survival in the jungle
On Christmas Eve 1971, German teenager Juliane Koepcke was sitting next to her mother on a plane.juuliane had just graduated from high school in lima, peru, and was on her way to the amazon region of peru. there, she and her mother planned to meet up with her father, biologist hans koepcke. but the plane was struck by lightning, and when the 17-year-old girl looked out the window, she saw the right wing on fire. the last thing juliane remembered was feeling herself whirling in her seat in midair, and then landing in soft vegetation. she ended up on the ground two miles from the crash. juliane lost consciousness, and she came to several hours later, still strapped in her seat. miraculously, she had survived, but she had fractured her collarbone, gashed her right arm, and lost vision in one eye. and her ordeal was just beginning. she set out to find the plane and her mother, but all she found were empty seats. and then suddenly she saw the bodies of three young women still in their seats. of the 92 people on board the plane, juliane was the lone survivor. juliane then wandered away from the crash, wearing torn clothes and only one sandal to try to find help. juliane had been raised by her parents on an ecological site in the jungle: she had to locate the water and follow it downstream until on the river, she might come across natives who could help her. as she waded through jungle water, she fought off swarms of insects and leeches, not even caring when crocodiles dived in her path. she used a walking stick to make her away, prodding shapes in the water to protect herself from deadly sting rays. despite her injuries, juliane hacked her way through the rainforest. she frequently heard planes overhead, but she had no way to signal them. she drank water, but she was too stunned to eat anything at all. on the tenth day, she stumbled onto a canoe and hut, where she was found hours later by peruvian lumbermen. they tried to treat hre injuries. one of them used salt and kerosene to clean out the insects that were buried in her skin. juliane counted thirty-five worms that came out of her arms alone. the following day she was taken on a seven-hour journey by canoe down the river to atown, where a local pilot flew her to her father. juliane recovered and went back to germny, where she became a zoologist. in 1998, at the age of fifty, she came back to peru as a consultant to werner herzog's documentary film about her ordeal, which was called wings of hope.