Sam Amico
When you’re lost in the jungle, your first priority is probably to avoid being eaten. If you can do that, well, you’re going to need some food for yourself.
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That may not be so easy to find. After all, it’s a jungle out there.
Anyway, one man found this out firsthand when he was hunting with four friends in northern Bolivia — and somehow ended up getting separated.
So Jhonattan Acosta, 30, started to panic about the possibility of starving. The longer he remained lost, the more he got creative about making sure he had enough “fuel” to survive.
That meant eating lots of worms and insects, as well as collecting rainwater in his boots to drink, as relayed by People. Acosta was in the Amazon jungle for 31 days in all. He came out alive.
“You wouldn’t believe all I had to do to survive all this time,” he told Unitel TV.
Acosta was without a machete or flashlight and even dislocated his ankle during the ordeal. He did have a shotgun, but only one bullet remained at the time he got lost. Miraculously, he only felt the need to use it once, and to scare off a group of wild pigs.
In fact, Acosta said he thinks some of the animals in the wild were looking after him. One morning, he said, he awoke to find he had been surrounded by jaguar tracks. Along with jaguars, he said he also came across some alligators and anteaters.
Worms seemed to be his main source of nutrition, though he did find a papaya-like fruit to snack on at one point. The drama came to an end after just more than a month, when a search party discovered Acosta while scouring the forest.
He said he was surprised that the search party stayed with it for so long.
“I thank God profusely, because he has given me a new life,” Acosta said, via People.
