the tribe uses a chemical insecticide, while a television blares in the background. Not long after, we see the Penan back in the jungle, living in makeshift camps and hunting by traditional methods. Parry tells me that the film, which is unhurried and beautifully shot, is not "trying to point out that one [way of life] is bad and that one is good". But the message is clear enough: material gain does not necessarily equate to progress.   

"What is progression? If progression is just material accumulation – more gadgetry, faster cars – then yes, of course we in the Western world have progressed further," Parry says. "But if progression means more loneliness, less of a future for our children, and anxiety about growing old, then that is not progression at all.

"The Penan people don't have an underlying anxiety about wanting to be famous because they see themselves as part of a collective. They don't have an underlying anxiety about growing old because they know they'll be looked after. So I don't know what progress is.

"I'm not trying to persuade people to become hunter-gatherers but I am saying that materialism isn't the only thing we should be looking at. There are other aspects."

With that in mind, Parry, who is not married, is considering setting up a similarly egalitarian community in the UK. He is looking at buying some land (apparently Wales is the preferred location) and, according to one newspaper, has already recruited some like-minded souls. He is circumspect about this, however, when I ask him to elaborate.

"People ask me what I'm doing and all the rest of it and I'm just expressing how I'm feeling," he says. "There are no plans afoot as yet, other than that I've sold my house in Ibiza and I'm looking to be in the UK. And of course, in my mind and in my heart, I'm thinking, 'well, wouldn't it be great if X and Y were possible,' but I have to see if that would fit in with the other people who may want to be a part of this project."

I can't help but ask Parry if he watched Eden, the Channel 4 series that followed a group of people attempting to start a new society from scratch on a remote Scottish peninsula. The project was a disaster, with cliques forming almost immediately, food running low and people walking out within weeks.

Do these possibilities concern Parry? "[For this to be] a success, we will all have to step away from our individual needs and find a collective purpose," he says. "If people are doing a year-long TV show, and they know it's a TV show before they step into it, their individual needs will still rule the roost and you're going to have all those problems. My project is all or nothing and it has to be all or nothing for the people that come in."

TAWAI: A Voice from the Forest is out now. For information about screenings, visit tawai.earth

TAWAI: A Voice from the Forest, the original soundtrack by Nick Barber is due for release on iTunes and all major online stores soon 

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