A glimpse of PARADISE
In 2004, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner was on assignment in Saudi Arabia when he was shot six times by al-Qaeda terrorists and left for dead. Gardner’s cameraman was killed in the ambush, and Gardner ended up paralyzed from the waist down.
After 14 operations and almost a year in the hospital, Gardner returned to work. But not from behind a desk. He has been embedded at least four times with the military in Afghanistan and traveled widely, reporting from Colombia and Borneo to the Arctic and Malaysia.
Just as significantly, his injuries didn’t stop him pursuing a “childhood dream” in 2016, when he set out to see at least one species of bird-of-paradise in the wild.
“I ski and scuba dive,” says Gardner, 59, “But the one country I’ve always wanted to go to, one of the most distant, remote, exotic, and difficult places, has always been Papua New Guinea.”
Gardner’s fascination with the Pacific island nation began at
