Backpacker lost in bush penned 'dying' messages to family

Published on Sunday 19 July 2009 22:15

A BRITISH backpacker who was lost in the Australian bush for almost two weeks wrote goodbye notes to his family fearing he would suffer a slow and painful death by starvation.

Jamie Neale, 19, from north London, was found alive but dehydrated by sightseers in the Blue Mountains national park, west of Sydney, on Wednesday morning.

In an interview on Australian television, he described the torment of hearing search helicopters overhead and the frustration of not being found.

He even guided viewers through his experience, stumbling around the wilderness for a reconstruction.

Mr Neale denied his ordeal was a hoax and insisted: "I'm not lying.

"I was thinking that I might die on that mountain and in the notebook I had, which I later lost, I had actually written some goodbye notes, things to family, saying sorry and explaining how I got lost and things like that.

"I thought I was going to have a long, painful starvation death where I could just really think it over and over and over again.

"I'm not a particularly religious person but I started thinking about God and I was praying and saying, 'Surely you can move a helicopter an inch and find me' and, 'Why won't you just help me?'

"I starting thinking about all the friends that I'd been working with, my family – wondering if I was going to see them or hear their voices again."

With a film crew following him, around dawn on Saturday morning in 2C temperatures, Mr Neale fell over several times in his interview, stumbling off the beaten track and told the world: "I'm not lying. I was genuinely lost. I feel a total idiot."

Mr Neale set off from a hostel in Katoomba on 1 July. At first, he was not worried, he said, until he ended up walking for a day and a half in the wrong direction.

He said: "That's when the panic started to set in because I knew I couldn't climb up and down these hills, it was too tough and I couldn't get out."

Mr Neale had taken only two bread rolls with him and a bottle of water. He did take a free portable personal emergency beacon, but forgot to take his mobile phone and did not tell anyone where he was going on his ten-hour walk to an outcrop known as the Ruined Castle and then on to Mount Solitary.

The Briton managed to build a makeshift shelter but said making a fire by rubbing two sticks together was harder than survival programmes on television suggested.

As time went on, he foraged for food, eating seeds and leaves without knowing if they were poisonous or not. But he admitted he was not brave enough to swallow bright red millipedes in his quest for sustenance.

Mr Neale was discharged from Katoomba's Blue Mountains Hospital on Friday after being treated for dehydration and exposure. He is unable to fly for up to eight weeks because of bubbles on his lungs caused by his ordeal.