Original subtitles

It's a no man's land.

A complete wilderness.

I was hunting really rare orchids.

Then things started to go wrong.

I'm looking down the barrel of a gun.

We're in trouble here.

This is a kidnap situation.

We want five million dollars.

That's when I realized we'd completely lost control.

They will shout, I will blow their heads off. You have to escape.

I was 23 years old.

I was backpacking into Central America.

It was a honeypot, I was told, for orchids, my favourite family of flowers.

There's something about the orchids.

There's something about their erotic, exotic flowers.

They're just orgasmic, basically.

When I first met Tom, he was going off in lots of different Latin names which I

didn't understand.

At first I thought he was completely barking.

I just thought, wow, he's very enthusiastic and full of life.

I thought, you know, if he was mad of a box of frogs, then he might be

interested in going backpacking with me.

Do you know a place called the Darien Gap?

There's a highway that runs from the top of North America all the way down to

the bottom of South America, but there's only one gap in it, and that's the

Darien Gap.

Look, let me show my guidebook.

Out came the guidebooks, and I thought, this place is bloody brilliant.

There was something mystical and magical about it. It was a magnetic drawer.

I mean, it mentions orchids straight away. And they even mention orchids in

guidebook.

And bang, I was in love with it.

Yeah, let's do it. I was telling him when to go.

I didn't realise it changed my life forever.

From Panama City, we planned to take a bus to the last town on the Panamanian

Highway, which was Yviva.

Yviva is where the Pan American Highway stops and the Darien Gap proper starts.

We got off the bus.

We were accosted by two military personnel with big guns.

We didn't know what was going to happen next.

Come with me.

They took us to the Panamanian army base and we met the Comandante there.

The Comandante was sitting in a chair with a revolver on the deck.

What are you doing here?

We told him that we were attempting to cross the Darien Gap into Colombia.

And he said, you know, this place is dangerous.

He kept repeating, muy peligroso, it's very dangerous.

He said the civil war in Colombia was still very intense.

There was a big drugs problem.

I thought we could just play the innocent tourist. We're looking for

do us any harm?

He said you can cross, but we will take no responsibility for that,

and people do get killed in this area in recent years.

We weren't listening, no.

Very naive.

The next destination was the village of Paya.

It is the last village left in the Darien Gap before you cross the border

Colombia.

One of the biggest fears I had was becoming lost and disorientated in the

jungle.

I really wanted to find someone to guide us and show us the way.

If we didn't get the guides in pile, Paul was adamant about it. We were going

back. End of story.

We are looking for guides to go to Colombia.

He recommended two guides.

We met this guy called Carlos.

He said, we can take you to Colombia, I can be your guide. We are providing you

all food.

And he seemed genuine and friendly enough.

And we agreed, $50 a day, and it would take roughly three or four days.

I'm going.

The whole thing had gathered a momentum that almost became unstoppable.

We left Paya heading for Colombia.

We went straight into the primary rainforest.

We ascended hundreds and hundreds of feet, almost vertical, back into

heaven to me.

The rainforest just surrounded us, covered us.

As we went higher and higher, orchids started to just cover the trees.

They were dripping from them.

i began to have a breakdown i couldn't control myself

suddenly

we saw this craft

really

shook us that actually we thought what's that for is it a body what is it

We took that as someone who had a nasty end.

We should have said, look, let's stop this. Let's go. Let's get back.

But neither of us had the courage to say that to the other.

After a couple of days of walking in the rainforest, we were right in this no

-man's land.

We're in this very dangerous area now.

This is it.

We walked into this funny clearing, as if it was like a trap or something. It

was very strange.

And it was weird what happened next.

There was this huge commotion.

We just fell to the floor.

There was a guy in front of me shouting.

I didn't understand him very well, but I knew what he was saying.

Just hands on your head.

God, this is it. They're going to just take what they want.

And then shoots us.

Paul was like a ghost. I looked across to see him.

Just staring ahead of him.

These two blokes were seriously aggressive.

We, of course, were absolutely frozen.

You know, I'm looking down the barrel of a gun.

And behind that barrel, an angry, aggressive stranger.

And it was all over in a flash.

Absolutely kind of boom, boom, boom.

Gone.

We marched to our feet very aggressively.

And marched back the way we had come.

We could just see our guide being taken away.

We don't know to this day exactly what happened to the guide.

But the last time that we ever saw... That.

When I realised, really properly, that we'd completely lost control.

They took us to a dilapidated camp.

Compañeros, tenemos huéspedes.

There was some kind of lean -to's.

They said, this is where you'll stay.

We actually thought, no, we really are in trouble here.

This is a kidnap situation.

We made a series of errors of judgement.

We should have done that.

But we didn't.

One of the most powerful feelings I had was one of guilt.

In a way, it was my idea to cross the Darien Gap.

I mean, he was enthusiastic and really kind of, come on, let's do it.

But still, it was kind of, maybe it's me who's planted the seed in his brain for

doing it.

That guilt feeling was magnified.

Your parents, people you loved, your family and friends, you're thinking,

stupid thing to have done. And if we die here, they'll never find us and they'll

never know what happened to us.

It's not just me having an adventure.

I'm involving... Yeah, I was involving people that I love in

a situation that was just a series of errors of judgment.

Two days later, we're interrogated by the commandante, the guy that we called

Smith.

He got his notepad out and just went through our name, addresses, what our

occupations were.

So I said, I'm a gardener.

And what about Paul?

I don't know what you do.

Tom, I work in a bank.

And he said, well, I work in a bank, Tom.

Bunker.

And you put banker.

And he underlined banker.

Ka -ching.

I said it, but then I thought, why did I admit that?

We shouldn't have said that.

Anything but bank.

Anything.

Now the atmosphere had changed.

I felt there must have been something brewing.

Mr. Smith.

Tom. Came along and said, I want a word with you, Tom.

Right now. Go.

Come over to the top of the camp.

I was shaking away, trying to stay focused, not knowing what the hell he

going to say.

You want to go home and see all your family and friends?

Well, yeah. Yeah, well, of course, you know.

And he said... We want three million dollars for your freedom.

Three million dollars?

Inside you're thinking, holy smoke.

Three million dollars isn't just going to appear.

It's not going to happen.

And he said, in blunter terms as possible,

Paul will stay here.

Paul stays here.

You go home and get the money from England.

Didn't expect that at all.

You have two weeks.

I was completely confused.

Your freedom is there.

You could go.

That's it. The whole situation is over. You could be free.

But Paul won't be. He'll be still here.

What did he want?

They want me to go home and get three million dollars in cash.

Tom will collect the money.

From friends and family.

Come back to the jungle.

And then hand over the cash and I'm free to go.

My hair's on the back of my neck.

I thought,

well, I'm going to be left behind, aren't I?

And I felt, you know, isolated.

Fire up.

Tom. Paul, in concrete terms. There was no hesitation.

Tom, it's not going to happen.

Whoever stays here is dead.

The person who stays here is going to die. End of story.

You've got to go back.

And you've got to tell him no.

As he started to talk through more clearly his reasoning, he was absolutely

right.

We agreed.

We're in it together.

We're going to get out of it together.

We'll take them all on.

But, bloody hell, you know, I was absolutely petrified.

It's not going to happen, your plan.

We haven't got three million dollars, we're staying here.

We are staying here together.

And that's the end of it. One person's not going home or leaving.

But they were starting to get annoyed.

You will stay in these woods forever.

That, to me, was... They're going to shoot us.

It had been, you know, three or so weeks now.

And I thought, we're in trouble here, because when they realise that their

plan's gone wrong, they're only going to blame us and just shoot us for that

reason.

So we were trying to find ways to humanise them, to try and get a good,

reaction from them.

And one particularly key moment was with Mr Smith. We tried to invite him to

play cards.

Beggar, my neighbour?

We played a game called Beggar, my neighbour.

At the end of the game, the person with all the cards is the winner.

It's a game of complete charm.

Once the cards are dealt, there's no skill to it.

For the first ten minutes, me and Paul, we were winning everything in sight.

We held all the cards, we had all the big strong jacks, we had the queens, the

kings and the aces.

I looked at Mr Smith.

He was really pretty annoyed at this stage.

It was a very dodgy situation to be in.

There were guns strapped to the side of the table.

He had a revolver in his pocket.

There were guns everywhere.

But whatever combination of cards we put down, they lost all the time.

Mr. Smith was standing up and looking around with a love face he was losing

here.

We flashed a little bit of eye contact, but it was quite clear that we were

both, like, absolutely kind of bricking it, really nervous.

We were sort of thinking, you know, well, we're going to get shot here for

winning this game of cards.

Deal again.

Go, go, deal again.

This is the last chance we've got to get him to win.

So I was kind of deliberately kind of shuffling my card to try and make sure

that I was going to be a loser.

He had almost won.

And I played my cards.

Finally, he'd won.

I went.

That was a clear -cut moment when we were taught.

No more kind of playing card game. It's too dangerous.

Hey, Bilbo.

Get out.

Go back to the hut.

They clearly had complete control and complete power on the situation.

The big boss arrived six weeks exactly into our ordeal.

He was considered to be the general, the highest commandante of the group, and

he was coming to sort the whole thing out.

The minute he turned up, we knew he was trouble.

We just knew it, and we named him Trouble Ahead.

It was an apt name.

Who is some?

Then a few minutes said Thomas to the top of the camp Sit

over there He had this presence about him he was serious

I

Literally was gonna pee my pants

We want five million dollars

for your freedom

Um, I thought it's gone up.

Each?

Each.

Ten million dollars.

We haven't got anything.

The lungs just deflated.

I thought, we're never going to leave. And I just had despair when he said

Go!

We were now worth ten million dollars.

They're gonna kill us if they don't get us.

That's when it sunk in.

Let's just get the hell out of here.

Paul was like, my feeling is that they're not gonna really...

do anything but shoot it. We've got to make our own luck here.

The biggest

problem

we faced was surviving in the jungle for a number of days it required for us to

get out.

We needed things.

Like food.

Anytime you saw a sharp object, even a section of a machete, something to cut

your way through the jungle.

And if we could do that and choose the right moment, then we would go.

Opposite where we were in the tent was an open palm house with a table in the

middle where they store a lot of the provisions for cooking.

I'd start to go into the habit of going in there with my guidebook and sitting

on it, and then my towel would go down.

I'd better pick up a bag of rice in the towel.

Yeah, I became a kleptomaniac.

Paul was a class act. He should be a professional thief.

Broad daylight with everybody there.

It was class.

It was class.

So over kind of a week, I was able to steal, like, six bags of rice.

And Tom had found a bit of mirror.

And, yeah, done a machete.

That's brilliant. That's a really useful tool.

It's almost an adrenaline rush.

We just were cleaning them out.

After just a few days, we collected what we needed to.

The lighter, the broken bit of machete, enough food to run away.

We had these little, we call them escape pods with us, which were our modifiers,

little rucksacks that we had.

We had everything in place.

There was a chance that we could do this.

But then things started to really go wrong.

I became very ill for a couple of days.

This fever kicked in very quickly in the morning. And by the afternoon, I could

barely walk.

I'm going to try and clean them a bit, OK? Just gently, though, yeah?

Tom does forget.

boils and fists appearing on his legs this

was a proper problem walking

and the ability to walk was utterly vital in an attempt to escape

the leg was starting to swell up with these volcanic little eruptions

then he started feeling Something wriggling around in his flesh.

Paul said, look, we don't know what it is, but we've got to speak to Mr.

Smear.

Do you know what it is?

It's a... It's like a laid egg.

There's a worm that kind of dug into you and started eating you from the inside

out.

He laid me down on a bench. He put a bit of a leaf in my mouth and said, just

grit down on that.

They were smoking cigarettes and then taking the smoke and putting it up

the leg and blowing the nicotine onto the wounds.

And the minute he put the nicotine on top of each of the wounds, he said,

they're sleeping and they come up and then we'll get them out, producing this

bloody razor in his hand. I thought, this is going to be messy.

Yeah.

I just think that's not a good idea. He turned the blade to open the wound.

He got these big thumbs out and he went right.

He just shot his finger the other side and then the pain came through.

And up came the worm.

White maggots, basically.

After the operation, it was painful to walk.

No possibility of escaping.

We got very disheartened about the whole thing.

Just as the healing process was taking place, they came in and told us we were

going to start walking again.

It was a forced march we went on.

Day in, day out.

We were going into seriously.

Hardcore territory.

Very, very hot.

The humidity, the heat.

I was baking hot.

I mean, you could fry an egg on those mornings.

Loss of sense of balance.

They were very dizzy and hazy. The vision was starting to go, but you were

prodded on by a gun to go faster.

It was just too much for me in the end.

I came to

in the worst camp ever, ever.

In this camp, the atmosphere was...

Definitely much more aggressive.

The lady we nicknamed the beast.

She came out and said, you will dance now, you.

I started to awkwardly dance.

Dance all the time.

She might sort of pull the trigger and be a bit... trigger happen, accidentally

shoot us.

Oh, safety off. Oh, no. Bullet in the head.

They were angry with us.

You know, they'd come up with this idea that they were going to get some money

for us and it wasn't happening the way they thought it might happen.

And they were literally just shouting out, you know, I will blow their heads

off.

And then they'll just give me a really hard, long stare and just draw their

finger across their throats.

And I thought, they're just going to kill us.

Just for no reason, just to get rid of us.

The throat drops into your stomach.

absolute kind of terror, this is the end, that's it. It's going to be lights

out.

It was getting really twisted stuff, and we thought we have to escape.

There was fear, and if we were found breaking out, they'd come after you

wouldn't they?

With a vengeance.

We were very nervous and wary about it. So that's when we started to write the

wills.

In case we get split up, we should write a note home to our parents.

So we agreed to swap the wills so that at least if I was to die in the woods,

they'd at least see my will that I'd left with Paul.

Dear Mum and Dad,

Things aren't looking too good.

Love you lots. I hope everything's going well at home.

Really sorry about the situation that we're in.

Dear mum and dad, you know, if this gets to you, that's because Tom has gone out

and give Tom, like, a good welcome.

No, he's proved his friendship.

in incredibly difficult circumstances and we said we go now

it was that moment

two

pods were ready to go we thought we don't go now we're going to die

the biggest problem

we faced then was how do we get out of the tent without being seen?

So we thought the only way out of the tent was out the back.

We got a bit of a broken bit of mirror.

I started just to etch the cut in the back of the tent.

Plastic was easier to cut.

But the noise it made made this Kind of rasping sound.

I thought,

oh God, are you sure to hear that?

He's only 10 yards away.

I thought,

what? they realized that we had this kind of idea to escape.

They were going to shoot us.

We

needed

some sort of cover.

some thunder in the distance.

We thought, wow, that's brilliant. If it comes this way, that noise of that

thunder, the noise of the rain, it means he wouldn't hear a thing. And then we

could sneak out the back and be off.

And we were thinking, right, it's got to rain, it's got to rain.

The storm was coming. We could hear it. We thought, this is it.

Hearts were just coming out of our chest. The ribs were cracked just from

excitement of it.

When thunder and lightning was that close, it was going to rain.

It was guaranteed. It was never going to fail.

It didn't rain.

For the first time ever, I think, in the whole nine months, it never came.

First thing in the morning, these two messengers

arrived.

And they went over to whisper to the commandant in charge.

And the reaction was instant.

He was just furious.

He was just mad.

We thought they may have seen us or had a hint of us trying to escape.

And me and Paul were like, you know, holy crap, we are really in trouble

I thought, these guys are serious, and they're going to shoot us.

He looked at us, and I thought, we're going to die now.

He said, totally out of the blue.

Get your stuff up.

You're going home.

Utter disbelief.

And we thought, well, is this really happening?

It can't be this sudden. Why are they just giving up?

Somewhere I thought, just let these guys go. Just get rid of them.

Why he did it, I'll never know.

They pointed down the path and said to leave the forest and follow that path.

Kind of around the 12th of December.

And they shook us by the hand. They wished us Merry Christmas.

Happy Christmas, you two.

If you come back, we'll blow your heads off.

Is this really happening?

But we really were off and gone.

And we never looked back.

We're home for Christmas. We're going to be eating turkey in a couple of days.

I mean, it was just before Christmas.

And then we came to this tea junction.

Which way do you think we should go?

Um, left or right?

Let's go straight on or we should go up there.

We have to make a decision now.

I don't know.

Your call.

So I said, well, why don't we go left?

Yeah.

So we turned left.

The rain began to melt. It was absolutely torrential.

It was like something out of a murky Florida swamp.

And the paths were just impenetrable.

We waited for just hours and hours.

We just kept... Going round in circles.

And getting lost.

Not knowing where we were going.

We were both thinking, we're going to die. Not because of a gun.

We're going to die because the jungle's going to kill us.

After three or four days, we'd eaten all the food, it all gone.

The bodies were starting to go.

Trench rock was kicking in.

It was just a nightmare.

Paul turned to me and said, We're struggling here, Tom.

Tom, this isn't working.

We've got no idea where we are.

I suggested to Tom that we go back to the guerrilla camp

and ask them to make it clearer about what we exactly needed to

do.

To get out.

We should go back.

They'll shoot us.

It was kind of one of the few moments during those nine months that things got

a bit heated and kind of voices were raised.

Look, we don't have any choice, all right?

I didn't want to do it. I just thought, well, we're going to end up in trouble

here. I think we should carry on.

We were nearly out of here. Freedom was just at the end of our...

end of our fingertips look we've got to go back i just look shut up let's get

this over in dublin go back up the hill we went

we walked for

two days and then made the very demanding ascent to the the camp

Out came one of the foot soldiers.

He looked at it in absolute horror.

And I thought, if anyone you want to see, it's not him.

I was petrified.

Were they going to shoot us?

What have you been doing for the last five days?

Corley said, oh, we just got lost.

And that eased the tension.

They thought we were rubbish and, yeah, we were rubbish.

And they kind of laughed at us.

It's those two gringos who just are clueless, basically.

He laughed it off a bit and said, you must turn right.

And we said, oh yeah, we know the mistake we've made. Stupid tourists,

idiots.

Thank you. And we romped.

We romped.

Right!

We just walked and walked until we got to where the National Park headquarters

are.

They had a radio and they radioed the embassy.

I genuinely just didn't think he could believe that we were there in front of

him.

The next day a Red Cross speedboat came to pick us up.

The floodgates were released and there it is, whoosh, out it comes.

Sheer and utter joy at somehow having got through it.

Lucky to be alive.

A hundred times over in big red bold capital letters, lucky to be alive.

Oh, goes without saying, because we should be dead.

There were low times, there were terrifying times, but we always believed

had the confidence that we would one day get back to England and see our

families.

Mum told me about the vigil they'd had for me, all the candles lit in the

at home.

When you started to hear these stories, it made you realise how stupid we were

for doing it, but how amazing it was to get out.

the lengths that my parents had gone through to try and find out what had

happened to me.

Very brave and very good people.

And I'd put them through things that they didn't deserve to go through.