Kidnapped in Colombia: Into the Jungle (Part 2 of 2)

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0:33It's 4pm on September 12, 2003. Somewhere deep in the mountains of northern Colombia, a group of people follow the ridge above a deep, jungle-filled gorge. There must be around 20 of them, marching single-file, heads lowered against the rain, trooping along in a neat, orderly procession. The group is a strange mix. Some are tourists, bewildered, nervy, unfamiliar with this terrain. Others are dressed in camouflage and wielding assault rifles. It's the men with the guns who hold dominion over the confused, frightened holidaymakers who have little choice but to silently follow orders. That is, until suddenly, one of the tourists breaks rank and darts lightning quick from the line.

1:28Matt Scott's plan is simple. Get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. I thought, let's go, and just kind of pushed off. With one last glance over his shoulder at the armed guard walking behind him, Matt hurls himself off the ridge in a desperate bid for freedom. The side of the gorge is alarmingly steep, practically sheer, uncovered in a mixture of vegetation and loose, gritty scree. Matt slides, feet first, sending up a fine spray of mud and gravel as he skids on his backside. If there are gunshots behind him, he can't hear them. His ears are filled with the roar of rushing blood and the fizz of adrenaline.

2:14The mountains across the valley become a blur as he accelerates, letting gravity take the reins, not daring to slow down until he's outside the range of a bullet. But even if he wanted to slow down, he couldn't. His body violently jolts and judders over the rocks, grating and scraping, the friction tearing his trousers and cutting into his skin. An attempt to steady himself with his hands shreds the skin from his palms. Having escaped from his kidnappers, Matt is now in serious danger of sliding to his death. He flails, throwing out his hands in the hope of finding something to grab hold of. But the weeds uproot in his fingers.

2:55The undergrowth comes away from the ground like torn paper ribbons. And then, with a horrible, gut-wrenching lurch, the gradient drops away beneath him.

3:09The slope has steepened into a vertical cliff, and suddenly Matt isn't sliding at all. He is falling. As I'm sliding down one of these sections, I sort of came off the side of the mast and took quite a big fall, like 20 or 30 feet down. By daring to escape, he took a risk. And as he plummets through the air, it seems that his gamble has spectacularly backfired.

3:44Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we return to 19-year-old Matt Scott. In September 2003, the gap year student is on a trek to the Lost City, an archaeological site in Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountains. With just a week before his flight home, Matt is hoping to make the most of his remaining time in South America.

4:24But he ends up getting more than he bargained for. In the early hours of the fourth day, he and seven other tourists were taken hostage by a gang of armed paramilitaries. We were separated into two groups, people they wanted and people they didn't want. And I was put into the group of people they wanted. Matt and his fellow captives were forced to march through the jungle with no idea where they're going or what their kidnappers intend to do with them once they get there. Rather than sticking around to find out, Matt made a bold choice. I made the decision to escape partially because even though I had underestimated how serious this kidnapping business was, I seemed to have a much higher estimation of how serious the situation we were in was compared to the other people I was talking to.

5:13Unable to persuade any of his fellow hostages to come with him, he's been forced to go it alone. But after risking his life in a daring escape, he will soon discover that he may have just traded his human captors for something just as formidable. From that point on, I thought, well, LA Act S, the die is cast. Now I need to walk down this river system until my luck changes or I die. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories.

6:12It's September the 12th, 2003, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Partway down the side of a steep gorge, Matt Scott is falling through the air, bracing himself for impact. until he comes to land awkwardly in a spiny thicket of dense undergrowth. The teenager catches his breath. He's disorientated, flushed with adrenaline. He peers around and tries to get his bearings. He must have lost his glasses in the fall, because the world around him is fuzzy at the edges. He disentangles himself from the branches and twists his neck, squinting back up towards the ridge several hundred feet above. When I came off the side of the mountain and looked up at this fall that I'd taken, I thought, well, they're not following me down that.

7:06That was the first time I really felt safe and I knew it was just new to get into the jungle. The top of the ridge is out of sight and so too are the men he's running from. Matt listens out for voices or gunfire, but there's nothing. Just his own heavy breathing and the soft pitter-patter of rain against the leaves. He's done it. Matt was in the clutches of the rebel soldiers for about eleven hours, from the time he was woken at gunpoint to the moment he chose to escape. Had he stayed, like the seven other hostages, there was no knowing how long his captivity might have lasted. Whatever happens next, at least it will be on his terms.

7:53Matt turns and looks down towards the bottom of the slope. It's still a long way down, with multiple rocky outcrops and trees blocking his view. Somewhere down there lies the stream that he intends to follow to the main river in this region, the Rio Buritaka. Find that, and he will be on the home straight back to civilization. He extracts himself from the bush and drops down onto a small ledge.

8:23From here he begins to down climb, a more controlled descent than his initial dash for freedom, but no less dangerous. Fortunately, he's still pumped up on the thrill of escape. There was definitely a real exhilaration for the first hour, and that helps a lot with the adrenaline because I was doing dangerous climbing as well, so my adrenaline was really pumping. And I just felt like such an action man hero. Check me out. I'm escaping from kidnapping by gorillas in the Colombian jungle. The cinematic descent into the gorge continues. He leaps from outcrop to outcrop, using tree trunks and hanging vines for support.

9:06He's still riding an adrenaline high, which is suppressing both fear and pain, anything that might slow him down. Your body and your mind are actually very good at making you feel the way that it is best to feel to maximise your chances of survival. So even in a situation that I'm facing in, that's quite bad. And because feeling bad and kind of depressed or scared about my situation would not have helps my survival chances. Your evolved response is not to feel that way at all. Your evolved response is to feel really like you're ginned up and going for it. So yeah, I definitely felt quite good in the first couple of hours after escaping.

9:55Eventually, he reaches a ledge where he stops to rest. He has descended below the tree line. The rain has stopped and the sun is out, leaving the jungle more dazzlingly verdant than ever. It bursts with colour, an emerald green explosion of life, palm trees, giant ferns, and flowering plants with huge waxy leaves. Nat sits on the ground and starts taking stock. I pull off my backpack and see what on my backpack I have to survive the jungle. did a little inventory it's mission focus time i have two juggling balls i throw those away i have two socks filled with gravel and sewn together to make two more makes of juggling balls i have one water bottle potentially very helpful i have a small amount of a sugar solid called canela which is this solid sugar product very cheap the kidnappers gave us the stuff as we were walking just for the calories.

11:00Matt arranges his supplies on the ground in front of him. As well as the water bottle and the sugar solid, he also has a torch, a few pairs of socks, a waterproof plastic sheet, and that's it. He frowns. He rummages in the bottom of his backpack, searching for the one item that he was really counting on, his cigarette lighter. But it's not here. A queasy feeling rises in his stomach. Yesterday evening at the campsite, he and some other tourists had been playing cards when someone took out a lighter to light a candle. It was the same brand of lighter that Matt owned. At the time, he had chalked it down to coincidence.

11:42But now, it's pretty obvious what must have happened. He'd left it lying on the table, and someone else must have picked it up. It's such a small thing, because it was just a free gift at a shop. But not having a cigarette lighter was going to be very bad for my chances of survival in the next week. And had I known that I didn't have a cigarette lighter, it might have been a factor in the decision to escape. It gets cold up here in the mountains. And without a lighter, Matt will struggle to start fires for warmth at night. It's a blow. But he can't turn back the clock. His decision's been made.

12:21He'll just have to make do without. The priority is being able to travel light and fast. With that in mind, the more weight he can shed, the better. Anything cumbersome or non-essential must be left behind. And that includes his backpack itself. This backpack that I've been wearing is a bit ripped, and it slightly impedes my arms, which I need to climb. And because the bag is impeding my movements, I really needed to dump it. Matt's plan is to follow the stream at the bottom of this gorge until it flows into the Rio Buritaka, which will lead him back to civilization. Since he doesn't plan on ever being out of reach of running water, he elects to discard the water bottle along with his backpack.

13:07The torch he discovers is broken, so that gets chucked too. Though he does unscrew the top first, keeping it as a cup for drinking water. He stuffs the rolled-up plastic sheet down the side of one of his Wellington boots, and then, with his meagre survival kit in tow, he continues descending into the gorge. Soon, bone-weary from over twelve hours of high exertion and little sleep, he stops for the night. He finds a flat ledge and clears away some of the undergrowth to form a small sleeping area. He wraps himself in the plastic sheet and hunkers down as the light fades and the temperatures plummet.

13:51And that first night knocked all of the bravado out of me. And after that, I never again felt like, oh, I'm an action man, I can escape. No, after that, I was just like, just sort of grim struggle for survival from there on.

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16:08It's dawn the following morning. Matt sits up, bleary-eyed and shivering. He stretches out his stiff, cold limbs to catch the sunlight filtering through the forest canopy. Last night was utterly miserable. Lying in the fetal position, the plastic sheet was barely big enough to cover his body. He was forced to grip one end between his thighs, then pull the other half over his torso to get as much coverage as possible. Needless to say, it wasn't much of a barrier against the wind and the rain. He barely slept a wink. But look on the bright side. He's still alive, isn't he? He is still the master of his own fate, whatever that might be.

16:55Matt gathers his few possessions and continues his descent down the steep terrain. After a couple of hours, he encounters a series of waterfalls cascading down the side of the gorge. I remember this one waterfall. I had to jump from side to side, going down. And I was holding on to these little vines that were sort of growing out of the hillside. And I was rocking, looking at the place I had to jump. and I was planning to jump on three. I was going like one, two, and then on two. As I walked over on two, I felt the vines like ripping and giving way. Matt drops six feet and lands with a hard thud on a moss-covered rock.

17:37He winces in pain. Yesterday's adrenaline has worn off, and that one definitely hurt. But he gets up, dusts himself down, and carries on, taking extra caution descending the next few waterfalls. All day he picks his way down the side of the gorge. When the sun drops behind the opposite ridge, he starts looking for a place to camp. He pitches up on another flat ledge and steals himself for another chilly night.

18:12The next day, the gradient eases. The valley levels out into a dense sprawl of jungle, wedged between two hills and crowding around a shallow, meandering stream. He has finally reached the bottom. He drinks gratefully from the stream and sets off down the valley. But it soon becomes clear that his climb down might have been the easier part. I had to walk inside the stream itself in order to make any progress because the jungle is so thick. And so I'm walking through this, in this stream, in my Wellington boots, like pushing through the wet undergrowth and like over and under branches and trees growing across the stream continuously.

18:57The air around him swims with humidity, a constant cloying moisture that coats his skin and catches in his throat. The hours pile up as he beats a path through thick undergrowth, swatting at the clouds of biting insects that swarm above his head. And in this way, day three slips indistinguishably into day four. All this time, Matt's assumption has been that this stream is a tributary of the Rio Buritaka. Hopefully, he will soon reach the larger river, which he can then simply follow out of the mountains back to civilization. But as day four grinds on, foundations of his grand escape plan start to look increasingly shaky.

19:42He should have reached the main river by now. Something is wrong. I've become increasingly concerned from day four onwards, correctly as it turns out, that I'm in a different river system and I'm never going to find the Neil Bonachaca. And if I keep walking into the jungle without seeing any signs of humans, I am not going to survive that. Like, I don't know how long I can survive without any food in a sort of hostile environment with no support system. But the outlook is not looking great.

20:28It's September the 16th, 2003. For the past 48 hours, Matt Scott has followed the shallow stream as it meanders through a steep-sided gorge. Having access to drinking water is advantageous, but it comes at a cost. Because I'm walking in the river in permanent shade, my feet are always wet and the water is cold and running fast. And actually, all my body is damp all wet because I'm continuously pushing through undergrowth. So, everything is dampened cold. In just a t-shirt and hiking trousers, he's feeling the chill. His exposed arms are scratched and bitten. His wellington boots constantly fill with water, forcing him to periodically take them off and empty them out.

21:21As day five dawns, concluding yet another bitterly cold night, Matt looks up longingly at the sunlit ridge running parallel to the stream. I need to be up on the ridges so I can get back into sunlight, which would help keep me warm. I won't have trouble with water, but I could make much faster progress. Matt climbs out of the stream, then begins thrashing his way through the waist-high vegetation that lines the bank. The terrain steepens, and he's forced to climb, using branches and vines to haul himself up. After an hour or so, drenched in sweat and panting like a dog, he turns to see how far he's come.

22:04Not very. He soldiers on, his thirst intensifying as the heat picks up. Eventually, after five soul-crushing hours, he reaches a near-vertical slope of loose scree, similar to the one he slid down to escape the kidnappers. He starts up it, but immediately triggers a small rock slide of grit and shale He backs away, defeated I realised two things Firstly, I was never going to be able to get out of this van Because the top that I had come down at the start was so steep And it was so loose that it was impossible to climb up And also, I just couldn't survive that far away from water for any length of time His throat already burns with thirst.

22:53Even if he did manage to reach the ridge, he'd soon be forced back down in search of water. He might as well cut his losses. He turns around and retraces his steps down into the valley, arriving back where he started in a fraction of the time it took him to climb up. He drinks from the stream, then squats in the shallows and splashes his face, rubbing the cool water into the back of his sunburned neck. From that point on, I thought, well, the die is cast. Now I need to walk down this river system until my luck changes or I die. I don't have any options. A decision has been made. In the hours after his escape, Matt was fuelled by adrenaline.

23:41Now it's a different story. As he resumes his miserable slog along the streambed, it's not even clear what he's looking for. Civilization lies in the opposite direction. It's hard not to feel like a dead man walking. I was thinking increasingly that odds on, I was not going to make it out of this experience. This was going to be it. And I kind of made my peace with that. I didn't feel, like it didn't feel so bad. It's strange. You would think that would feel really bad, but actually I just thought this is what it is. You make a decision, that's how it goes. It feels like the universe, you could say perhaps, has given us quite a generous allotment of time on this planet.

24:33And, you know, 18 years of good times could be worse. A lot of people don't even get that. And I sort of felt like if I did die there, actually I'd had a pretty good inning. Even AT had quite a fun life, and that's how that was.

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25:57It's two days later. Matt trudges lethargically through the jungle, his shoulders slumped, his eyes downcast. He doesn't even bother to swat away the horseflies anymore. When one lands on his skin, he either ignores it, or, if he can muster the energy, he tries to catch and eat it. Aside from the occasional insect, he hasn't had a bite of food all week. Not since he finished the Pinela, the solidified sugar product that the kidnappers handed out. Oddly, though, he isn't tormented by hunger. A small mercy. I think your body is quite good in a survival situation at giving you the sensations that you need to survive.

26:46So actually, I would say that while I didn't have any food and I did notice physically the effects on myself and I noticed that I was getting weaker, I had to mentally make that connection between, oh, I'm getting weaker, it's because I haven't eased in the last week. Like a car running out of fuel, his body is slowing down. His strides have become shuffling steps. Gradually, the slow rasp of his own breathing replaces the symphony of the jungle. And as he gets weaker, the jungle, it seems, is getting stronger. The weeds and bushes that block his path appear more formidable. horrible, thorny barriers that knock him back and catch on his clothes.

27:37But then, in the afternoon of day six, Matt sees it. Up ahead, two small openings have been cut in the undergrowth along the riverbank. Beyond them, a muddy track snakes off into the trees. it's a footpath cutting right across the stream and this is the first human signs of anything that I've seen in like the last week and I was ecstatic and when I found that path I was like mentally my chances of survival went from like 10-15 % way up to 90 % so I was really thankful, I got down on my knees and gave thanks to God. Now, I find this intensely embarrassing because I'm not a religious man, and I knew even at the time that I was being a bit ridiculous, but I don't know, the solitude does funny things to you.

28:37Matt gets back to his feet. With a new spring in his step, he pulls his boots out of the boggy streambed and hops up onto the footpath. It cuts across the valley running east to west. Surely, by following this path, he will eventually reach some kind of human settlement. But as he sets off walking, another possibility presents itself. I was 90 % sure that I was on the paths used by the same rebel group that captured me. So if I was going to run into anyone, I sort of thought I was going to run into the rebels again. Later that day, his suspicions are confirmed. I can see where the rebels make camp every night, because there's just parts next to the path that are cut flat, where you can see tension being pitched, like the grass is discoloured in that way that you get.