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StrangeOutdoors.com 5/1/21 StrangeOutdoors.com 5/1/21

The real story behind the movie Jungle - heroic survival and mysterious disappearances

Revised October 2023

In 2017, the movie “Jungle”, based on Yossi Ghinsberg's 1981 journey into the Amazon rainforest, was released. It was directed by Greg McLean and starred Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame as Ghinsberg. The film was based on Yossi’s 2006 book, “Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Adventure, Danger and Survival”.

The true story behind the film is shocking and heroic, which left two men surviving a terrible ordeal and two others lost in the Bolivian rainforest forever—vanished with no trace for over 40 years.

As Yossi said, “I have to tell you, usually, movies are bigger than life. This movie is smaller than life. Everything you see is on a smaller scale than what really happened.”

The story behind the Amazon group

In November 1981, Yossi Ghinsberg, 22, had just finished his military training at the Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) and had served three years in the navy. He wanted to explore the world, “I wanted an adventure. I was naive, bright-eyed, everything is possible”.

The book Papillon by Henri Charrière had inspired Yossi. Charrière was a French writer, convicted as a murderer by the French courts, who always denied his guilt. He wrote the novel, a memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a penal colony in French Guiana on Devil’s Island. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates rather than Charrière himself.

In the 1970s, Yossi became determined to find Charrière and asked for his blessing to follow in his footsteps by traveling to the Amazon rainforest. Ghinsberg had briefly returned from an Africa to Mexico trip, and he worked several jobs to save the money to travel to South America. But by the time Ghinsberg was finally able to travel, Charrière had passed away on 29 July 1973, and the tribes Ghinsberg was interested in discovering had been "civilized".

In late 1981, Ghinsberg hitchhiked from Venezuela to Colombia and then on to Bolivia. There, he met Marcus Stamm from Schaffhausen in Switzerland, and the pair became good friends. Markus was a primary school teacher in Dörflingen and was well-known as a multi-region tennis champion. At the time, Marcus was going through a personal crisis as his long-time girlfriend, who had followed him to South America, had just separated from him.

Yossi and Marcus traveled together to La Paz in Bolivia. At 3,650 m (11,975 ft) above sea level, La Paz is the highest capital city in the world.

Yossi and Marcus met Karl Ruprechter, an Austrian who claimed to be an expert geologist. Karl told Yossi that he was planning an expedition into the uncharted Amazon in Bolivia in search of gold in a remote, indigenous Tacana village.

Ruprechter told stories about visiting an ancient indigenous village hidden deep within the Bolivian rainforest, inhabited by an indigenous tribe who had seen few white men in their lifetime and tantalizing stories of gold and riches.

Yossi also persuaded Kevin Gale, an American photographer from Oregon they had met on their travels, to join them on the trip. Kevin was about to fly back to the U.S. to spend Thanksgiving with his parents but decided to return for Christmas instead.

The journey into the Amazon

Ghinsberg, Gale, and Stamm followed Ruprechter by plane to Apolo, La Paz, and from there traveled down to the Tuichi River and then to a village called Asariamas, at the confluence of rivers Tuichi–Asariamas.

Then, the group began moving up the Asariamas River and across the mountains on their way to Ruprechter’s fabled destination with promises of gold.

After packing some supplies in their backpacks, the four men headed deep into the Bolivian jungle. They headed away from civilization, with Karl leading the way.

There was animal life everywhere around them, including birds, monkeys, spiders, snakes and insects.

Karl told them they wouldn’t carry food apart from rice, beans, and salt, and they would kill wild animals in the jungle to survive. Yossi said of Karl when he killed a monkey, “It was gruesome. You could see the wilderness in his eyes”.

Things start to go wrong, and the group separates

The group trekked for several days and began to run out of food as Yossi, Marcus, and Kevin expected to be at their destination within a few days.

Eventually, low on supplies, they had to eat monkeys. Stamm refused to eat them and inevitably grew physically weaker. And he had gotten trench foot, a fungal infection so that he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the men. After a week, he said he was in tremendous pain, but the others didn’t believe him as he was always complaining.

Yossi said, “We were constantly hungry. We would walk long days, having eaten nothing at all. We shot at monkeys and ate them. I would have put anything in my mouth. If you’d offered me human flesh, I wouldn’t have refused to indulge. When you get that hungry, nothing is disgusting.”

The four men decided to abandon their journey and return to Asariamas, as Marcus was adamant he could not walk any further. They headed back to the Tuichi River. Kevin and Yossi were distraught with Marcus as their dream had been shattered, and they blamed his unwillingness to eat the wild game as the cause of their problems.

The river rafting plan

When the four men arrived back at the village of Asariamas, Karl told them about his new plan to raft down the Tuichi River to a small gold quarry called Curiplaya, on the river bed, and from there downriver to Rurrenabaque, near the Beni River, and then return to La Paz.

With the villagers' help, they built the raft and headed downriver, and arrived at the confluence of rivers Tuichi–Ipurama.

There, Karl Ruprechter told them about the rapids in the San Pedro Canyon, which were unsuitable to pass through using a raft. He told the others he could not swim and refused to continue on the water.

Yossi said, “On the raft, Karl argued with the others, even though he didn’t know anything about rafting. There was no cooperation, no friendship, it was hell”.

So Kevin Gale and Yossi Ghinsberg decided to continue rafting downriver to Rurrenabaque. At the same time, Karl Ruprechter and Marcus Stamm planned to walk up the Ipurama River to Ipurama village, near the river's source, and return to Apolo. The four men agreed to meet before Christmas in La Paz.

Karl said if the others wanted to live, they should walk, but Kevin was adamant they should continue with their plan and walk around the San Pedro Falls, build a new raft and then continue their journey down the river.

Yossi wanted to go with Karl and Marcus, but Yossi had built a relationship with Kevin, and he decided to join him on the raft. Yossi was concerned as he wanted the group to come out together, and Marcus was upset to be left behind with Karl on foot. In hindsight, it was a crazy decision to split the group in the jungle. It would, theoretically, take Karl and Marcus a week to walk out, but they were never seen again.

Kevin and Yossi and the San Pedro Canyon

As Kevin and Yossi neared the waterfall in the San Pedro Canyon on the raft, they lost control in the raging rapids and separated. The river was narrow and fast-flowing. The two men lay down on the raft as they hit the white water and then they had a catastrophic collision with a large rock. The two men were thrown into the water. Gale made it to the bank safely, but Ghinsberg floated down the river and over the waterfall.

Yossi fought hard and kept afloat until the waters had calmed down. He then swam to shore, realising he was all alone, hungry, exhausted, and scared. Fortunately, he found the pack with some essential supplies, which would later be critical in keeping him alive in the jungle.

Kevin Gale is rescued

Kevin was rescued by local fishermen after having been stranded for five days floating on a log in the river and returned to La Paz. He visited the Israeli and Austrian consulates to request their help in preparing rescue missions for the missing men. He was told by the authorities at the Austrian consulate that Ruprechter was actually a criminal wanted by Interpol. He was no geologist.

Kevin Gale (left), Tico Tudela (center) and Yossi Ghinsberg (right) two days after rescue by the Beni River 1981

Yossi Ghinsberg lost in the jungle

Yossi spent the next three weeks lost without supplies or equipment. He quickly ran out of rice but occasionally found berries and fruits in the forest, foraged for eggs from nests, and even waited for a monkey to fall so he could eat it.

He faced attacks from wild boar, the constant threat of poisonous snakes, termite bites, and, on his sixth night alone in the jungle, a hungry jaguar.

Yossi said, “The nights, without doubt, were the worst of all. As darkness descends, there is no light whatsoever, the canopy swallows the stars and moon and the darkness is as thick as velvet. At night all the noises emerge, the screeches and roars and barks and calls, and things are moving around. It was simply overwhelming and I had no fire or gun to protect myself. If not for my ability to daydream, I would have consumed myself during these nights of horror.”

One night, Yossi had been asleep when he was awoken by rustling and woke up face-to-face with a jaguar. He grabbed a can of mosquito repellent and a lighter and improvised a flame-thrower. Yossi said: “I learnt the trick from a James Bond movie.” This was Roger Moore as 007 in “Live and Let Die”, killing a snake that was placed in his hotel room to kill him.

But the worst experience of all as he hiked day after day in what he hoped was the direction of the nearest settlement was the flesh and skin tearing from his feet. They became so infected that soon he had no skin left on his soles, leaving nothing but bloody, fleshy stumps.

He said: “They were just chunks of exposed flesh. I couldn’t take the pain. I dragged myself to a tree full of fire ants and shook it on my head. The waves of pain and adrenaline distracted me from my feet.”

He also discovered worms embedded under his skin and impaled his rectum on a broken stick after sliding down a mud slope.

One morning, Yossi woke up with aches and pain all over his body, only to realize he had spent the night on a termite nest.

Thoughts of suicide and the mysterious girl

On the 17th day of his ordeal, a plane flew overhead, but they did not see him. The canopy of the jungle means that anyone on the ground cannot see up to the sky and vice versa. He recalled: “When the plane passed it just broke me, that surge of hope was the worst thing that happened to me.”

Yossi was sobbing in the mud, contemplating suicide, when he looked up and saw what seemed to be a young girl, “For two days, I had the company of a girl. She appeared next to me. It was no less of a miracle if it was my imagination that had summoned her up because it happened at the very moment I had broken down and given up. She appeared in the worst moment when I really gave up. I talked to her all the time but she didn’t talk back. I built a camp for us both and made a space for her to sleep next to me.”

But then, one night, the girl vanished, “I was trying to hug her and I realized there was nobody there. I freaked out because if she’s not there it means I’m crazy. I thought I’d lost my sanity. I was very scared. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. Maybe my subconscious pulled it out?”

Yossi believed the “girl” saved his life because she needed him, “That’s something very deep about human nature. We’ll do more to save someone else’s life than our own because I couldn’t help myself anymore. I felt it was over. But the moment she was there, suddenly I had responsibility.”

Yossi also nearly drowned twice after the worst storm in a decade hit the area. He said: “The second swamp I fell in, I couldn’t pull myself out. I was thinking of committing suicide, but then I thought that if I was going to kill myself I should have done it in the first couple of days. After 19 days of struggle, there was no way I was dying then.”

The rescue of Yossi Ghinsberg

After nearly three weeks, Yossi was rescued the next day, barely clinging to life.

Upon hearing the sound of an engine, Yossi returned to the nearby river and amazingly bumped into Kevin, who was with indigenous people who had organized a search and rescue mission led by Abelardo "Tico" Tudela. They found Ghinsberg three days into their search, three weeks after he was first declared missing, and close to the search being abandoned. He spent the three months following his rescue recovering in a hospital.

The disappearance of Ruprechter and Stamm

Ruprechter and Stamm were never seen or heard from again. Despite attempts by several search and rescue missions involving Kevin and Yossi, they were never found, and there was no sign of any campfires, human waste or evidence of animals being killed or vegetation being disturbed.

Marcus’ mother in Switzerland believed a story from a spiritualist that he was living in Peru, and Yossi agreed to try and locate him there with no success. None of the communities in the area had ever seen a gringo living there. They completely vanished into the jungle.

What happened to the two men remains a mystery. Did Reprechter leave Stamm to his fate, given his trench foot and then get lost himself? Or, as a criminal, did he just vanish into the Bolivian jungle or further afield in Latin America? Yossi said in his book he thought a falling tree might have killed them in a storm or that Ruprechter had succumbed to an accident, and both men had died as Marcus would have been unable to get out of the jungle unaided.

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