I only had to find this knowledge in my concussion-fogged head." "There was almost nothing my parents hadn't taught me about the jungle. But one wrong turn and she would walk deeper and deeper into the world's biggest rainforest. "I recognised the sounds of wildlife from Panguana and realised I was in the same jungle," Juliane recalled. She could identify the croaks of frogs and the bird calls around her. Maria Koepcke, pictured here with a four-year-old Juliane, was a German scientist who studied tropical birds. They ate their sandwiches and looked at the rainforest from the window beside them.īut 15 minutes before they were supposed to land, the sky suddenly grew black. Placed in the second row from the back, Juliane took the window seat while her mother sat in the middle seat. The flight initially seemed like any other. He urged them to find an alternative route, but with Christmas just around the corner, Juliane and Maria decided to book their tickets. Of 170 Electras built, 58 were written off after they crashed or suffered extreme malfunctions mid-air. Juliane's father knew the Lockheed L-188 Electra plane had a terrible reputation. Their only option was to fly out on Christmas Eve on LANSA Flight 508, a turboprop airliner that could carry 99 people. Her mother wanted to get there early, but Juliane was desperate to attend her Year 12 dance and graduation ceremony. ( Wikimedia Commons: Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke) Juliane's parents set up a research station in the Amazon so they could immerse themselves in the local wildlife. In 1971, Juliane and Maria booked tickets to return to Panguana to join her father for Christmas. Juliane was homeschooled at Panguana for several years, but eventually she went to the Peruvian capital of Lima to finish her education. "It's not the green hell that the world always thinks." "I learned a lot about life in the rainforest, that it wasn't too dangerous," she told the BBC in 2012. Juliane became a self-described "jungle child" as she grew up on the station. Together, they set up a biological research station called Panguana so they could immerse themselves in the lush rainforest's ecosystem. Her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, was a renowned zoologist and her mother, Maria Koepcke, was a scientist who studied tropical birds. The 'jungle child' raised by scientistsīorn to German parents in 1954, Juliane was raised in the Peruvian jungle from which she now had to escape. Returning to civilisation meant this hardy young woman, the daughter of two famous zoologists, would need to find her own way out. She had crash-landed in Peru, in a jungle riddled with venomous snakes, mosquitoes, and spiders. Walking away from such a fall bordered on miraculous, but the teen's fight for life was only just beginning. It was Christmas Day 1971, and Juliane, dressed in a torn sleeveless mini-dress and one sandal, had somehow survived a 3km fall to Earth with relatively minor injuries. She lost consciousness, assuming that odd glimpse of lush Amazon trees would be her last. The trees in the dense Peruvian rainforest looked like heads of broccoli, she thought, while falling towards them at 45 metres per second.Ī wild thunderstorm had destroyed the plane she was travelling in and the row of seats Juliane was still harnessed to twirled through the air as it fell. Strapped aboard plane wreckage hurtling uncontrollably towards Earth, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke had a fleeting thought as she glimpsed the ground 3,000 metres below her.
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