Antonio was trapped in the lush jungle of the Amazon after the plane he was traveling in crashed and crashed. He was unharmed, but walked and survived for 36 days thanks to a makeshift machete and the monkeys ’eating habits.
It was a Monday in January when pilot Antonio Sena suffered a plane crash in the bowels of the Brazilian Amazon. There, in the vastness of the jungle, he was trapped for 36 days, in which he survived with a machete and the help of monkeys, whom he observed in his search for food.
Seine, 36, had been hired to perform an air taxi service at an illegal gold mine located in the heart of the Amazon, between the states of Pará and Amapá. Halfway through, the engine of his small aircraft stopped. He managed to control the direction of the device for a few minutes and ended up crashing into a remote stream.
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He got off the plane unharmed and hurried to rescue the groceries he was carrying: three bottles of water, 12 loaves of bread, four cans of soft drinks, a rope and a sack of cloth. Shortly afterwards, the aircraft exploded.
“I spent the first night and tried to assimilate everything that was going to happen. Many years ago I had done some survival training in the jungle, at the time I was working for another air taxi company,” he explains in a telematic interview with Efe the Brazilian pilot.
As dictated by the manual, the first seven days were kept at the crash site to wait for rescue teams. Several planes flew over the area, but with each passing day the noise was less intense and their hopes of coming out alive as well.
On the fifth day of waiting, he decided to record a farewell video for his family.
“Tonight I decided to talk to God. I told him, ‘If your will is to find my family, give me strength, because I’ve tried it alone and I haven’t succeeded. It seems to have worked,'” he recalls. .
The Amazon is the largest jungle in the world, with almost 7 thousand square kilometers. Illustrative and non-commercial image / Pixabay.
The next morning he began drawing up a plan to get out of the clutches of the Amazon rainforest, which he describes as “a large living organism pulsing.” A forest with many forests inside.
“On the eighth day I grabbed all my things and started walking east. ‘I’m not going to die here,’ I told myself. ‘I’m not going to die,'” he recalls.
It was then that he entered the lush jungle with the help of an improvised machete which he made with a piece of wood, a razor and a knife.
In the woods the routine was the same for long days: he woke up in the light of dawn and walked for hours in the direction of the sun until shortly after noon, when he stopped to look for a place to camp. , always far from the rivers.
This is because water, it counts, attracts the great predators of the Amazon: the jaguar, the alligator and the poisonous anaconda.
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“Everyone says it’s a region that’s full of jaguars. I never found one. I think the mix of God and knowing how to get away from them helped me,” he says.
Despite his temper, fear surfaced at night, when the noise of nature broke the silence.
“The first few days, mostly at night, I was very scared. That’s when the jungle manifests. There are a lot of unknown noises and as you don’t recognize them they seem to awaken your most intimate fears,” he confesses. “Over time I started to recognize some noises. It’s awesome how the jungle fools you. It fooled me a lot.”
The search for food
During the 36 days he spent lost in the jungle, hunger, he recalls, was “very common.” When the few foods he carried with him ran out, he turned to nature. But how to recognize whether its fruits were poisonous or not?
“I couldn’t find the fruit you find on the market: banana, mango, pineapple. There’s none of that in the middle of the jungle. I started looking at little white fruit and I didn’t know what it was. macaques moved them. I saw them eat. If the monkeys eat, it’s good, “he says.
Some time later he discovered that it was brief, a fruit widely used by the cosmetics industry. He found cocoa on four occasions and three eggs from Nambu, a bird characteristic of the Amazon.
Lack of food greatly weakened him. In 36 days he lost 25 pounds.
Observing the eating habits of monkeys helped them survive in the jungle, says Antonio Sena. Illustrative and non-commercial image / Pixabay.
The noise of the saw
Sena had been wandering in the jungle for more than 30 days when she heard the sound of a chainsaw from afar. His forces had reached the limit. He had cramps and vision loss, but decided to make his last effort.
He plunged into a swamp and crossed a river. Soaked, he continued walking through the woods chasing the distant noise. That was when he found a white canvas and, miles later, a man.
“He looked at me very scared. He stood still, with the chestnuts in his hand,” he recalls.
Minutes later another man arrived and together they walked to the base of the chestnut gatherers. Once there, rescue teams and his family were alerted via radio. It was the end of his odyssey.
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“My brothers did not give up at any time, they always believed he was alive. I felt his strength. They did not give up,” he explains through tears.
Seine, who recently flew over the crash site again, will now tell his story in a book entitled “36 Days: The Airplane Pilot Saga That Fell in the Amazon and Reunited with God.” from publisher Buzz.
“I was transformed within this jungle. My brothers were transformed as well. Thank God this story is transforming a lot of people too. It’s the only thing we want. Just that,” he argues.