Lost in the Amazon

by Tod Olson

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: DECEMBER 24, 1971

  CHAPTER 1: THE GREEN HELL

  CHAPTER 2: ALONE

  CHAPTER 3: FOLLOW THE WATER

  CHAPTER 4: NO SHORTCUTS

  CHAPTER 5: THE RIVER

  CHAPTER 6: SWARM

  CHAPTER 7: LOSING HOPE

  CHAPTER 8: “MY NAME IS JULIANE”

  CHAPTER 9: SURVIVOR

  CHAPTER 10: THE STORY

  EPILOGUE: PAYBACK

  GLOSSARY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SOURCES

  END NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK: LOST IN THE ANTARCTIC

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CARD PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  It was Christmas Eve day, and the terminal at Jorge Chávez International Airport teemed with people, vying for position. Bags full of presents, wrapped and unwrapped, crowded the floor. It seemed like half the population of Lima, Peru, wanted to get home for the holiday—and at least some of them weren’t going to make it.

  LANSA Airlines had canceled its flight to Cuzco, on the edge of the Andes Mountains. The plane had been delayed for repairs. Only Flight 508 would operate today, the airline announced. It would leave at 11:30 a.m. for Pucallpa and Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

  Dozens of frustrated passengers jostled in line at the airline counter, insisting that the plane take them to Cuzco. The German movie director Werner Herzog elbowed his way forward and made his case. He was desperate to get back to the mountains, where he was shooting a film about a Spanish conquistador who led a disastrous expedition through the jungle more than 400 years ago. Herzog had even bribed LANSA employees with a $20 bill to guarantee him a seat. But now, they said, there was nothing they could do.

  Mingling in the crowd were the 86 lucky people who had seats on Flight 508. Maybe they were going to make it home after all.

  But while Herzog and others pleaded for a flight out of Lima, at least some of the passengers on Flight 508 were dreading the trip. LANSA had a terrible reputation for safety. Two of its flights had crashed in the last five years; 135 passengers and 13 crew members had boarded a LANSA plane and never gotten off. The last crash had happened just 16 months earlier in Cuzco. LANSA Flight 502 to Lima had 49 exchange students from the United States aboard, fresh from a trek to the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu. An engine caught fire during takeoff, and the plane careened into a mountainside less than 2 miles from the airport. Only the copilot survived.

  The accidents had left LANSA with just a single plane, an old Lockheed L-188 Electra. The plane’s wings carried four giant turboprop engines. When the Electra was first made, the engines had a tendency to vibrate so violently they would tear the wings off the fuselage. LANSA se lanza de panza, went the saying: “LANSA lands on its belly.”

  They might joke, but few Peruvians got on a LANSA flight without a shudder of fear. José Guerrero Rovalino was feeling it. He had flown in from Iquitos for his job as an accountant. During the few hours he spent in Lima, he told his mother he didn’t trust LANSA to get him back safely.

  Narda Sales Rios, a singer, was nervous too. She had tried to change her flight at the last minute, but everything else was booked. Her sister was getting married over the holidays, and she needed to get to Pucallpa for the wedding. She waited anxiously in the terminal with her five-year-old son, Gerard, and a wedding bouquet she had bought for her sister.

  Alberto Lozano, a college student, had a friend’s warning in the back of his mind. His roommate had come into Lima on a shaky LANSA flight two days before and told Alberto not to risk it. “Don’t fly LANSA, brother,” the roommate said. “That plane is in bad shape.” Alberto shrugged him off. He wanted to get home to spend Christmas with his parents. Besides, he said, he had booked a seat in the tail of the plane, and that was the safest place you could be.

  At least one passenger wasn’t worried at all. Juliane Koepcke approached flying the way she did the rest of life, quietly optimistic and ready for anything. A few weeks earlier, her high school graduating class had flown to Cuzco to explore Machu Picchu, like the exchange students on Flight 502. On the way back, the plane hit a pocket of turbulence and bucked like a wild bull. Most of the class was terrified. Juliane thought the ride was fun.

  Then again, at seventeen, Juliane was no stranger to adventure. Her parents were both zoologists. They had come to Peru from Germany to study the plants and animals of the rainforest, and Juliane had spent her childhood following them through the mountains and the jungle. Her city friends might have to deal with a cockroach or a rat every now and then. Juliane had grown up dodging poisonous snakes, alligators, and vampire bats.

  For two years she had lived at Panguana, the family’s research station deep in the rainforest. During the rainy season, she and her parents could only get there by boat. Their hut stood on stilts to keep it dry when the river flooded. Tarantulas and lizards dropped from the palm-frond roof. Every morning, Juliane had to shake out her boots to make sure no poisonous spiders had moved in during the night.

  Now she split her time between Lima and Panguana, city and jungle. It was a strange existence that set her apart from her city friends. Since the age of five she’d been referring to animals by their Latin names. She had raised fig parrots by chewing up bananas and feeding the mush to them. She could imitate the ominous hissing sound of a tarantula. When she came back to Lima after a stay in Panguana, her friends told her she walked strangely. She’d gotten used to lifting her feet high off the ground to keep from tripping over roots.

  Over the years, Juliane had been recording bird calls or collecting insects during a lot of important social events. Had it been up to her mother alone, she would have missed the most important one of all. Her graduation from Lima’s Alexander von Humboldt school fell on December 23. The night before was the Fiesta de Promoción, Peru’s version of a senior prom.

  Juliane’s mother, Maria Koepcke, had wanted Juliane to skip both events. She was anxious to get out of Lima. Juliane’s father was waiting for them at Panguana. He had already cut down a Christmas tree and put it up in one of the huts. And Faucett, the more reliable of the two airlines flying to Pucallpa, had no seats on December 24.

  The last thing Juliane’s mother wanted was to fly LANSA. She had once been on a plane in the United States that had to make an emergency landing with a failing engine. The experience made her skittish every time she flew. Besides, as an ornithologist, she had spent her life studying birds. With their hollow bones, sail-like feathers, and inexhaustible energy, birds were made for flight. A plane, by contrast, was a bulky mass of metal that looked like it should never leave the ground. Maria Koepcke couldn’t help feeling that humans weren’t meant to fly.

  Still, Juliane stood her ground. She loved the rainforest and rarely complained when her parents’ work took her away from her friends. But she didn’t want to miss graduation. She had saved her money for a long dress with a pretty blue pattern and short sleeves cinched at the end. A college student she’d known for a month, tall and broad shouldered, was taking her to the dance. It would be the last chance she got to say goodbye to many of her friends.

  In the end, Maria gave in and bought LANSA tickets. Juliane went to the dance and the next day crossed the stage to receive her diploma.

  The following morning, on Christmas Eve, Maria and Juliane stood in line for Flight 508. Out the plate-glass window of the airport, they could see the L-188 Electra that would take them to Pucallpa. To Juliane, the plane looked beautiful, clean and shiny.

  It did, however, have an unfortunate nickname. LANSA had stamped the name MATEO PUMACAHUA on the side of the airliner. Puma
cahua, as everyone learned in school, had led an army of indigenous people in rebellion against Peru’s Spanish rulers in the early 1800s. His rebels carried slings and clubs into battle against Spaniards armed with rifles. The war did not end well for the rebels, and when it was over, the Spanish authorities hanged Pumacahua for treason. Then they cut him into pieces and sent assorted body parts around the country to be displayed as a warning.

  Two young Americans in line next to Juliane noticed the nickname too. Nathan Lyon and David Ericson lived with a group of religious missionaries in the rainforest, not far from the Koepckes’ research station. Nathan was just thirteen, but he was determined that sometime in the future he would ride his bike from the rainforest across the mountains to Lima. He had traveled by truck to scout the route and was flying back home to his parents at the missionary community. At eighteen, David had delayed college for a year to help the missionaries provide medical aid and other services to indigenous villages in the area.

  Looking out at the plane, Juliane, Nathan, and David saw the opportunity for some dark humor. Let’s hope this Mateo Pumacahua keeps its parts intact, they joked.

  At around 11 a.m., 86 passengers climbed aboard the LANSA plane. Juliane and her mother, David and Nathan, Narda Sales Rios and her son all took their seats, eager to be home for Christmas. Werner Herzog and his camera crew stayed behind, resigned to another day of waiting.

  Juliane found her place next to the window in the second-to-last row, somewhere near the college student Alberto Lozano. Her mother sat to her left in the middle, and a heavyset man settled his bulk into the aisle seat.

  At 11:38 a.m., the plane rumbled down the runway with none of the grace of Maria’s birds. Its four propeller engines, spinning in a blur, somehow lifted more than 40 tons of metal, baggage, fuel, and passengers into the air. The pilot, Carlos Forno Valera, banked over the Pacific Ocean and headed east toward the Andes Mountains.

  The plane was about to carry its passengers through one of the most abrupt transitions a traveler can make on Earth. Lima sits just north of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on the planet. In the Atacama you can find places that don’t see rain for four years at a time. Just over the mountains lies the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest. In the Amazon’s northwest corner, where moisture gets trapped against the Andes, 20 feet of precipitation can fall in a single year.

  As they climbed toward the crest of the Andes, the cabin was in a holiday mood. Passengers slept, read, or chatted with one another about Christmas plans. Juliane thought the flight attendants seemed cheerful as they served sandwiches and soft drinks.

  About 20 minutes into the flight, the plane began to leave the desert air of the coast behind. At 12:09 p.m., Captain Forno Valera radioed in their position over the town of Oyon, nestled in the heart of the Andes at 12,000 feet. He couldn’t yet see what awaited them on the other side of the mountain range.

  Just 100 miles south and east of Flight 508, a giant mass of moisture-laden air had gathered over the western edge of the rainforest. Trapped against the towering walls of the Andes, the storm rumbled its way northward.

  At about 12:20 p.m., the Electra rumbled out of the mountains. Some 20,000 feet below lay the eastern edge of the largest rainforest in the world. But the ground had vanished from view. The storm, sweeping up from the south, had begun to engulf the route to Pucallpa. The plane had 150 miles to go on a northeast path—a half hour of flying time at the most.

  As a thick bank of clouds closed in, Captain Forno Valera faced a choice. He had fuel for four hours total; he could veer north and try to stay ahead of the storm. He could land in Huanuco, which lay almost directly below, and wait out the weather there. He could reverse course and bring everyone back to Lima.

  But LANSA had already created dozens of irate customers, stranding them for the holidays when they wanted to be with family. And for all the rain that falls in the Amazon, most storms don’t pack a lot of energy. Pilots tried to avoid them, but when they had to fly in bad weather, they knew what to do: Keep the altitude setting constant, at a safe distance from the ground; don’t fight the winds because it puts too much stress on the plane.

  Captain Forno Valera set the altitude for 21,000 feet, kept the plane on its northeast route, and pressed ahead.

  Out her window on the right side of the plane, Juliane Koepcke could see two of the four big turboprop engines working hard against the heavy air. It wasn’t long before the plane began to shudder. The flight attendants made their way through the aisle, telling everyone to fasten their seat belts. To Juliane, it seemed no worse than the flight from Cuzco with her graduating class. But in the middle seat, Maria was getting anxious. “Hopefully everything will be okay,” she said.

  The man in the aisle seat slept, oblivious to it all.

  The sky outside darkened, as though the pilot had found the mouth of a cave and dived inside. Raindrops pelted the metal sides of the plane. Water streaked the window next to Juliane’s face. And now, the shaking turned violent.

  The plane lurched up, down, and up again. Water and soda went airborne. Overhead compartments popped open one by one. Flower bouquets, Christmas cakes, and hand luggage flew through the aisle. Lightning bolts pierced the darkness outside, and screams began to fill the cabin.

  It got worse by the minute—the vicious shaking, everything coming unmoored in the cabin, the pitch-black sky broken by blinding flashes closer and closer to the plane. Juliane found herself holding hands with her mother. And still the man on the aisle slept.

  Twenty minutes into the heart of the storm, the sky outside Juliane’s window exploded with lightning. Bright yellow flames erupted from the wing. The plane pitched downward, and before the roar of the engines blocked everything out, Juliane heard her mother say, “It’s all over now.”

  Then she felt a whoosh sweep through the plane, and suddenly everything had vanished. She was in the air, strapped to her seat, and all of it was gone—her mother and the sleeping guy and the two boys from the missionary station and the smiling flight attendants and the Christmas presents and the plane.

  Even the plane was gone.

  The forest below looked to her like densely packed heads of broccoli. And it was spinning slowly and growing closer by the second.

  From the air, the Amazon rainforest looks as though it goes on forever. Move it 2,500 miles north, and you’d have a dense carpet of treetops—400 billion of them—stretching almost unbroken from New York to Florida and from the Atlantic Ocean all the way west to Utah: two-thirds of the continental United States covered in forest. An English naturalist named Richard Spruce came to the Amazon in 1849 to collect plants, insects, and animals and send them back to Europe for museumgoers to gawk at. Just the thought of how vast it was left him breathless. “The largest river in the world flows through the largest forest. Fancy if you can two millions of square miles of forest, uninterrupted save by the streams that traverse it.”

  Europeans first encountered this giant wilderness 470 years before LANSA Flight 508 tried to fly over it. The Amazon had been supporting indigenous communities—“Indians,” the newcomers called them—for at least 11,000 years. But to the Europeans it was brand-new.

  They were both fascinated and terrified. “Of all the marvels of nature,” wrote the 20th-century explorer Gene Savoy, “the jungle has the power to evoke both fear and wonder in man.”

  Fear, wonder, and an urge to exaggerate.

  A slave trader named Francesco Carletti went to Peru in 1594 and came back with a bizarre description of the rainforest. There were frogs and toads of “frightening size,” he claimed, so many of them that people think “they rain down from the sky.” Bloodsucking creatures of all kinds preyed on human flesh—from vampire bats to insects that grew fat on blood. “Mandril cats” crossed rivers by linking “themselves together by their tails” and swinging from trees to the other side.

  Later reports warned about all the ways a human could be eaten alive in the Amazon. Alligators with an
“insatiable desire” for human flesh lurked on every riverbank, according to the Spanish naturalists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. A man-eating snake the Indians called jacumama lay in wait on the forest floor, disguised as rotten wood. “It will swallow any beast whole, and … this has been the miserable end of many a man,” wrote Juan and Ulloa. Or so they had heard.

  Europeans were just as suspicious of the people who lived in the rainforest, and fear made their imaginations run wild. Explorers returned from South America with fantastical stories about giants, dwarfs, and people whose feet grew backward—the better to confuse anyone who tried to follow their footprints. A tribe of headless men was said to live in the region of Guayana, on the northern edge of the Amazon. According to the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, they had “eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.”

  Another common story involved a fierce tribe of warrior women. The Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana supposedly ran across them in 1542 as he traveled from one end of the rainforest to the other. These women towered over everyone and fought as effectively as ten Indian men. They reminded the Spaniards of a group of women warriors from Greek mythology, known as the Amazons. From then on, Europeans had a name for the 4,000-mile-long river that formed the backbone of the forest.

  But if the rainforest instilled fear in Europeans, it also inspired another powerful urge: greed. In the 1530s, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro invaded the vast empire of the Incas in the Andes, just on the western edge of the Amazon. He tricked the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, into handing over several tons of gold and silver. Then he had Atahualpa strangled to death in a city square.

  The brutal conquest of the Incas gave the indigenous people of the region their first glimpse of guns and cannon fire. But the Spaniards brought a weapon that would prove even more deadly over the next decades: smallpox. The disease was new to the Americas, and native Amazonians had no resistance to it. In the next century, smallpox would play a large part in wiping out nearly 90 percent of the rainforest’s indigenous population.