‘I’m falling, slicing through the sky … about two miles above the earth.’
JULIANE KOEPCKE
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1971. A 17-year-old student born in Peru to German parents is firmly strapped into her aircraft seat next to her mother. It’s a short hop, from Lima to Pucallpa, and should only take an hour.
But Juliane Koepcke’s journey is going to take a lot longer than that.
The aircraft is a Lockheed Electra turboprop, cruising at 10,000 feet. When she’d first seen it back on the ground, Juliane had thought it looked awesome. She didn’t know that it was designed principally for flying over desert landscapes. Or that it was totally unsuited for taking on the turbulent mountain air above the Andes.
And little did she know that the aircraft was about to fly into the eye of a storm.
Minutes ago, it was daylight outside. Now it is as dark as night. Out of the windows Juliane can see violent strobes of lightning splitting the skies all around her.
The aircraft starts to shudder. It feels as if some external power is shaking it, like a child shaking a toy. The aircraft might have looked mighty and formidable on the ground, but up here, surrounded by such massive forces of nature, it is as insignificant as a humble fly.
The overhead lockers suddenly drop open. Luggage tumbles out. Food scatters everywhere. Everybody’s screaming.
Juliane Koepcke tries to stay calm. So does her mother. She tries to reassure Juliane, to tell her everything will be all right.
But it won’t be all right.
A searing white light blinds Juliane. Something’s happened to the right-hand wing. A lightning strike? It’s impossible to say. There’s a sickening jerk. The front of the plane tips downwards. The screaming gets worse, but it’s dwarfed by the deafening roar of the engines as the stricken aircraft plummets, faster and faster, towards the ground.
Juliane hears her mother speak among the screaming of both engines and humans. It is a quiet acknowledgement that death is approaching.
The plane is breaking up around her. And suddenly, Juliane Koepcke realizes that she is not surrounded by the other passengers any more. Or even by the plane itself. She can no longer hear either the screams or the engines.
All she can hear is the immense roar of the wind in her ears.
She is still strapped into her seat, which has broken away from the body of the airliner. She is still 10,000 feet in the air.
She’s falling back to earth. Fast.
But, amazingly, her epic story of survival is only just beginning.
*
Juliane Koepcke would later recall how the seatbelt strapping her to the seat, dug tightly into her guts, pushing the air from her lungs as she fell. There was no time to feel scared. She slipped in and out of reality. During a moment of consciousness, she sensed that she was upside down and spinning fast, drilling her way through the empty air as the jungle canopy below spun up to meet her.
Then darkness, as she blacked out again.
She awoke to find herself lying on the rainforest floor. The plane seat was on top of her, but she was no longer strapped in.
She looked at her watch. Nine in the morning.
She tried to stand. Sudden dizziness. She collapsed to the jungle floor again.
Her collarbone felt strange. She touched it. Broken: the two ends of the break were pushing upwards, but mercifully they hadn’t punctured the skin. There was a deep cut on her left leg, but strangely it wasn’t bleeding. She felt lethargic with concussion, and had lost her glasses, so it was difficult for her to see clearly for more than a few metres.
Only then did it strike her what had happened. And that now, she was utterly alone. She called out to her mother, but nobody called back. The only sounds she could hear were those of the rainforest.
She had survived the unsurvivable. Now she would have to survive in one of the most unforgiving environments on earth.
Dense, uninhabited, primary jungle.
*
If you want to get out of your comfort zone, go to the jungle.
A mixture of constant high temperatures and humidity, plenty of water and plenty of sunlight mean that rainforests are homes to the most complex ecosystems on the planet. Life is everywhere: crawling, clawing, biting through the undergrowth, crouched in the trees, slithering along the branches. It can take your breath away with its beauty; but it can also kill you in an instant.
Juliane Koepcke knew this. The jungle was not, to her, totally unfamiliar. Her parents had been zoologists, and had taken her to the jungle when she was a child.
Consequently, she also knew that the worst thing she could do, alone and injured, was panic. She needed a clear head and a calm mind. She needed to be alert, and to consider her every move carefully. If she allowed herself to freak out, she’d probably never make it through a day.
She realized that she was only wearing one shoe. The other must have come off as she fell from the sky. In her previous visits to the jungle, she’d always worn rubber boots to protect herself from snake bites. Venomous snakes or spiders could be lying anywhere, camouflaged to invisibility, but guaranteed to strike if disturbed. One covered foot was better than none, she figured.
Other than the shoe, she was wearing nothing but a thin summer dress. Ripped to shreds already. Hardly the ideal gear for jungle survival.
Then the thirst hit her: sudden and overpowering. Juliane looked around to see broad green leaves covered with moisture. She sucked the water off the leaves.
Moving and navigating in the jungle is an art form. And it is also bloody hard work – even with all the right gear and footwear. One section of jungle can appear almost indistinguishable from another. To the untrained eye, it can be just a blur of noisy, steamy, filthy, stinking green.
In her previous experiences, Juliane had used a machete to hack markers into the trees to ensure she wasn’t walking around in circles. But now she had nothing. So she examined her surroundings carefully and remembered an especially imposing tree. A fixed landmark to help her orientate herself. Then she started to stagger around the area, looking for survivors.
And, especially, for her mother.
She found nothing but a tin of boiled sweets that had landed in the vicinity with her. Hardly what she was hoping for, but it was sustenance of a sort.
Far above, through the thick jungle canopy, she heard an aircraft circling. She knew what that meant: rescue teams were searching for survivors. But there was no way they’d ever be able to see her. Her spirits sank.
If she was going to get out of there, she would have to do it alone.
The hard way.
Above all the strange noises of the jungle she caught another sound. Running water.
She remembered a piece of survival advice her father had once given her: if you’re lost in the jungle, find running water and follow it. It doesn’t matter how feeble it is: chances are it will meet another tributary and become a stream. Then that stream will meet another stream and become a small river. And where you find a river, you’ve a good chance of finding people …
She located the source: a tiny, weak stream, blocked continuously by fallen trees. As she trekked, the stream grew a little wider – twenty inches. Exhausted and disorientated, she continued to follow it. She would make it her path to safety.
At about 6 p.m., night fell swiftly, as it always does in the jungle. Utter blackness surrounded her, as did the strange, eerie sounds of the rainforest at night. She had been shown how to light a fire by the friction of rubbing sticks together. A fire would give her some warmth, and ward away dangerous animals. But the process of lighting a fire was impossible: it was the rainy season, and everything was soaked through – not to mention that she had no tools to cut into the wood in the first place.
Night-time can be very intimidating in the jungle, but Juliane was too burned out to be afraid. She slumped against a tree, exhausted.
*
Her first night had done little to relieve her exhaustion. Her fatigue was the result of both shock and concussion. But Juliane knew she had to press on.
She followed the same stream, taking care to step with her sandalled foot first. The trickle of water twisted and turned its way through the undergrowth, adding distances she couldn’t even measure to her path through the jungle. The further she walked, the more she felt the energy draining from her body. But she couldn’t risk taking any shortcuts. Without her glasses she couldn’t see very far into the distance. She dared not stray from the stream. And so she continued to struggle, her strength continually ebbing away.
Lost in a jungle, humans need to be aware that they are not the only ones searching for water and food. Every other animal and plant is doing the same. So while a stream can be a tool for survival, it can also be a magnet for danger.
She passed a bird-eating spider – the second biggest spider in the world with venomous fangs that can easily puncture human skin. She eased her way gingerly past it, but it wasn’t the worst jungle creature she was going to encounter by a long shot. She later heard the ominous, slow flapping of wings. Longer and louder than any other bird. With a sick feeling in her gut she knew that she was listening to a king vulture.
And she knew exactly what the king vulture feeds on.
Carrion. Rotting flesh.
She turned a bend in the river, and there she saw it: a row of three seats from her aircraft. And strapped in to the three seats were two men and one woman.
They were upside down, their heads stuck into the floor of the jungle. Their legs were broken, pointing awkwardly up into the air.
She saw the vultures next. They were perched in the trees, watching and waiting. The flesh was still too fresh for their liking. But soon they would descend and rip the rotting meat from the corpses.
She looked around to see if there were any more bodies. Nothing. Just a few scraps of metal littering the jungle floor. And so she hurried on her way, leaving the dead and the beady eyes of the hungry vultures.
She wasn’t carrion. Not quite yet, anyway.
*
Juliane dared not eat anything.
The rainy season is not the best time to be foraging for food in the jungle, as most of the fruits flourish during the dry season. That’s not to say the jungle can’t be an abundant source of food at any time, but you have to know what you’re eating. There are many plants that look delicious but are in fact deadly poisonous.
Juliane had no knife to hack out palm hearts or roots that she knew would give her sustenance, nor any means to catch fish or animals. When her last boiled sweet ran out, she had nothing to eat.
She did, at least, have water, but the stream along which she was walking had brown scum floating along the top. In previous visits to the jungle, she had always boiled water before she drank it. That’s the sensible thing to do – the only way to be sure of killing the myriad bugs that can infest unknown water sources. But Juliane had no means of making fire.
So she drank the dirty water in huge quantities – both to keep hydrated and to stave off hunger by keeping her belly full. It is always a risk drinking water like this, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
She tried to keep track of the days, but it wasn’t easy. At six in the morning it grew light. At six in the evening, night fell fast. After the deep, concussed slumber of her first night, sleep seldom came again. During the long nights she found herself surrounded by mosquitoes which seemed intent on eating her alive. Her skin was covered with burning welts, and the only relief came when it rained.
Only that was no relief at all. It is cold at night during the rainy season, and the freezing rain soaked her thin cotton dress, leaching all the warmth from her body. It was during those unbearably long, painful nights that she felt herself steadily abandoning all hope …
Little wonder then that, starving, partially concussed, her bones broken, her clothes soaked, her skin burning with sores and bites, that any sense of time became jumbled. So, she wasn’t sure if it was on the fifth day or the sixth that she heard the call of a hoatzin – a bird which she remembered makes its nest on wide rivers under open skies. She scrambled through the thick brush, which continuously ripped at her skin, and eventually found herself by a broad river.
There was zero sign of human habitation.
The river bank was too overgrown to walk along. So, she waded along the shallow edge of the water, wisely feeling her way with a stick so that she could scare off any stingrays that might be lurking in the mud.
She kept sinking into the deep oozing mud. And so she soon decided to swim instead. Which took a lot of guts. She knew there were piranhas in that water. Then there were the caimans – South American relatives of the alligator, that can grow up to four metres long.
She had little choice but to brave them both.
And pray.
She drifted slowly downstream with the current. Then, as darkness fell, she pulled herself up on to the bank for another of those agonizingly long jungle nights.
*
Juliane had a cut on the back of her right arm. It was difficult to see but felt uncomfortable so she twisted her arm around to take a better look.
Maggots.
Flies had laid their eggs in the open wound. The eggs had now hatched and the larvae were a good centimetre long. The gash was infested as they fed off the rotten skin.
Juliane tried to pick them out. But without success.
She knew that these parasites would not harm their host – indeed, maggots can help keep a wound clean because they only feed on dead tissue. But while the wound was open it could become infected – and an infected, open wound in the jungle could kill her very fast.
There was little she could do, so she left the crawling maggots where they were and lowered herself once more into the piranha and alligator river and continued her dangerous swim.
As the day wore on, she knew that her body was steadily falling apart around her. She could soon feel a sharp pain between her shoulders. She touched it gingerly. Blood. As she’d been drifting downstream, the sun had been beating down on her back, scorching the skin. She had bleeding, second-degree burns just from the sunlight.
Soon, too exhausted to continue, she collapsed on the river bank. She awoke to find several baby caimans just inches from her body.
And, nearby, the mother, preparing to attack: hissing, mouth open.
She fled into the river, hoping the caiman would stay with its young.
But soon she had an even worse enemy to deal with: her hunger. She’d been struggling through the jungle for more than a week, and she was severely weakened. She found herself on all fours, frantically trying to catch one of the frogs she saw jumping around her, but without success …
*
On the tenth day of her jungle nightmare Juliane was drifting like a corpse through the water, in a daze of confusion and pain, when she saw it.
At first, she thought her eyes were deceiving her. A hallucination, brought on by exhaustion on the brink of death.
But then she realized it was real. There was a small boat on the river bank.
She dragged her broken, bleeding body towards it. There were footsteps leading from the boat up the bank. She crawled after them. It took her hours just to cover a hundred yards. But she finally found a simple shelter. There was a canister of petrol there, for the outboard motor of the boat. She poured some on to her maggot-infested wound. It was agony, but it had the desired effect: the maggots – most of them, at least – came worming their way to the surface and she was able to wipe them away.
Then she discovered a tarpaulin and wrapped it round her to protect her skin from the mosquitoes. That night she slept like a baby in that little shelter. She would later say it felt like a five-star hotel.
The following day, three men found her.
She explained who she was, that she had fallen from the skies and survived for ten days in the jungle. They stared at her in amazement, not knowing how any human could have survived such an ordeal.
And they also stared at her in horror. It was not her bleeding back that horrified them the most, nor the maggot-infested wound, nor the broken skin, blistered with angry, suppurating insect bites.
It was her eyes. The blood vessels had burst all across her eyeballs from her extreme fall at terminal velocity. They were oozing blood – sockets of weeping red.
*
Juliane Koepcke had fallen two miles from the sky and survived through sheer good luck. But after that, luck had very little to do with it.
She survived the horrific ordeal of the next ten days by using the little knowledge she had to very good effect. Despite the terrifying situation she found herself in, she stayed calm and adapted her mindset to survive the jungle terrain around her. She trusted her instinct and refused to give in, despite the often hopeless outlook of her situation.
How many people in Juliane’s situation would have panicked? But Juliane knew that to panic was to die. She kept her cool and she kept moving. She ignored the pain, and she stuck to her plan. And, ultimately, it was that indomitable survivor spirit that saved her life.