EPISODE 40 - I Fell From The Sky

And I said , okay , she went , I'm going to call it Sarah's word fuck ups .

And she was like , oh , she started doing it . And I was like no , you need to scrubble it like this . And she was like I am scrubbing it like this . I was like , no , you're not scrubbing it properly .

And she's like okay , but I'm just going to leave this pinned here so that it shloops it down . And I said , oh okay , no worries .

Devastated , absolutely devastated , but I do want to ask what is that next to you ? Because that looks awesome . Next to you there's something oh amazing .

So we was going to make a cardboard witch's house . But it's much more difficult when you're trying to do it with a 12 year old , because they now have opinions and ideas about how to do things themselves , which is just yeah , it's not the best . Oh , I'm going to recognize it .

wait to see that . When you finished it , are you going to like crack on with it while Hayley is at school ?

So we used to get her to cut out little like leaves and things like that so that she felt like she was helping , but I'd never stick them on , no , just eat them .

It really made my day because I can imagine everybody's sitting in the office and all of it's really quiet and they're just , you know , doing their work and all of a sudden someone goes random blam go and they've got to come up with something about them so cool . I think that should now be a staple at every meeting .

You know when they always do hi , my name's Sarah and then you do like a random thing .

Random blam Merch go . Yeah , that'd be awesome Morning .

Born to German parents in 1954 , julianne was raised in Lima , peru . Her father , hans Wilhelm Kopke .

When Julianne was 14 , her parents had set up this biological research station in the Peruvian jungle called Panguana , which has been so cool to say but not cool to type , because it keeps changing it to penguin Every time I typed it .

No , absolutely anything , because her parents didn't want any like generators or anything there that would make a noise and scare off the wildlife or make them not behave in a way that they would normally behave .

That's what she said . She loved it , absolutely loved it . So Julianne learned how to live in the jungle , how to navigate her way around the jungle . You know , like the vastness of it , the dangers , to look out for the animals that she would encounter in the jungle , how they would behave .

So if you know how they would behave if they felt threatened , how they would behave if they were on the attack , or just generally how animals behaved in the presence of other people .

She learned what was poisonous , so all the vegetation and plant life growing in the jungle , and she learned everything that you could about living in the jungle and , unbeknownst to her at the time , she learned the very skills that she would need to save her life when she was 17 .

So Julianne would live in the jungle with her parents for nearly two years , but it was then decided that although she was being homeschooled by her parents , it wasn't enough and she would return to Lima alone and attend the high school that she had been previously going to before she left for the jungle .

And Julianne was just she's just an incredible person , but she was very adaptive and she fitted straight back into school and she had no problems leaving her parents and staying with friends and she quite regularly made the short flight from Lima to Panguana quite regularly , like on the holidays and things like that , to go back and see her parents .

And she was very self sufficient , she was very level headed and very together . So her mother had actually flown over to be with Julianne when she graduated , when she was 17 . And it was decided that they would fly back together to Panguana to be with her father over the Christmas period .

So Christmas 1971 , 17 year old Julianne and her mother were looking to book tickets for the short one hour flight from Lima to I think it's like Pocopa or Piquela or something I can't remember the name of where they actually flew into , but they were going back to Panguana .

So the flight was only an hour and the late booking that they were trying to do and the fact that it was the Christmas holidays meant that their only option was a ticket aboard Lancer flight 508 , which was a turboprop airliner that could carry maximum 99 people .

And when Julianne's father heard that the pair were planning to take this Lancer flight to go back and see him , he urged them , like the pleas of a desperate man . He urged them to book a different flight . So he knew that the Lockheed L188 Electroplane , which is the aircraft they would have gone , had a terrible reputation .

Of the 170 electroplanes built , 58 had been written off after they had crashed or suffered extreme malfunctions midair .

Where their wings are , they're not kind of fused onto the fuselage and they can withstand the turbulence and they're quite flexible . The wings of the Lockheed plane were not .

It was the last thing that should have been flying over the Andes , because the Andes had the rainforests and the weather there was very unpredictable and the monsoons and the typhoons and all sorts . And Lancer airline itself also had a particularly terrible reputation , so terrible that flight 508 was the only aircraft now left in the Lancer fleet .

Flight 501 from Lima to Cusco crashed 10 minutes after takeoff into treacherous mountain conditions . It crashed into a mountain , leaving no survivors from the 49 passengers on board , and pilot error was overwhelmingly the reason for the crash . No other reason , just pilot incompetence .

Investigators found that pilot error from incorrect engine shutdown procedures and faulty maintenance caused the crash .

There had also been quite a few other , you know , like near misses with the aircrafts due to faulty maintenance and pilot error , and the Lockheed plane that they were due to board , although they didn't know it at the time , was actually made up from parts of other planes that they pulled out the side of a mountain .

So Lanzanel had the one remaining aircraft but , however , despite the overwhelming evidence that they should not have boarded the plane , they were worried about not being able to make it back over the Christmas period to see Hans , and they decided to go ahead and get on the flight with Maria , specifically telling her husband quote not every airplane crashes .

End quote .

And they waited at the airport for seven hours or more and they eventually boarded the Lanzar flight 508 . Initially the flight seemed like any other . It's a straightforward flight . Like I say , it was only an hour , so by the time they get up it's due to come back down again .

Placed in the second row from the back , Gillianne took the window seat , while her mother sat in the middle seat , so it's a row of three seats , like a normal aircraft . Half an hour into the flight , they ate their sandwiches .

The stewardess came around , gave them sandwiches and Gillianne looked at the rainforest out of the window beside her and you know it was a lovely view for her flying over the Peruvian jungle .

But 15 minutes before they were supposed to land out their destination in Pukalpa that is the name of the destination the sky suddenly grew black and she said daylight turned to night and lightning flashed from all directions , oh God . And people were screaming . The plane had hit horrendous turbulence and it shook like vibrated and shook and it dropped at .

It rocked from side to side , and I'm going to put this out there now no plane has ever crashed from turbulence .

And in the next instance , Julianne said that there was a huge flash of brilliant white light over the plane's wing that plunged the aircraft into a steep nosedive . And Julianne looked beside her to see her mother and she could see the entire length of the aisle right into the cockpit below her . So instead of just looking , you know , sideways and the cockpit .

Being in front it was , it was below her . That's how steep the nosedive was . And she grabbed hold of her mother's hand and her mother very calmly said to Julianne that is the end , it's all over . And Julianne said that it was over the noise and the chaos of everything . That's all she heard was their mother say that and it was clear as clear as crystal .

But the sounds of the passenger screams were drowned out now by the roaring of the engines . It was plummeting down the roar of the turbines . It was incredibly loud and Julianne says that in her book , that she will never not hear that sound Like it will never leave her .

Saturday morning , you'll be fine .

Julianne looked to her mother in the chair beside her , but she was alone . Deciding to put her seat belt on at the last minute had stopped Julianne from being completely thrown out of her seat .

At a height of 10,000 feet , or two miles , to be exact , julianne was now free , falling in her row of chairs and spinning out of control , Just you know , like one of those little boomerang leaves when you do it in the air .

That's like how a row of seats was spinning constantly and the last thing Julianne saw before she passed out was the dense canopy of the jungle coming to meet her . And she said during that free fall she was completely aware that she was falling from the sky to the ground and she was going in and out of consciousness .

She'd go out of consciousness and then she would wake up and she would know exactly what was happening and she'd go back into being unconscious again , like people do on that slingshot ride .

But she was now very alone in the depths of the Peruvian jungle

so . But she was somehow out of her chair , although she'd been free falling in her chair . When she'd woken up she was unbuckled , she was out of her chair , but the chair was there with her . The chair was near her . Yeah , well , it wasn't quiet . She , you know , she weren't just sitting in her chair , it was near her .

So she tried to stand up but immediately passed out . And when she came to again her vision was blurred and she realised that she could only see out of one of her eyes . The other one was swollen shut . And again and again she tries to get to her feet but her head spins and she feels sick and she's nauseous and then she passes out again .

She eventually manages to get to her knees . So instead of trying to stand all the way up , she manages to get to her knees and she kind of stays there , steadies herself , and it was then that she kind of managed to assess her injuries . So not only does she have her swollen shut eye , she's suffering from a severe concussion .

She notices a large gash on her calf which is about an inch and a half long , and she has a similar car on the back of her arm . But it's hard for her to kind of seize . You can't . It's right on the back of her arm . She can't really twist around and see to get a better look . She's only got one eye as well .

She's only got one eye , and then she's trying to look around . She notices that her collarbone feels a little bit strange , so she touches it and she immediately feels that it is completely broken the bones . Although they weren't protruding out of her skin , they were so broken that they were actually overlapping , so that she had bone on top of bone .

But she felt absolutely no pain from any of her injuries , just this like crushing sense of loss , you know . But she felt that if she had survived there must be other survivors . She can't have been the only one to solve If she'd survived with such kind of minimal injuries . There must be other survivors .

So she screamed out for her mother and she crawled around on her hands and knees around her little crash site and she couldn't find her and her body eventually gives out and she passed out on the floor of the jungle . Day one . It's now Christmas morning and Julianne wakes up with a clearer head .

She knows where she is , she knows what's happened to her and if her parents had taught her anything , it was that calm , clear thinking could master any situation that she found herself in in the jungle . She knew she had to keep level-headed and keep rational .

Panic and fear would get her nowhere and she had no doubt in her mind that she wouldn't make it out of the jungle . At no point did she think otherwise . She never thought that she was just going to be stranded there .

She'd been in the depths of the jungle so many times previously with her parents and they'd always made it out safely , and she's now kind of confident that she can stand up straight without passing out and she assesses the area around her . There was obviously trees everywhere , incredibly tall trees .

While I was writing this , I was reminded very much of the Marina episode , where she's in the jungle .

She kept that one shoe on and she felt that she needed that small bit of protection . Back in Pangoana , she never went out without her rubber boots on because of the snakes . There was a lot of deadly animals that she could step on and you know they were not too fond of that . The first day she doesn't venture too far from her little crash site .

She wanted to get her bearings because she knew how easy it was to get lost and confused . So she just was just kind of like getting her bearings . And although I say it's her little crash site , there's nothing there apart from her row of chairs . There's no plane wreckage or anything .

On her exploration she became incredibly thirsty and she knew how quickly dehydration could take hold and she had absolutely no source of water at all . So what she did was that she started licking the moisture off the leaves around her . So the rainforest is always damp , humid damp , despite how hot is , you know the burning summits .

There was no water for her to actually drink , but she could get some moisture from the leaves , which I would never think to do . That , would you ? I ?

So she was obviously hungry and she knew that she needed this food . So she scooped up part of the Stalin , but it was like almost disintegrated from the rain and it was covered in mud and it wasn't nice . So although she tried it , she said it was disgusting . She left the Christmas Stalin where he was , but she took the pack of sweets with her .

All morning and afternoon Julianne stays relatively close to her crash site , eating some of her , the sweets that she found and rehydrating as much as she can , looking for other survivors and more wreckage from the plane . She kind of hears this low hum and it is a helicopter flying above her and they were looking for the wreckage of the plane .

She shouts and she waves her arms and kind of like half-heartedly because she knew there was absolutely no way they would be able to see into the jungle . So she knew that she had to get out of that thick forest . That then became her resolve .

She had to get out of the thick forest so that she could be found , and eventually the noise of the helicopter faded and she was left with just the ominous jungle sounds .

Her trained ears picked up a sound that she knew and it was a sound that had been there all along , but through her concussed state and disorientation she hadn't really focused on it and it was the sound of dripping , tinkling water .

So she immediately set off in search of the source and nearby found a little spring that fed into a tiny like she called it , a rivula , which I guess it's just a tiny little stream of water . It's not a river , it's like an inlet of a river . Yeah , exactly that . What did you say ? It was called A rivula .

Having explored her little crash site as much as she could , she was sure that there were no other survivors nearby . There was no hope of being found by the helicopters above . Her only lifeline was this source of water , so she followed it for the rest of the day .

She had no way of knowing how long she walked , for she generally told time by the light of the . She couldn't really see the sun , and it was just how hot it was as well . When it started to get colder , she knew that it was getting into night and things , so she generally told time by that .

So she walked and walked and walked , and eventually the tiny little stream that she'd been following started to widen and eventually it turned into a low stream that was in this big riverbed . So there was a little bit of water like a little stream in this really big riverbed .

So she was able to actually walk down into the riverbed quite easily , instead of trying to hack her way through the jungle . She managed to quite easily walk through this riverbed .

So she only stopped when it started to get dark and she knew that darkness brought dangers , and so she looked for a place to bed down for the night , but the only thing that she could sleep on was the forest floor . There was no other source of you know anywhere to sleep and she always tried to protect her back .

So you know , like up against a tree or something , and despite the humidity of the rainforest and the blazing heat of the sun in the day , the night was freezing cold . And although she knew how to make a fire her training and her knowledge and all the times that she'd previously been in the jungle she could quite easily make a fire .

But it was the rainy season and everything was wet and everything was damp . She couldn't even use her knowledge to make a little fire . Her sleep that night was plagued by insects everywhere rain , wind , sleeplessness , All throughout this .

You have to remember that she was being absolutely hounded by mosquitoes , like buzzing everywhere , and that would be the case for every day and every night . The insects never , ever relented .

read out amongst them . Can you , can you , could you even . Can you even imagine ?

The terrain was rocky and hilly and she couldn't see very well into the distance because of a swollen shut eye . So she didn't dare to take any shortcuts for fear of it leading her away from the stream that she was following .

So she just stayed in that riverbed and followed the stream , no matter which way it went , and on her travels she met a Goliath bird eating spider .

Its body is a whopping five inches big , with a leg span of 11 inches . You're welcome .

Tess makes it all like humid and nice for him , but Tess did go to Peru . She went to Peru , she lived in the rainforest in Peru and she was part of a like rescue program , breathing program . Like 508 , was it 507 ? Just the one before , but yeah , it's . I mean it's not some .

It's not for me the thought of going into the rainforest , firing this fog up into the canopy of the rainforest and then put great big umbrellas that catch the spiders and things that come out of it . It's not for me , but you know .

wouldn't bite her . So she kind of just skirted around the spider and carried on her route and the stream eventually got bigger and wider and deeper and eventually fills the riverbed so that now she has to wade through it and the river itself is filled with all sorts of dangers . And actually later on we come to learn that it's actually called stingray .

Oh , I can't remember what it's called . It's further down in my notes , but it's not got a nice name to it . Anyways , it's filled with dangers , filled with stingrays , snakes , payment crocodiles , parrots and just all sorts of awful things . But again , julianne , she knows that the the river is a safer option for her than trekking it through the jungle .

So she makes her way through the stream . But what she does is she leads the way with her sandaled foot , because she knows that if she stings , if she steps on a stingray , that it will immediately shoot a poisoned barb into her foot and that will be the end of it .

So she goes with her sandaled foot ahead and then to make sure that it was clear and that she wasn't stepping on anything , and then she would proceed . So it was quite slow going . She's got a broken collarbone . Later on you'd find out that she's got like a ruptured ligament in her knee as well .

And , like I say , she was a teenager , she was a child and she had this knowledge that she can't actually do . Thank God she did so . Day three Julianne continues her journey through the stream .

The sun was scorching her skin so much that her back had open blisters on it , and it was on this day , on day three , that she came across her first bit of plane wreckage outside of her own little crash site and she found one of the plane's turbines and it was scorched black .

But she said that although she knew that this turbine was from an aeroplane crash , she didn't kind of relate it back to the aeroplane that she was on and that it was actually her crash that she'd been in . She was like , oh , there's a bit of plane there , you know .

Day four while making her way continuously through the stream , julianne hears a noise that made her blood freeze in her veins and it was the sound of flapping large , large wings , flapping louder than that of any other bird . And she knew this sound because her mother had studied birds .

And it's an ornithologist , not an anthropologist , oh , or an anthropologist , someone else , someone that studies antlers ? Yep . So she knew that this sound was not good . This was the sound of the king vulture .

The presence of the king vulture would only mean one thing to her , and it meant that there was a large amount of carrion in the forest nearby , and it was a large amount of what Carrion Like dead meat dead .

Shortly after hearing the king vulture , just on the other side of the river Bend , where she was , julianne came across a horrific site , and it was a site of a three-seat bench , the likes of which that she had been strapped in and that had fallen 10,000 feet lay in front of her .

But unlike hers , this one had landed with such force that it was buried head first , at least three feet deep into the jungle floor . Oh god , passengers and all oh no . So she could tell from the legs sticking out of the earth that it was two men , two men and a woman , and in a moment of sheer panic she thinks that this woman could be her mother .

So she takes a long stick from the ground and she carefully removes the woman's shoe and she sees that the woman has got now varnish on her toes and she breathes a sigh of relief because she knew that her mother never paid her toenails . She later on goes to .

She understood that there's no way that this woman could have been a mother , because the mother was in the seat next to her . She was relieved that this wasn't her mother , but she was also horrified because , you know , these were still people . Yeah , it's still someone .

And the vulture was just sat atop the trees just waiting and there was nothing that she could do . Yeah , but she scanned the area around the seats and things for any other survivors that could have been there .

And all the while she's listening to the helicopters overhead and she knows that she needs to hurry to find a clearing because she knows that the helicopters , they're not just going to search every single day , they will eventually stop , stop searching .

Yeah , so the days from here on out , the days kind of start to merge into one and she starts losing track of what day it is . She's eaten the last of the bag of sweets that she's been really carefully rationing . So about day four or five he's been , they spend five days pretty much , and she's only had these boiled sweets to keep her company .

And then , now that they're gone and there was no fruit growing in the rainy season , there was absolutely nothing for her to forage , and Julianne knows that in order to survive she must drink plenty of water , and this she has been getting from the dirty stream that she has been wading through and , although it was brown in colour and filled with dirt and soil ,

she knew that it was safe to drink , it wouldn't do her any harm , and she knew that bacteria and things that would normally be harmful are only found in streams that could potentially be like what human putting things polluted and polluted yeah that's the word I was going for . So she knew it was safe to drink .

So she would guzzle it down and she said that that actually would fill her stomach . On days five or six Julianne heard the distant sound of something that actually brightened her mood . It kind of lifted her spirits a little bit , and it was the distinct call of the Hoitzen bird . She knew that these birds only nested near large , open bodies of water .

Oh , that's handy . So she knew that people also took root near large open bodies of water . She was like great news . But up ahead , the stream that she'd been so carefully following for the last five or six days was blocked by a huge amount of driftwood and reeds and stuff had been growing on top of this driftwood as well .

So she knew that there was absolutely no way she was going to be able to make it over it or through it . So she actually left the stream to find her way . She wanted to just find a way around the blockage really , but she had to fight through the underbrush . She had no machete . She said normally in Pankwani you'd always go out of the machete .

So it took her hours and all the time it took her hours and hours and sapped what little energy that she had . But she managed to make it across , like around the obstacles , and what she found was that it kind of where the blockage was . It fed into a river that was about 30 foot wide .

It's a big old river that she was now about to follow , but there was still not a soul in sight . But she can still hear the helicopters in the distance and when she looks up for the first time in six days she can see quite clearly sky through the canopy of the trees .

There was a helicopter circling above her that she can see and she's waving her arms frantically and she's screaming , and to no avail , the noise of the engine , just if it just starts to fade , and she knows that it's going off .

And she wondered if it would ever come back , or if you know that was the last helicopter that they were going to send out , or even if perhaps they had already found as many survivors as they could .

And she was all of a sudden incredibly angry with herself and she felt that she'd made the wrong decision and she felt that if she just stayed where she was at the craft site that she would have been rescued and she still believed in in her heart that there were other survivors that had also been rescued and she was the only one left in the jungle .

But despite that , her resolve , it still didn't waver and she never thought about giving up and she just knew that she had to continue . But the river that she'd come across now it was too deep for her to walk through and she didn't have the energy to fight away through the jungle .

So she decided that she would just float down the river and just making sure that she didn't bash into any locks or debris or anything , because she knew that , you know , if she'd broke a leg or something , then that that was it , that would be death for her , so she would just lay and float .

So by day seven or eight she noticed that the wound on her calf had become very swollen and red , and you know she'd been . She'd been wading through this dirty water I don't know how long , and her body's not got anything to to fight an infection .

And she craned her neck around as best as she could so that she could see the wound on the back of her arm , and she was horrified to see that it had become infested with maggots .

So that you know , then , people are alerted to the fact that there's anything in there , neck and little buggers . Neck and little buggers . And by the time anyone had noticed , the dog's leg had started to like , smell and rot and it was gross .

So their dad told Julian that the only way to get the maggots out was by either pouring alcohol or gasoline into the wound . But Julian didn't have any alcohol or gasoline . Oh , she didn't , you did not . She did , however , have a small ring with her that she'd bent into some like some sort of pliers that she'd managed to kind of .

That she was going to pull the maggots out with . But she said whenever she got close to them they would burrow deeper into her skin . If that wasn't bad enough , she was also suffering from what she would later find out was second degree burns across her back from the sun . But nevertheless she continued her journey and by day nine she was absolutely starving .

Her thoughts became consumed with food and her dreams were haunted by different arrays of meals set out in front of her , and all she could think about was food .

They were kind of inquisitive because they'd never seen another person . And Julian knew that that . You know it was like a crushing blow to her . She , despite all of her efforts and thinking that she knew the best possible route and she knew the way out , and she just kind of felt a little bit that she was just getting further and further away from rescue .

And by this time as well she had also started to hallucinate visually and audibly . And while drifting down the river she was sure that she could hear chickens in the distance . And it was always she said always chickens that she could hear . And at first she would get her hopes up and then realise that it was a hallucination .

And there were no chickens and she could no longer keep going at the pace that she had been going , and she often found that she was dozing off while floating in the river , and she knew that this could be disastrous . So she would often leave the safety off the river and climb up onto the bank to sleep , and then she'd go back into the river .

One such day , when she climbed up to the river bank to sleep , she was woken by the small chirps of a baby caiman crocodile , just inches away from her and with its mother very shortly bound , and she knew that she had to get back into the river .

She also knew that if she'd gotten up to run away , that they would have attacked her straight away , so she thought the best thing to do was just to slide away on her belly , just back down into the water , instead of getting up and making it Like they do ? Yeah , exactly like

they do . Exactly so day 10 , having had nothing to eat apart from her little bag of sweets , she was desperate for food . So she decided to try and catch frogs . The frogs in the jungle were poisonous dart frogs . She knew that . But she knew that they wouldn't agree with her , they wouldn't kill her .

But it would also be a little bit of something to give her a little bit of energy . It was still food at the end of the day . So she spent what little energy she had trying to catch these little tiny poison dart frogs . But she never succeeded .

And it was on this day , day 10 , that she saw something in the river up ahead , and it was a tethered boat . But she didn't trust her eyes at all . They had been deceiving her with all sorts of hallucinations up until then .

And as she got closer , floating down this river , the boat was still there and she kind of shook her head and she rubbed her eyes and things , but the boat remained . And it wasn't until she reached the boat and she touched it that she knew that it was real and this meant people .

Yeah , and sure enough , when she looked by the boat up to the riverbank , she could see footprints leading away from the boat and it would take her hours to cover just a few yards . But she followed the little path of footprints and eventually she came to a small tambo . Now , a tambo is a little makeshift shelter .

It was about 10 by 15 feet and it was made out of like palm leaves and things like that , and it was something that hunters used to store their equipment while they went off into the forest . And sure enough , inside the tambo was the boat's 40 horsepower motor and a jug of gasoline Nice .

And she was sure that the owner of the boat was nearby and all she had to do was wait . And as she was thinking and formulating this new plan , she thought about the jug of gasoline and she remembered the maggots eating into her flesh and the wounding around was obviously painful and she could feel them burrowing inside . Yeah .

And she knew that they'd gotten bigger as well . And it took her ages to eventually unscrew the cap of the jug , but she did it .

But she didn't have the strength or the energy to lift the jug up , so she found a small piece of hose pipe in the shack and was all to sucking up some of the gasoline and then letting the gasoline drip into her wound and she said the pain was excruciating because at first the maggots burrowed deeper into her flesh before they couldn't stand the gasoline anymore

, and then they would start to kind of make their way out . So she grabbed her makeshift tweezers and she began pulling them out one by one , and she managed to count to 30 before she was happy that there was none left and she couldn't see anymore . But she would find out later on that there were actually many , many more inside .

The effort of finding the boat and climbing out of the water , the river , up to the tambo , opening the jug and then pulling these maggots out left her absolutely exhausted , so she decided to spend the night in the tambo .

It offered her shelter from the freezing wind , the rain , and she also found a piece of tarpaulin as well that she used as a blanket , which gave her some relief from the constant bite of the insects that so far , every night she had faced .

On the 11th day she awoke in the morning and still no one had come , and it was then that she realized actually that sometimes hunters was only used these shacks periodically in the year and that this could actually be an abandoned tambo and that maybe there was no one nearby at all .

And she said in a book that it was only very briefly that she wrestled with the idea of actually taking the boat , but her conscience wouldn't allow it . She said that she could not save herself and potentially endanger the life of someone else .

If there was someone else in that rainforest and she took the boat , that person would be in the same situation that she was , and she just couldn't do that and she also did not have the energy to get out the 40 horsepower engine or to even just push the boat back into the river and untether it .

But by the time she'd made the decision to continue her journey along the river , it had started to absolutely pour down , and she told herself that she would just remain in the shelter out of the rain until it stopped . That way she could regain some energy as well . And by the afternoon the rain had stopped and she told herself that she would continue .

She would leave the tambo , she would go back down the river and continue on . But she just couldn't make her body do what she wanted it to do . She no longer had the energy to get to her feet . She literally had no energy left to do anything .

So she decided that she would stay there for one more day , regain some more energy , and then she would continue on . And it was only then that the thought occurred to her that she could quite easily die here , and no one would know . They wouldn't know her struggles for the past 11 days . They wouldn't know what she'd been through . She wouldn't know .

Nobody would know the effort that she had put in trying to survive .

But late evening that day , she hears out of the jungle voices and she couldn't believe it . After all that time that she spent alone , not hearing or seeing another living person , she assumed that it was her mind again playing tricks on her and this was her brain , giving her one last bit of hope before she died .

But the voices started to grow louder and she knew that they were actually coming closer . And now , with the forest before her , stepped three men and they stopped in shock , horror .

At the site before them , and before they even had time to register what was going on , julianne speaks to them in Spanish and she says I am a girl who was in the lands of Crash , my name is Julianne , and that was the first sentence that she'd spoken for 11 days , and it was now January 3rd .

Julianne had been in the forest nearly 12 days without any food or tools to survive at all . The three men obviously took care of her . They gave her food to eat but she couldn't really stomach any food . She said she got very little food . Did she manage to get down ? They tended to her wounds and they managed to pull out 50 more maggots from her arm .

And she asks them about the other passengers and she's desperate for news of her mother . The men are aware of the crash and they tell her that no one has been found , not even the plane wreckage has been found , and as far as they knew she was the sole survivor .

But Julianne doesn't allow her brain to kind of process what that actually means , because then that would mean that her mother had died as well . And she just didn't allow herself to go there . The three men tell Julianne how lucky she is that they found her and that they actually hadn't been planning on coming to the TANBO at all .

It was only because of the heavy downpour that the men had decided to come back to the TANBO to check to make sure the boat was still tethered .

The men decided that the best course of action would be to spend that next night in the TANBO and then travel early next morning into the village , and they desperately wanted to get Julianne to the hospital . That night , julianne said she slept terribly . She all of a sudden could feel all of the pain from her wounds .

The hunger that she'd been previously feeling hadn't ever caused her any pain . She always said that she thought starving to death would be incredibly painful , but she never felt any sort of pain until that night when her body kind of brought out the full force of all of her injuries and she was just desperate to get on that boat and get out the jungle .

But she was too weak to make the short journey to the boat . So the men actually had to carry her and they laid her inside the boat and then they covered her with a tarpaulin and it was only then that she kind of allowed herself to relax and kind of let go and she immediately drifted into a very deep sort of unconsciousness .

The entire way down the river she was coming in and out of consciousness and when she is awake she speaks to the men and she finds , you know , she's trying to find out information and things . And she finds out that the river that they are on is called the Rio Shibana and it is absolutely completely uninhabited .

She would never continuing down that river , she never would have been found . The trip that the hunters took hours and hours and hours before the river eventually joins the Rio Petita , which is a much bigger river , where the village of Tornavista lies , and that is the village that the three hunters had come from .

And it was that she realised then that there was absolutely no way she could have made that journey by herself . She would have died well before she even made it anywhere near that little village .

And when she got to the village and the men unloaded her , obviously curious children and people kind of ran up to see the strange new woman with yellow hair and white skin . They were all sort of like Indians and things . And the curious children run up to her and then they left , absolutely screaming , terrified .

And a woman saw her and she screamed and this is a quote from the book those eyes , I can't look into them , oh God , those terrible eyes . And when Juliane asks the men what was wrong with their eyes , they explain that her eyes were completely blood red . All of the blood vessels had burst and there was no whites left .

Even the black iris had turned red , goodness , and there's a photo of her that's taken off her in this village and it's , although it's black and white , her eyes are completely black .

So they were very superstitious and things and they thought that she was some sort of not witch , but they didn't think that she was real .

A nurse from the village runs out to meet her and Julianne is shocked because she actually knows this woman . Oh , she had once given her a tetanus shot before she'd gone back to Panguana with her parents .

So this village in Toronto was very near Panguana and it turned out that actually , where the plane had crashed and where she was in the jungle was 30 miles from Panguana . Oh , no way . So it wasn't far at all . But this nurse had wanted to give her some penicillin because of her wounds were infected and things . But Julianne did not want penicillin .

She actually refused it . Her father was allergic to it and she was concerned that she also would then be allergic to it . So she didn't want to run the risk of having an allergic reaction to the penicillin when that's the thing that's supposed to have saved her .

Yeah , but even then , that's very level headed thinking , isn't it To have come that far and survive ? You know to be starving to death and then go ? No , actually I'll pass on the penicillin just in case , yeah ? So she's eventually cleaned up and she's told that a flight had been arranged for her to get her back to the mainland and into a proper hospital .

So the flight is only 20 minutes . Julianne is a bit understandably terrified , but she knows that she needs a hospital and she does not even have the energy to argue about getting on this flight . Once at the hospital , Julianne's injuries are fully assessed . The doctors pull out yet more maggots from Julianne's arm and also from the cut in her leg .

So she was already wounded . Her arm was massive . They had to like pack it for it to be able to heal completely . They had to put disinfectant on a bandage . Yeah , and then pack it and then change it every single day for it to be able to heal .

They also pulled out a huge splinter in her foot that she didn't even know was there and she was covered from head to toe in inflamed red , angry insect bites and she would later explain that experience actually a terribly swollen knee .

So a few weeks after the crash , her knee all of a sudden ballooned up and when she went to get it checked they told her that she'd torn her cruciate ligament in the crash . And she was also told , medically speaking , that it should have been impossible for her to walk for 11 days without any pain or any swelling at all .

And she said it wasn't until she was safe and rescued that her body , kind of the full force of these injuries , actually came out . And that just blows my mind that your body protects itself until it's ready to allow other people to protect it .

I guess if you're the only person in that situation , there's only you and your body and your mind , and how much it protects itself and tries to survive .

But yeah , before that , no knowledge of it .

Her stomach had shrunk so much that up until then she'd not really been able to eat a lot at all , but she managed to gobble down this sandwich and then , once she'd eaten the sandwich , she fell into a very safe , nice , deep sleep . So by now news of her rescue had reached headlines and all across headlines and TVs across Peru .

And this sparked almost like a frenzy of renewed hope that actually other passengers could well have survived , especially after her injuries had been read out and people realized that she actually wasn't very particularly injured from the crash . People were like , oh my God , if she survived with such little injuries other people could have .

And , based on Julianne's description of the stream and the river that she had followed , the hunters that found that were able to determine that she actually followed something that they know as Stingray Stream that's what it was called and a helicopter was sent out over the area , and it was only then that the first piece of airplane wreckage was found , but still

no survivors . The next morning , julianne was greeted in the hospital by her father and he simply walked into the room and asked her how she was , and she said that . She replied I'm fine , and that was that .

She said that he'd never really been a man of many words , but that she also felt within herself this complete void of emotion and she said that she was still in protection mode and she couldn't switch it off . She knew that she was happy to see her father . She just didn't feel it . She didn't feel any emotions at all .

By January 8th , most of the wreckage of the plane had been found and the first 20 deceased passengers as well , and there are reports of incredibly gruesome finds , just like what Julianne had stumbled across with the passengers in their seat . Most passengers were either dismembered or horribly disfigured .

The pilot was only identifiable because of his position in the cockpit . Her mother was eventually found among the wreckage , along with a few other people that they said that they had actually survived the initial impact but had very quickly succumbed to their injuries . So it was determined that the plane had crashed due to a lightning strike .

The airline that day had been running late . I said that they had been to cancelled flights already . There was a seven hour delay . The pilots were under extreme pressure to try and make up as much time as they could , so instead of detouring and going around the storm , they decided to fly straight through it . So it was pilot error that led to the crash .

She's just an incredible woman , and this book that she's written is called when I Fell Out of the Sky or something like that . We'll link it . But the book itself and her overview and her way of thinking is incredibly inspiring .

Definitely , because if you think , you know , if you're having a bit of a bad day and you're like , oh God , stuck in all that traffic , it kind of really puts things into perspective about where people can actually survive . Yeah , you know , when you're feeling tired . I've said that since having chemo .

Never again will I complain about being tired , because on a normal pre-cancer , when you're just like , oh my God , I'm so tired , I actually wasn't .

It's just the sheer amount of divine intervention , yeah , that how things had to be so perfectly aligned for her to be able to survive and be rescued , I mean your timing could have been better from my point of view . Sorry , but yeah , just the fact that , if she had not , it's almost like her childhood had been preparing her for what was going to happen .

Definitely , if she hadn't been in the jungle , she would never have survived the way that she did . And had she not listened to her body and listened to her gut instincts , she would never have been found . And just the sheer amount of fate that led to her being found was what makes this story so incredible .

Yeah , in fact she didn't feel any pain what the human body can go through is yeah , is tremendous .