Real Survival Stories - Kidnapped in Colombia: Into the Jungle (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

We return to Matt Scott and his terrifying escapade in South America. The young British backpacker was recently kidnapped by armed men. But he’s just made a break for it - over a precipitous ridge deep in the rainforest. Will he make it down in one piece? Will the soldiers lay chase? How can he hope to make it out of the jungle alive? A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins.   Written by Joe Viner | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Matt Peaty | Assembly edit by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Ralph Tittley.   For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions   If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That's annoying. What? You're a muffler. You don't hear it? Oh, I don't even notice it. I usually drown it out with the radio. How's this? Oh, yeah.

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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, hollied. holiday makers 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. Matt Scott's plan is simple. Get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible.

Nice thoughts, 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, you can't hear them. His ears are filled with the roar of rushing blood and the fizz of adrenaline. The 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 known. 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, the undergrowth comes away from the ground like torn paper ribbons. And then, with a horrible, gut-wrenching lurch, the gradient drops away beneath him. The 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 math and took quite a big fall, like to go to 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. Ever 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 returned 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. But 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 the 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. Unable 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, Elie A act est, 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. It's September 12, 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, it looked up at this fall that I'd taken.

I thought, well, they're not following me down that. That was the first time I really felt safe, and I knew it was just a new against. 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 11 hours, from the time he was

woken at gunpoint to the moment he chose to escape. At he stayed, like the seven other hostages, there is no knowing how long its captivity might have lasted. Whatever happens next, at least it will be on his terms. Matt 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 river. 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. From 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, and I checked me out,

I was escaping from kidnapping by guerrillas 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. He's still riding an adrenaline heart. 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 on the face of it, that's quite bad. Because feeling bad and kind of depressed or scared about my situation would not have helped my survival challenges, 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. Eventually, he reaches a ledge where he stops to rest. He is 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. Matt 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. It's in 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 canella, which is this solid sugar product, very cheap. The kidnappers gave us the stuff, which we were walking just for the calories.

Matt 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, have 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. But 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. He'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 movement, 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. The 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 stuffed the rolled-up plastic sheet down the side of one of his Wellington boots,

and then, with his meager survival kit in tow, he continues descending into the gorge. Soon, bone-weary from over 12 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. And 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 could stay, like, no, after that, I was just like, just sort of grim struggle for survival from there on.

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on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. It'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 to 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. Matt 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, like, jump from side to side, going down.

And I was holding on to these little vines that 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. He 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 to sending 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. The 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 have 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 this stream

continuously. The 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. you 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 Bono-eachaka 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. It'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

Walking water is advantageous, but it comes at a cost. Because I'm walking in the river in permanent shades, 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 like pushing through undergrowth. So everything is damp and 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 filled with water, forcing him to periodically take them off and empty them out. As 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 wouldn'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. Not 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 rockslide 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 land 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. Even 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 sunburnt 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 option to the decision has been made. In the hours after his escape, Matt was few. fueled by adrenaline. Now 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, the odds on, I was not going to make it out on this experience. This was going to be it. And I kind of made my piece 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 and you know 18 years of good times could be worse. A lot of people, a lot of people they'd even get that and i sort of felt like if i did die there actually i had a pretty good innings it's even at 18 had quite a uh a fun life and that's how that was

It's two days. Matt trudges lethargically through the jungle, his shoulder 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 Pinella, 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.

survive. So actually, I would say that while I didn't have any foods, 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 have an easter 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, thorny barriers that knock him back and catch on his clothes. But 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 chance 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. Matt gets back to his feet. With a new spring in his step, he pulls his boots

out of the boggy stream bed and hops up under the footpath. It cuts across the valley, running east to west. Surely by following this path, he would eventually reach some kind of human settlement. But as he sets off walking, another possibility presents itself. I was 90% sure that the 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. The camps appear periodically along the trail, the distance between them indicating how far the rebels and their captives have walked every day. Matt forces himself to march the same distance, not stopping until he comes across another patch of flattened grass with the remnants of a campfire beside it. He inspects these little heaps of damp grey ash for embers, something he could use to start a fire of his own, but no luck. She walks on.

The trail climbs the side of the valley before tracing the spine of a ridge. He is able to make much better progress up here than down in the stream. But of course the big drawback is the absence of drinking water. His entire daily supply comes from whatever rain happens to collect in his plastic sheet overnight. His thirst is a constant round-the-clock torture. And now up here there is also the constant round-the-clock throttet. of running into his captors again.

Day seven becomes day eight. On the morning of day nine, Matt staggers to his feet. His body aching and burning from the countless blisters and sores he's accumulated and hobbles off in the footsteps of his kidnappers. I would have been pleased to see them at this point, because this is gaming business had not gone well for me. at that point I would have said oh survival

it would have been awkward I'm not going to lie oh my guys funny story but what can you do so I thought I might went into them again on and on he goes

following the gentle curvature of the ridge eventually his profound dehydration forces him to resort to desperate measures I did drink my own urine It does not taste nice It really doesn't And it was so unpleasant

That I redoubled my effort To get water by other meat Because it was so nasty There's a plant that grows there That kind of rotting wood That sort of stores water in its base And I found that you can grab the base Of the plant

Rip the whole thing off the rotting wood then find the longest leap, like angle that into your mouth and drink the water that's in the middle. It dawns on him. The jungle isn't just an antagonistic force working against him. It might also contain tools to help him survive. It's a simple but significant mindset shift. And as time passes, Knight discovers other new and innovative ways to use the few tools he has at his disposal. Noticing one day that his sock is saturated with rainwater, he touches the sodden fabric

to his lips. In doing so, he manages to partially alleviate his thirst without actually drinking a drop. It's another light bulb moment. If you are really, really thirsty, water goes a lot further if you suck it out of a sponge rather than just drinking it. you get the sensation of sort of having drunk more and just wetting your lips, but it makes a huge difference. So I would use this sock like a sponge and I would suck like the rainwater and sweat from my feet out of this sock until it got dry and then I would exchange it with

one of the socks I was wearing and just repeat the process. The longer I walked, the more I would regress back to simplistic and back to kind of childhood to the point. where I was just singing these nursery rhymes, the same few verses that I could remember. For hours and hours and hours as I walked, like originally out loud and then aggressively sort of slightly under my breath, almost meditatively. I think, I don't know, these things just kind of help you keep going somehow. return of Mayor of Kingstown. Warden? You know who I am.

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It's got to be consequences. Mayor of Kingstown, new season now streaming on Paramount Plus. day 10. Matt drags his feet up the last few meters of a steep incline. When he reaches the crest, he lifts his head and immediately stops in his tracks. There's another valley spread out below. But this one looks different from the countless others he's already walked through. Rather than another sprawling depression filled with dense jungle, this valley It bears the signs of human agriculture. The trees have been cut down to allow grass to grow.

So I'm going over this one valley, and I think that looks like science of cultivation. So I made the decision to descend into that valley, which is quite a big decision, because I wasn't sure that I would be able to get back out of that valley if it turned out not to be a good idea. Matt descends. Sure enough, he soon emerges from the trees into a wide open area of cultivated grassland. There is no question that a human hand is behind it. What's less clear is whether this land is still in use or if the people who once raised crops or livestock here have moved on to pastures new.

All afternoon Matt walks through the fields. The sun dazzles overhead, flooding the valley with sunshine. He scans the horizon but doesn't see any further signs of human civilization. On either side of the valley floor, steep, jungle-covered hills bracket the sky, which has turned a dusky shade of blue by the time he decides to stop for the night. It's at that moment that he spots the building. It's a few hundred feet up ahead, a simple wooden structure with four posts holding up a ramshackle roof.

There's an indigenous hut with no walls but a roof and actually some rotten kind of food in a cloth bag that it's some green potatoes and some animal has been skinned and the skin has been left there. But it's all been left in this bag and it started to turn green so I don't try and eat it. But this is definitely like

we're going up on the levels of human habitation. The next morning Matt continues through the valley, following the path uphill into the trees. He's been walking for a couple of hours when he hears something behind him, the soft clip-clop of hooves. He spins around. A pair of donkeys plod along the

trail behind him. Their heads stooped, their long pointed ears twitching away the flies. The animals come to a halt when Matt stops walking, gazing dolefully at him with their big black eyes. He stares back, transfixed. Are they following him? He turns and continues. He turns and continues on, and immediately the donkeys fall into step behind him. Now, this is a promising sign. The presence of domesticated animals suggest that humans must be in the vicinity. And sure enough,

three or four hours later, some people come for the donkeys, and the people who come are a couple, I think, a man and a woman, and one of their children. They are indigenous people from a group called the Kogi. and they don't speak any Spanish so we can't really communicate with each other The indigenous people stare blankly as Matt tries to communicate

They seem disinterested Even slightly bored by his desperate mime act A hint of panic enters his performance What if he can't get his message across What if they decide to leave him here? There's a lot of chivalves that happens like while I try and act out being kidnapped by rebels in the jungle for these indigenous people. And I kind of thought for an agonizing moment that they were just going to walk on and leave me back at the top of their land.

It's two days later. Matt's frantic attempts to communicate with the indigenous people finally yielded results. At the very least, they decided he wasn't a threat. They beckoned for him to follow them and set off walking. He has been following them now for the past 48 hours

on a grueling trek back to their village. I thought that the rebels marched us hard. Oh my God, the indigenous people walk so far. And they don't lie about it either. With the guerrillas, when I said, oh, where are we going?

They were said, oh, we're not a mask, we're not a mask. It's always one hour more. We're just walking one hour more. But I was like to the indigenous people, oh, we must be nearly there yet. Please. They're like, no. Finally, they reach what appears to be the outskirts of a village. A few scattered huts line the trail, with more indigenous people sitting outside on chairs.

The villagers are all chewing dried coca leaves and gazing at Matt with the same look of mild indifference. He's told to wait while one of the three people who found him disappears inside one of the huts. They emerge moments later with a woman who greets Matt in Spanish. Finally able to communicate with words, he begins to explain the situation. The woman nods, understand. she said yeah we know who they are we hate them because they steal our cows and it's not a small detail but it's unreasonably angry i mean the indigenous people really have nothing but they're not living

in a market economy it's hand to mouth you know they steal from people who have so little but it seems so petty that's what i what i can't get over is how petty these guerrilla grips in the area they go for extortion kidnapping and ransom and they sell a lot of cocaine and these are all multi-million power crops and they're still chaos from the indigenous people. Matt is taken inside a hut where he's offered a place to rest, eat and recover.

He's given some food, some oranges and some salted bean curd that he devours in seconds flat. Then he gingerly removes his wellies, revealing the battle scars of 12 days lost in the jungle. When I got them out of the boots, they immediately swelled up to be enormous. Like, I'm not exaggerating, they were enormous. And they turned this bright, sort of angry red, and they're covered in swords.

And I got, like, a good old-fashioned case of trench foot for walking wet boots all that way. That night, I get to sleep in a hammock, a room with a fire where it's actually warm. And there's this indigenous guy who sits by the fire. And he's got this big burlap sack, like this big sack of cocoa leaves. and there are these stones that he puts in the fire. And he sits there doing this for hours, like five hours or something. So it's just this kind of ASMR sound of him shaking these stones in this bag of leaves for hours, hours, hours, now. And yeah, I get the first actually good night to sleep.

The following morning, Matt is led a little bit further down the valley, to what he learns is the tribe's main village. When he gets there, he receives a nasty surprise. I get back to the main village, and they say there are some people here who are interested in you. And then half an hour later, there's two guys, black military flanks jacket, assault rifles. The armed men approach him.

Their assault rifles are their hips. Has he been tricked? Led straight back into the arms of the kidnappers. Should he run? But before he has time to consider his options, his fears are quelled. These men are not the rebel soldiers. They are members of the official Colombian military, and they've come to help. Just minutes later, an army helicopter arrives on the scene.

The forest can't be churning in the powerful downdraft. Matt is helped onto the backseat. He waves goodbye to his saviors as the chopper lifts and swoops off across the jungle. to safety. Matt is flown to Columbia's capital city, Bogota, where he is taken straight to hospital. As he lies in the ward, being checked over by a rotation of different doctors and nurses, he comes to learn that while he was fighting for survival in the jungle, the story of the kidnapping had been making headlines. It even reached the upper echelons of the

the UK government. Now, as the sole escapee, Matt finds himself at the centre of a media frenzy. I have to be debriefed by the military. I get to call my parents, there's following up his mind as you come to pick me up. There's press. I get interviewed by the press. They come with the president's coming to see me, then he never does actually. And yeah, it's real sort of chaotic bedlam stuff while I'm lying in this bed and all this stuff is happening. around me. A few days later, Matt is put on a flight home to England. With his new celebrity status, he gets the royal treatment. The best part of the story is, when I get past the boarding gate and get on, the flight cruise says to me, oh, we can upgrade you to first class. There's three

seats up here. We know what you've been through. We heard the story. We'll just bump you up to first class. I remember saying, oh, you mean I could order anything off the surrender? You're not like, yeah. I said, well, can I have everything off this menu? And they said, yeah, well, great. Just like start at the top starter and keep bringing things. And I just tried, I didn't actually get that far through because it's still very hard to eat. Ah, yeah, that was a real joy.

And then having him with a celebrity for like 15 minutes wasn't bad either. At the airport in London, he is happily reunited with his family. There's a flurry of media attention. press conferences, interviews, and segments on the news. But the hubbub quickly dies down. People move on, and so does Matt. He starts university, making it in time for Freshers' Week. He can feel pretty confident that no gap-year stories can rival his.

But what about the seven other kidnapped tourists, the ones who didn't escape? Their ordeal goes on and on. It turns out they were kidnapped by a group called the ELN, a left-wing paramilitary organization. The reason behind the kidnapping, as will later be reported, was part of a complex negotiation strategy over the release of the ELN's imprisoned leader. The captives are held for over three months, before finally being released after a negotiated agreement between the rebels and the Colombian government. No ransom money was ever exchanged.

In the years since, Matt has gone on to graduate and become an engineer. It retains an interest in juggling and in international travel, though he is still prone to miss the occasional flight. Looking back on his misadventure in Colombia, Matt admits that he feels incredibly lucky compared to the other hostages, many of whom suffered far more lasting psychological scars than he did. As for his survival, he maintains that his astonishing display of endurance isn't rooted in extraordinary ability, courage, or even luck. It's all about choices, or rather, the lack thereof. If you want to do something extraordinary, it makes it much, much easier

if you give yourself literally no other choice. So you might think, oh, I can't swim 20 miles back to shore in, you know, 10-degree water. If someone dumps you 20 miles out of shore in 10-degree water, you might surprise yourself. Get up and walk or, you know, sleep in the warm afternoon sun and just die and give up. It's easier to walk and keep going than you might think, yeah, I think what else you survive,

having no other choices, that helps. In the next episode, we meet Tom Wilson. In November 2008, the 35-year-old is on a routine work trip to visit a construction project at Tobar Inlet, a wild remote fjord on the coast of British Columbia. But when his small, chartered plane meets a violent and horrifying end, Tom will be thrust into hell on earth. After somehow surviving the initial impact, he must find a way to overcome his panic and escape the burning wreckage of the plane.

And even then, he'll soon discover his ordeal has only just begun. That's next time on real survival stories. Listen right now by joining Noiser Plus. Whether it's a pair of running shoes or a new car, you check how well something performs before you buy it. investing be any different. At Fidelity, we get that performance matters most. With sound financial advice and quality investment products, we're here to help with accelerating your dreams. Chat with your advisor or visit Fidelity.ca.ca. Performance to learn more.

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