Captured by mercenaries A true tale of survival coming to light after 24 years! And Why Travelling in regions of Political unrest you can definitely encounter problems beyond your control.

 A True Tale of Survival Coming To Light After 24 years!

Ok I tell this story 24 years (almost to the date) after it happened. Why so long? Well, simply I never felt the need to tell it to anyone, all those who knew where we went knew what happened. However, I guess with so much BS on the SM these days about people going on about survival; I thought I'd share my non BS story to anyone who wants to read about it. 

It doesn't involve any knives I'm afraid or stuff which is commonly thought about being about "survival" but rather a travel story and those who travel a lot will know that at some point things happen which can land you beyond your control.

It follows on from an adventure we had travelling across the Indonesian archipelago on mountain bikes. 

KOMODO Island (Photo Author)

The location is the island of Sumbawa. We were talking it easy one particular day, in that we had decided to hop on a local mini bus, throwing (actually carefully putting our bikes on the roof with our only big knife) 

                                              This was not our big knife LOL (but there was a similarly sized one on the roof of our bus!

our bikes on the roof and then travelling to a ferry port with a bunch of locals. 

The bus was very packed and there was absolutely zero floor space. Luckily we got  two seats right at the very back left hand corner (it was a right hand drive bus). I was sitting next to a window, which in this case I could open fully, and this was a blessing in that tropical heat, there was none of that western, I demand air conditioning thing happening.

I did have my SLR (yes, the days before DSLRs were common!) cradled in my lap for any rough and ready shots out of the window. We were carrying a load of film with us, Fujichrome 100 and Kodachrome 200 and 64 ASA (yeah, LOL also before ISO!).

The overall mission was to hike to one of Indonesia's highest peaks Gunung Rinjani at 3726m give or take a metre!; camp on numerous deserted or near deserted beaches; camp on a deserted island (part of that adventure is already told here on the blog-if you haven't read it I highly recommend it) and to make our way across to Komodo island anyway we could, all on mountain bikes! We did indeed do all of that! 

But now I digress, let me take you back to the island of Sumbawa.

So, this was the first time we had decided not to ride and to hitch on a local minibus. Which, considering already the number of kilometres ridden in greater than 30C heat, I think we were justified in not having to "crack hardy" every day LOL!

As I mentioned the bus was really overcrowded, a bit like the Chuo- Sobu line in Tokyo during peak hour-ok, except no one is sitting on the floor there in a Japanese train!

 Ok so at one point we were driving past a field of sorghum which had not yet been harvested. If  you're not familiar with this crop, then let me tell you it is a grain crop that can easily attain heights over 2m. It's drought tolerant and loves the tropics and has big green leaves (now you are well versed in Agronomy!). Ok, so essentially we were driving past huge fields of this stuff, a sea of green almost.

Suddenly I saw a jeep, just like in the movies come out of nowhere within this field to my right. There was a guy hanging off the back behind what looked like a 50 cal machine gun. The sorghum was so high I couldn't clearly see the whole vehicle although strangely enough it looked like some Willy's Jeep! 

My immediate thoughts were, it was a movie taking place, and I turned towards my travelling companion to get her attention, (she was half asleep as it was that hot) and i said: 

"Hey Suzy, check this, they're making some sort of movie"! 

I mean, after all, why not? The perfect place in the middle of nowhere!

The jeep was paralleling the bus, maybe 25-30m away and moving pretty much as fast as we were, despite it ploughing through this sorghum crop. I was still looking for the Panavision trucks, the catering vans and all of the other associated film crew stuff, but I couldn't see anything!

In the next instant the bus came to an abrupt halt and I stuck my head out of the window, just far enough to see that there were some burning oil drums and some other black smoking fires across the road. At that instant that jeep roared out of the sorghum and came to a stop maybe some metres away;  and like the movies, people came out of nowhere armed to the teeth. I mean some even had the good old bandoliers of bullets (for a heavy machine gun) across their chests. Everyone in the vicinity I could see was fully tooled up. Side arms and rifles were the order of the day that's for sure.

I still thought at that point it was indeed a movie set but as reality sunk in, I realised we were in that reality set and it wasn't a movie being made, because as all of these rag tag looking military guys got closer, I saw they were indeed wearing and carrying real weapons and the ultimate crazy thing was that an old guy had appeared, now standing directly outside of my window was carrying a damn spear!

At this point I whispered to Suzy, should I get some pictures? Her common sense prevailed against my, about to get us shot stupidity, and she firmly said no way, keep the camera down. 

Right then, all sorts of things were going through my mind, like we, as the only 2 foreigners on board this bus and both standing out like sore thumbs, of course, would be taken captive, maybe held hostage if we were lucky? Those thoughts rapidly racing through my mind. 

   I was scanning the bush on the opposite side of the road to see if we could simply "disappear" into it but of course this was impossible due to our packed like sardines situation and that the back door was completely blocked by people sitting and or standing there!

Now some guy had got on the bus up front and was having a good look see around the bus. Everyone was quiet and to be honest, I don't remember anyone pointing a gun at anyone and besides that, everyone on the bus was out gunned anyway, in fact we were totally surrounded! 

Looking back on this, what seemed to be an eternity was probably an event which lasted less than 30 minutes. There was nothing we could have done. There was no anger, no time to be frightened (although to this date I don't recall ever having asked my companion if she was frightened, I don't think she was) but what I do know is that her parents way back in the US of A were not happy about her going on such a trip with me and that they wanted her to return home after her  (normal) tour of duty LOL! (she was a fellow scientist in our lab). 

When we did get to the final stop we were quick to locate an internet cafe (yeah, do you remember those things???) sending emails and trying to find out what was going on in this region, which my government had assured me was safe to travel in!

Ok, back to our temporary captors! So after this guy got off the bus, there was a wait and everyone seemed to blend back into the field. I wasn't trying too hard to be purposefully looking at any one of them lest I catch their attention and it go bad for us, because we had, at this stage, no idea what was going on.

The bus started to move and I saw again that the  barrel that was on fire had been rolled off this narrow half dirt, half bitumen road. We were slowly on the move, and as the bus negotiated past what I could now clearly see were burning chunks of wood, our fellow riflemen had all but disappeared!

So now this takes us back to that internet cafe with loads of questions flying backwards and forwards between the both of us and conversation centering around our luck not to have been hauled off the vehicle. But here you go eh? Typical of the foreigner thinking of their own self importance and why we should be the ones who would be "hauled off"!

Ok, so by now I guess you are wondering what had happened and it wasn't until some months later we found out the cause of our unscheduled bus stop; these were mercenaries who had been hired to 'look for gold miners' who were on their way to a large foreign acquired open cut gold mine. I believe that (if one can believe any of these stories appearing in the news print-yes news print!) that there had been one miner captured and killed. Thank god we weren't miners on our way to this mine!

 Supposedly this mining concession or whatever was given to a large US company and the government really didn't own the land upon which the mine was and there were some "locals" who were a bit pissed off at this. That's the story I read in the news papers and it made sense and we just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time as they say.

So like all adventurers, the moral of the story is, and I know you know it but  for the sake of my piece of mind:

Travelling in regions of Political unrest you can definitely encounter problems beyond your control. 

So the title was:

 A True Tale of Survival Coming To Light After 24 Years!

So how did we "survive" this adventure? Well believe it or not, by keeping a cool head and certainly  by NOT doing anything in the slightest bit stupid that could draw any unwanted attention to ourselves. As I've written in past blogs, survival, has nothing to do necessarily with guns or knives, it has all to do with keeping a cool head at all times.

BCT

Read about part One here: