Lost... In the Jungle of Doom

by Tracey Turner

  It’s not long before there’s a choice ahead of you as the river splits into two. Which route should you take?

  If you choose the smaller of the two rivers, click here.

  If you choose the broader river, click here.

  You were right to be wary of the big hairy spider amongst the bamboo. Tarantulas aren’t aggressive and their bite isn’t serious, but Brazilian wandering spiders, one of which you’ve just met, are aggressive and highly venomous.

  Luckily it’s not long before you see some more bamboo, where you get some drinking water, after checking carefully for spiders first.

  Click here.

  The river current carries you on. You gaze at the banks of the river, which are densely forested. However, soon you begin to see signs that make you hopeful! Trees are growing in regular lines, as if they’ve been planted and you spot a small boat moored to the bank! You can’t see any people about . . . but surely they can’t be far away?

  Click here.

  Tired, hot and sweaty, you tie up your raft on the bank, and sit down on a log for a rest, where there are a few ants milling about. Suddenly you feel the most intense, blinding pain in your leg! It’s agony! It happens again – and again! It’s the ants!

  You sink to the floor, writhing in pain, where more of the ants bite you. The ants’ venom isn’t enough to kill a person, but in your weakened, dehydrated state, with no one to help you, you pass out and die from dehydration.

  The end.

  Bullet Ants

  • Bullet ants are dark reddish-brown and up to three centimetres long.

  • Their sting is supposed to be the world’s most painful insect sting – as painful as being shot by a bullet.

  • The pain can make people throw up and pass out, and continues for 24 hours.

  Click here to return to the beginning and try again.

  Although it wasn’t poisonous, the fruit has upset your stomach, and you vomit several times. You feel better afterwards, but you know that it’s important to replace the fluid you’ve just lost by vomiting. Should you stay and rest first, or carry on in search of water?

  If you decide to carry on, click here.

  If you decide to rest for a while and then carry on, click here.

  As carefully as you can, you slide the stick into the water and push off. The creature has submerged, but you can still see its outline under the water’s surface. Your heart’s in your mouth as your raft glides past the large animal, hardly daring to breathe.

  In fact, the creature was a gentle manatee (see here), so you weren’t in any danger. Soon, you’re back in the river’s swift current. In the distance ahead of you, the river bends into a large loop, creating an expanse of slow-moving water. In the water, dark shapes dip and glide. You look more closely – they’re otters! One of your favourite animals! You could stop and swim for a bit with the otters, which would cool you down and give you a wash at the same time.

  If you decide to swim with the otters, click here.

  If you decide to carry on, click here.

  You tie up your raft and peer into the vegetation. You can’t see anybody. You call out but there’s no reply. People must be close by, though. You listen, but can only hear the strange whoops and cries of the rainforest animals.

  You spot a narrow, well-worn trail leading along the riverbank. You don’t want to stray too far from your raft, but you decide to take the trail and investigate.

  Click here.

  You round a bend and to your complete amazement you see that there’s a village on the riverbank! You rub your eyes, unable to believe what’s in front of them. There are several huts, boats moored by the river, people cooking and talking, children running about, chickens pecking at the ground!

  It’s not long before you’re surrounded by helpful people offering food and water and tending to your wounds. You can’t understand a word of what anyone’s saying, but you don’t care! You’re finally safe! The villagers contact an air ambulance, and it’s not long before you’re reunited with your family and friends, your Amazon adventure is over at last.

  The end.

  The People of the Amazon Rainforest

  More than 30 million people live in the Amazon, most of them in cities and towns. The biggest city is Manaus, with a population of 1.7 million. However, there are also people who live in the rainforest itself.

  About a million native Amazonians live in the Amazon Rainforest, in about 400 different tribes, each with its own language and culture. Some tribes have had contact with the outside world since Europeans first came to the Amazon around 500 years ago. Some still remain uncontacted in the vast rainforest. According to the Brazilian organisation FUNAI, there are 67 uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. They hunt, fish and farm in the same way their ancestors have for thousands of years.

  The first settlers in South America enslaved or killed thousands of the people they found living there. The settlers also brought diseases such as smallpox, measles and flu. The people of South America had no resistance to these new diseases, and many of them died.

  Today Amerindian tribes are protected. The Brazilian organisation FUNAI protects the lands where they live, and stops outsiders from going there uninvited. But logging and mining, some of it illegal, still continues, destroying the rainforest.

  Native People of the Rainforest

  Most Amazon tribespeople live in villages, where they grow crops, hunt and fish. A few tribes are nomadic, travelling about the rainforest, hunting and gathering. These are just two of the hundreds of tribes of the Amazon:

  • The Ticuna tribe was one of the first Amazonian tribes to meet the settlers from Europe in the sixteenth century. Despite their long history of contact with the outside world, they still have their own language and culture. They live near the borders of Brazil, Peru and Columbia, in more than 70 different villages along a 1,000 kilometre stretch of the Amazon.

  • The Yanomami live in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. They had no contact with the outside world until the twentieth century, and live almost exactly as they did thousands of years ago. They’re threatened by miners, loggers and cattle ranchers who destroy the rainforest and bring diseases that are common in the western world, but to which the Yanomami aren’t immune. There are around 20,000 Yanomami people, who live in 250 villages in the rainforest.

  More Amazon Facts

  As well as being the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon is also the world’s oldest. It’s millions of years old, and could have existed around the same time as the dinosaurs!

  The Amazon rainforest stretches across nine countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and French Guiana.

  There are different types of river water in the Amazon, sustaining different types of aquatic life. Blackwater rivers flow through swamps and flooded forests, picking up acidic soil and sand on the way. This kind of river water is usually very pure. Whitewater rivers are a creamy colour, and contain lots of animal and plant life. Clearwater rivers don’t contain many nutrients, and so not much animal and plant life either. Where the blackwater Rio Negro (meaning ‘black river’) meets the whitewater of the upper Amazon, the two contrasting coloured waters flow along together without mixing for about six kilometres.

  The Amazon Rainforest is home to millions of different plant and animal species, roughly including:

  • 2.5 million different insect species

  • At least 40,000 different plant species

  • 3,000 different fish species

  • 1,300 different bird species1

  • More than 400 different mammal species

  • More than 400 different amphibian species

  • Nearly 400 different reptile species

  And new species are being discovered all the time. For example, in 2009 a new type of tamarin monkey was discovered.

  Amazon Animal World Records

  The amazing animals of the Amazon include:

  • The wor
ld’s biggest eagle, the harpy eagle

  • The world’s smallest monkey, the pygmy marmoset

  • The world’s biggest freshwater fish, the pirarucu

  • The world’s biggest beetle, the titan beetle2

  • The world’s loudest monkey, the howler monkey

  The Amazon is named after a race of fierce women warriors from Greek mythology – the Amazons. It was given the name after a Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, reported seeing women warriors in the rainforest.

  There’s a dry season and a rainy season in the Amazon. During the rainy season, from December to May, the difference in water level in some parts of the Amazon can be as much as an eight-storey building.

  Disappearing Amazon

  As well as being an amazing place, and a beautiful one, the Amazon rainforest is essential to everyone and everything on the planet for many reasons:

  • The world’s rainforests are like its lungs, because they recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. Without them, the planet would die.

  • A fifth of the world’s fresh water comes from the Amazon basin.

  • The Amazon’s many different plant species have provided us with important medicines, including anti-cancer drugs and only a small proportion have so far been studied.

  Despite its importance, an area the size of England is being destroyed in the Amazon every year. Trees are cut down for the timber, then farms or cattle ranches take their place.

  Real-life Rainforest Survival Stories

  People really have ended up lost in the Amazon and some have lived to tell the tale. Here are two of their stories.

  Juliane Koepcke was only seventeen when the plane she was travelling in was struck by lightning and crashed in the rainforest in Peru. She woke up still strapped to her plane seat, the sole survivor of the crash. All she was wearing was a mini dress and just one sandal. Her collar bone was broken, and she was covered in cuts and bruises. Nonetheless she set off on foot to find help, using her single sandal to test the ground in front of her for snakes. She had no food, apart from a few sweets she found at the site of the plane crash. She walked through the Amazon rainforest for ten days, following streams and rivers downstream, before she found a deserted hut and a boat. By this time, a wound in her arm was crawling with maggots, and she used some petrol she found in the hut to wash them out. The next day, some men turned up at the hut and took her by boat to the nearest town. She was taken by plane to a hospital, and made a complete recovery. She lived in Germany, but later returned to Peru as a scientist, researching the bats of the rainforest.

  Yossi Ghinsberg, from Israel, and three friends were searching for an uncontacted tribe in the remote Bolivian rainforest. They decided to split up – Yossi and his friend Kevin travelling by raft, the other two, Karl and Marcus, on foot. Yossi and Kevin lost one another when Yossi was swept over a waterfall on the raft.

  Unable to find one another, Kevin eventually found his way to safety, then went back for Yossi with a rescue party. By the time they found him, Yossi had been alone in the rainforest for three weeks. He survived by eating fruit and birds’ eggs. Once he had to scare off a jaguar, which he did by setting fire to some insect spray. He had a bad case of warm water immersion foot (see here), which he said was so painful that he tipped fire ants over his own head as a distraction from the pain. Sadly, the two friends who had set off on foot, Karl and Marcus, were never found.

  Glossary

  anticoagulant something that stops blood from clotting

  antivenom a product used to treat venomous bites and stings

  balsa a tropical tree

  caiman a crocodilian reptile

  canopy the upper layer of trees in a forest

  cholera a disease caused by bacteria in dirty water

  contaminated unclean

  flash flood sudden, quick flooding caused by very heavy rain

  hallucinate seeing things that do not really exist

  initiation a rite or ceremony marking someone’s entry into adulthood

  meander wander (winding and turning)

  mildew a growth of mould

  nomadic not having one permanent home but moving from one place to another

  paranoid extremely anxious or afraid

  parasites creatures that live by feeding on another creature

  plantations artificially grown forests or crop farms

  predator a hunting animal

  prehensile able to grasp or hold

  prey an animal that is hunted

  receptors parts of body cells that can receive signals

  reticulated covered with a netting pattern

  ricin a poisonous toxin found in castor beans

  secretion storing and then releasing a substance

  stagnant water that is not flowing

  tributaries small rivers that flow into a larger, main river

  vaccinated protected (inoculated) against disease

  venomous capable of injecting venom

  Lost... In the Desert of Dread

  You’ve made it through the deadly depths of the Amazon Rainforest, but can you survive the harsh temperatures and seemingly endless Sahara Desert? From poisonous scorpions to terrifying sand storms, have you got with it takes to make it out alive?

  With deadly perils lurking where you least expect them and the threat of death by dehydration ever present, will you be able to make your way to safety and escape the terrifying perils of the sandy Sahara Desert?

  Live or die – you decide.

  £4.99 ISBN 9781408194669

  Extract from Lost... In the Desert of Dread

  The building’s little more than a tiny mud hut, half falling down, but it provides all the shade you need. After checking for creatures, you spread out your blanket and rest all day in the heat, making sure you drink enough water. As dusk descends and the temperature rapidly cools, you pick up your things and decide which direction to take.

  But your attention’s caught by some noises outside. You investigate, and discover a group of what look like dogs in the distance. You recognise them as jackals. It looks as though they’ve found a dead animal to eat.

  As long as the animal is recently dead, you could shoo away the jackals, then make a fire and cook some of the meat for yourself.

  If you decide to shoo away the jackals from their food, click here.

  If you decide to steer clear of the animals, click here.

  Endnotes

  1. one in five of the world’s birds is native to the Amazon

  2. the largest one measured was 1.7 centimetres longer than a pygmy marmoset!

  Published 2014 by

  A & C Black, an imprint of

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  ISBN 978-1-4081-9465-2

  eISBN 978-1-4729-0747-9

  This electronic edition published 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Text copyright © 2014 Tracey Turner

  Illustration copyright © 2014 Nelson Evergreen

  Copyright © 2014 A & C Black

  Additional images © Shutterstock

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The rights of Tracey Turner and Nelson Evergreen to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

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