Speaker 1: School of humans. Just be clear, I'm an absolute idiot,
Speaker 1: and so's my friend that was with me. We should
Speaker 1: never have gone, and obviously not recommending the experience because
Speaker 1: you know you're going to die.
Speaker 2: That's Tom Heartdyke. And Tom Well, he's an orchid lover.
Speaker 2: Back in two thousand, his zeal for these precious blooms
Speaker 2: even got him into I'd say a little bit of trouble.
Speaker 2: I'll let him tell the story.
Speaker 1: Where I met this chap called Paul Winder, also from
Speaker 1: England and not a plant man so much, but more
Speaker 1: of a mountaineer at heart, and we agreed across this
Speaker 1: area called the Darien Gap on the Panamanian Colombian border,
Speaker 1: an area that we knew wasn't that safe, but Paul
Speaker 1: knew there were wonderful mountains to be discovered, and for me,
Speaker 1: I knew it was a honeypot for orchids.
Speaker 2: So the two decided to buddy up and travel through
Speaker 2: the gap together.
Speaker 1: Get up beginning of March of the year two thousand
Speaker 1: to catch the six hour, bum bruising, potholed field bus
Speaker 1: ride down the remainder of the Pan American Highway as
Speaker 1: it fizzles out and the little hamlet, very very small
Speaker 1: village of Javisa. You get off the bus, don you
Speaker 1: rucksacks in your three foot long machettes. We bought a
Speaker 1: few days earlier mosquito nets enough food for about two
Speaker 1: and a half weeks. We reckoned, which was the time
Speaker 1: to cross the Darien Gap according to our Lonely Planet guidebook,
Speaker 1: and we followed the map in that guidebook, and we
Speaker 1: made fabulous.
Speaker 2: Progress, following paths made by the wild pigs. The two
Speaker 2: explorers weaved through the gap with unexpected ease.
Speaker 1: You are in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and the
Speaker 1: wild boar and the very few people in the area
Speaker 1: has rendered into this clearing full of air plants orchids.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was a lovely place and no orchids
Speaker 1: really worthy of Granny's name, and once to name it
Speaker 1: new species. Walking after my dear granny. That was my
Speaker 1: main drive, to see orchids and finding new species for her.
Speaker 2: It was a wonderland of plants. And then suddenly Tom
Speaker 2: noticed something out of the corner of his.
Speaker 1: Eye, and we got our rucksacked on our backs and
Speaker 1: started to walk through this clearing. When our guides just
Speaker 1: stood in front of us and fell to the ground.
Speaker 1: It was quite weird as these figures just ran at us.
Speaker 1: Three girls really were fifteen sixteen year olds with big
Speaker 1: M sixteen's and three chaps, so six in total, running
Speaker 1: at us with all their all their machine guns, bandannas
Speaker 1: on their heads and combat gear. Our guides just fell
Speaker 1: to the floor and offered their hands behind their backs
Speaker 1: and they were tied up in Paul just stared these people.
Speaker 1: I mean we were in a film set or something,
Speaker 1: We're in the TV screen. It was extraordinary and that
Speaker 1: amazing feeling of those wonderful orkids. Oh you're screwed, You're
Speaker 1: going to in split second, this happened on the hands
Speaker 1: and knees. We went rock saxel, ripped off us, tied
Speaker 1: up with what looked like garden string behind our backs.
Speaker 1: These big M sixteen stuck to our heads. Our guides
Speaker 1: dragged off into the woods. Probably one was executed. Even
Speaker 1: to this day they completely and aftere vanished basically, and
Speaker 1: Na and Paul marched to our feet and dragged off
Speaker 1: into the woods for ten months in captivity.
Speaker 2: In this episode, the passion for plants gets dangerous. I'm
Speaker 2: Summer rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 2: This is bad Seeds.
Speaker 1: My name is Tom Hartdyke and I'm curator of the
Speaker 1: World Garden at Lallingston Castle in Kent in southeast England.
Speaker 2: Tom is a forty six year old horticulturalist, but to
Speaker 2: be honest, after interviewing him, it's more apt to describe
Speaker 2: him as a plant evangelist. His passion for plant life
Speaker 2: pours from him.
Speaker 1: Hyper enthusiastic. I's called the other day.
Speaker 2: His property in Kent, which by the way has been
Speaker 2: in the family for twenty generations.
Speaker 1: We moved here in thirteen sixty.
Speaker 2: One, has been converted into a world Garden with more
Speaker 2: than seven thousand different types of plants.
Speaker 1: Laid out as a miniature map of the world. That
Speaker 1: North and South America are represented, and we've got the
Speaker 1: Canary Islands, we've got Africa, Europe, Asia, UK and Ireland
Speaker 1: included in't that and Australia one of my favorite areas, Australasia.
Speaker 1: And it's totally bonkers, but it's looking brilliant.
Speaker 2: To say the least. Tom is something of a plant addict,
Speaker 2: and he's been one for a long time.
Speaker 1: And my passion to plants started at the age of three.
Speaker 1: Sun in nineteen eighty when my granny gave me a
Speaker 1: packaging carrots eats and a trowel. She was an amazing
Speaker 1: character and she gave me my green blood cells and
Speaker 1: everything else's horticultural history.
Speaker 2: Tom has traveled all over the world in the pursuit
Speaker 2: to see the world's most spectacular plants. He's also, if
Speaker 2: it isn't already obvious, an avid collector, but one plant
Speaker 2: group has a special place in his heart.
Speaker 1: Orchids. Oh, it's just euphoric. It is spined even now
Speaker 1: talking about its spine tinkling. It's Granny's fault all of this.
Speaker 1: She had to sing about them. It was more unnative
Speaker 1: orchids that really inspired me and granny and I think
Speaker 1: they're absolutely majestic, and seeing them in the wild ear
Speaker 1: then inspired me to grow some of their cousins in
Speaker 1: a greenhouse here as a youngster. And then it was
Speaker 1: the inevitable, the itchy feet. What was it like to
Speaker 1: go abroad to see these plants in the wild. There's
Speaker 1: something about them, and it's also their rarity, and it's
Speaker 1: something about seeing them in the wild and some just
Speaker 1: growing on the edge of extinction because there're only just
Speaker 1: a handful of certain species of work. It's growing on
Speaker 1: a rock in a certain specific sight in whether it
Speaker 1: might be and that's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2: In two thousand, when Tom was in his early twenties,
Speaker 2: he made plans to visit one of the world's great
Speaker 2: orchid hotspots, the Darien Gap, a dense rainforest between Colombia
Speaker 2: and Panama. The Gap is widely considered one of the
Speaker 2: most dangerous patches of wilderness on the planet. Now forget
Speaker 2: the snakes, poisoned dart frogs, and jaguars. For decades, the
Speaker 2: dense jungle has been a hideout for drug traffickers, paramilitary forces,
Speaker 2: and guerrilla fighters. In the Lonely Planet guide to the region,
Speaker 2: the editors provide one simple admonishment to travelers considering a journey.
Speaker 2: Don't even think about it. But Tom, he didn't listen.
Speaker 2: He had orchid fever. It's the nineteenth century and a
Speaker 2: new plant craze is sweeping Britain. It's not tulips or ferns.
Speaker 2: This time, the rich are paying explorers top dollar to
Speaker 2: pluck orchids from the jungle. Tom Arenda, previously the orchid
Speaker 2: collection specialist at the Smithsonian Gardens explains that at the
Speaker 2: time there were a lot to choose from.
Speaker 3: There's probably more species of orchid than there are any
Speaker 3: other type of plant in newarkids are discovered all the time.
Speaker 3: I think that it's approaching about thirty thousand species. The
Speaker 3: closest plant family to that number would be the composites,
Speaker 3: which is the daisy family.
Speaker 2: Like Tom Hartdike Mirenda has been obsessed with orchids for
Speaker 2: a long time. He understands the allure.
Speaker 3: They're so beautiful that we get seduced by them, and
Speaker 3: so many of us that get fascinated with orchids end
Speaker 3: up addicted to them and having these huge collections. They
Speaker 3: are just mind bogglingly diverse, and they kind of have personalities.
Speaker 3: For example, orchids are what we call bilaterally symmetrical, So
Speaker 3: if you were to take my face and cut it
Speaker 3: in half, you could fold it over onto itself and
Speaker 3: it'd be a mirror image. Orkids are the same way.
Speaker 3: When you're looking at an orkid, it's kind of like
Speaker 3: looking at a face. You see something that kind of
Speaker 3: looks back at you with a personality.
Speaker 2: Those seductive personalities led dozens of Victorian orchid hunters to
Speaker 2: dive into the tropics, to Sierra Leone, to Brazil, to
Speaker 2: Ecuador and Madagascar, to the Andes and beyond. It was
Speaker 2: a scientific bonanza. They found thousands of species that previously
Speaker 2: had been known only to locals.
Speaker 3: People were seeing plants that they never imagined did. It
Speaker 3: was very exciting at the time, but it was also
Speaker 3: before we really knew a whole lot about orchids in
Speaker 3: particular and ecology in general.
Speaker 2: What followed was a botanical smash and grab. The wealthy
Speaker 2: of Europe wanted orchids to show off, and competition was brutal.
Speaker 2: With thousands of dollars on the line, orchid hunters swiped
Speaker 2: every plant they could find and then would burn down
Speaker 2: the surrounding forest to prevent competitors from finding new growth.
Speaker 3: They did a lot of dumb things. They would take everything.
Speaker 3: If they found a new species, they would collect them
Speaker 3: all and ship them all back to the Old World
Speaker 3: to be grown. They would often lie about where a
Speaker 3: plant was collected so that they could have it as
Speaker 3: an exclusive plant for their nursery. A lot of misinformation
Speaker 3: was promulgated from that where so people wouldn't know where
Speaker 3: to find these plants in the future, and sometimes this
Speaker 3: took like thirty forty years to figure out where the
Speaker 3: plants were actually from.
Speaker 2: That's if any were left. Orchid hunting stripped the tropical
Speaker 2: countryside within decades. Many species disappeared entirely from the wild,
Speaker 2: only to be found in the gardens of the rich
Speaker 2: and trendy.
Speaker 3: People think that it's a renewable resource, that there's just
Speaker 3: thousands and thousands of these plants out in nature, and
Speaker 3: it may seem that way, but it's very, very easy
Speaker 3: to make a serious dent in a population by overcollecting.
Speaker 2: These plants would soon be called the lost orchids, but
Speaker 2: rarity just enhanced the flower's mystique and boosted its asking price.
Speaker 2: Orchid hunters kept combing the tropics, ransacking everything along the way.
Speaker 2: Decency meant nothing. Susan Orlean in her book The Orchid Thief,
Speaker 2: tells the story of one flower hunter in New Guinea
Speaker 2: who discovered some orchids blooming from human remains, collected the
Speaker 2: plants and sent them to England, still attached to ribs
Speaker 2: and shin bones. That kind of behavior prompted one Swiss
Speaker 2: botanist in eighteen seventy eight to write, these modern collectors
Speaker 2: spare nothing. This is no longer collecting. It is wanton robbery.
Speaker 2: Worse yet, few of those stolen plants survived.
Speaker 3: They brought them back to England and they put them
Speaker 3: in what they call stove houses. These stove houses were
Speaker 3: terrible for those plants. They perished. So entire populations of
Speaker 3: plants from Colombia and Brazil and Venezuela and stuff all
Speaker 3: died there with very very few survivors. So even though
Speaker 3: all of this incredible diversity was being discovered, a lot
Speaker 3: of damage was done to the tropical environments that these
Speaker 3: things came from, and it can take, you know, hundreds
Speaker 3: of years for those populations to recover.
Speaker 2: Eventually, the pillagings spread home to Britain too. Take the
Speaker 2: lady slipper orchid siper Pedium calciolis. It bloomed across the
Speaker 2: north of England until local hunters wiped it out in
Speaker 2: twenty ten. The last remaining wild orchid in the country,
Speaker 2: which was one hundred years old, had to be protected
Speaker 2: by its own police detail. Even the country's botanical gardens
Speaker 2: are extra vigilant with these prized plants, locking many of
Speaker 2: the rarest orchids under cages. But during the height of
Speaker 2: orchid fever, the flower weren't the only thing in danger.
Speaker 2: The hunters were too. Guns, machetes, knives. These were the
Speaker 2: orchid hunters go to tools. They trapes the forest, knowing
Speaker 2: that at any moment they might have to fend off
Speaker 2: wild animals, hostile locals, and other orchid hunters. One young
Speaker 2: German hunter named William Arnold bragged that he once turned
Speaker 2: down a high paying orchid hunting job because his client
Speaker 2: failed to give him a trustworthy pistol. The gun wouldn't
Speaker 2: have saved him. Arnold ended up drowning in Venezuela's Orinoco River.
Speaker 2: His death was typical orchid hunters. Died of dysentery and malaria.
Speaker 2: They fell off cliffs and had their heads shrunken. Many
Speaker 2: stepped into the mists of the jungle and simply never returned.
Speaker 2: Some were murdered by local rebel groups, others by competing
Speaker 2: orchid hunters. Orchid hunting was a job for the few,
Speaker 2: the proud, and the very very reckless, but the potential
Speaker 2: for striking it rich was two appealing, and the orchid
Speaker 2: beef Orlean describes the fate of one cursed orchid hunting
Speaker 2: party in the Philippines, writing within a month, one of
Speaker 2: them had been eaten by a tiger, another had been
Speaker 2: drenched with oil and burned alive, five had vanished into
Speaker 2: thin air, and one had managed to stay alive and
Speaker 2: walk out of the woods, carrying forty seven thousand Fallinopsis plants.
Speaker 2: To pursue the plant was to embrace a curse to
Speaker 2: chase a blood diamond laced with petals. Few survived its seduction.
Speaker 2: Those who did reaped life changing rewards. Decades later, Tom
Speaker 2: hart Dyke heard the same siren call. Minutes before the ambush.
Speaker 2: Tom hart Dyke and his hiking buddy Paul had been
Speaker 2: making jokes about lollipops. Then their world is turned upside down.
Speaker 2: People in full camouflage rush out from the jungle foliage,
Speaker 2: and suddenly Tom is staring down the barrel of an
Speaker 2: automatic rifle. The armed strangers command that Tom and Paul
Speaker 2: come with them. As the young men are ushered through
Speaker 2: the jungle, their hands tied and guns jammed into their backs,
Speaker 2: they are convinced they are about to die. Then the
Speaker 2: group stops its trek and the gorillas ask the hikers
Speaker 2: to empty their pockets. The only thing that tumbles out
Speaker 2: are a few seeds. Now this is a pretty good
Speaker 2: indication that Tom and Paul are harmless. Still, the gun
Speaker 2: toting kidnappers keep the two men captive in the forest
Speaker 2: for ten long months.
Speaker 1: So we spent from March to Christmas of the year
Speaker 1: two thousand with this Colombian gorilla.
Speaker 2: Group, and it was unclear exactly who the gorillas were.
Speaker 2: They might have been rebels fighting the Colombian Civil War,
Speaker 2: like members of Marxist Leninist group FARK, then a recognized
Speaker 2: terrorist organization. All Tom could make out was they were
Speaker 2: very young.
Speaker 1: To this day, we don't really know who they were
Speaker 1: or what they wanted, at average age of fifteen sixteen
Speaker 1: years of age. A third girls, two third boys, I
Speaker 1: suppose made up the units, about seven hundred of them
Speaker 1: in total, seven hundred different faces he saw during the
Speaker 1: whole time.
Speaker 2: Over the months, the duo started to get used to
Speaker 2: the feeling of having automatic weapons pointed at them, even
Speaker 2: when they had to squat behind a bush or strip
Speaker 2: in a creek in private moments. The guys give their
Speaker 2: captors nicknames, Will Smith, Lucy M sixteen to name a
Speaker 2: few they create a secret code to communicate, dream up
Speaker 2: imaginary escapes, and even steal from their hostile hosts.
Speaker 1: We stole food from them. We stole a machete from them.
Speaker 1: Paul was an amazing thief, so subtle and so cool
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: One day, one of the gorillas, the one named M sixteen,
Speaker 2: asks Tom why he was in the Darien Gap in
Speaker 2: the first place. Tom tells them, I'm in love with plants.
Speaker 1: I thought to extend my life as much as possible.
Speaker 1: My tactic was to show them who I was, a
Speaker 1: gardener from Kent in southeast England and paul a mountaineers.
Speaker 1: And that was a tactic we employed because inside, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely peeing yourself. I mean, you are going to die,
Speaker 1: so your survival strategy kicks in and you have this
Speaker 1: faulty fact sort of thing. So on the inside you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're screwed. On the outside, excuse my language, on the outside,
Speaker 1: you're very much like, look at that wonderful butterfly flying,
Speaker 1: but oh, thanks for the tarantula. The hair's got stuck
Speaker 1: in my throat. But it was good to eat. The
Speaker 1: armadillo and the hell the monkeys were absolutely gorgeous, they weren't.
Speaker 1: They were awful and they're all protected. But it was
Speaker 1: a way of sort of dealing with the situation. And
Speaker 1: the captors didn't know what to do with this. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you showed pleasantries, they couldn't deal with it. You
Speaker 1: show a negativity and they feed off it. It's quite weird.
Speaker 1: But if you did say that, they'd get, oh, i've
Speaker 1: got a sore throw I missed my granny, and they
Speaker 1: loved that. They fed off that and got very aggressive.
Speaker 1: It's quite bizarre human nature, certain human nature. So we
Speaker 1: had to just show that enthusiasm all the time and
Speaker 1: that they didn't know what to do with us.
Speaker 2: At first, the militants, like M sixteen, thought Tom was
Speaker 2: bluffing about all this plant stuff. They were convinced the
Speaker 2: men were trafficking drugs to North America or maybe they
Speaker 2: were Cia. But as time wore on, their minds began
Speaker 2: to change. Because as the duo followed the gorillas deeper
Speaker 2: into the jungle, Tom was getting distracted on sidiums pleurithallus,
Speaker 2: lumbo glossoms.
Speaker 1: The orchids were fantastic. After we were kidnapped, it took
Speaker 1: us right up to these isolated areas in Panama in particular,
Speaker 1: and I mean there were orchids just dripping from the trees.
Speaker 1: There were literally hundreds worthy of Granny's name. I mean,
Speaker 1: you could name it after all the dogs and cats,
Speaker 1: all the fish in the lake, all my friends I
Speaker 1: haven't known over the years, people in the pub down
Speaker 1: the road. Everyone could have had a new species of
Speaker 1: orchids and named after them. Absolutely, it was astonishing. I'm
Speaker 1: not an expert in orchids, but even I knew there
Speaker 1: weren't just new species that I was coming across. There
Speaker 1: were new genera. We saw quite literally hundreds of varieties,
Speaker 1: and my guess was that some were highly endemic to
Speaker 1: this area, the darry And Gap.
Speaker 2: Thinking that as time was up, Tom did something that
Speaker 2: technically is illegal. He began to pluck the orchids.
Speaker 1: During captivity, going from camp to camp with the orchids.
Speaker 1: I thought, there's no harm in that. It's aware of me,
Speaker 1: keeping my sanity.
Speaker 2: Really, he later wrote in his book The Cloud Garden,
Speaker 2: I was taking orchids from everywhere, from trees and from rocks.
Speaker 2: I carried them behind my ears and in my hair
Speaker 2: to get them to the camp. Eventually, Tom's orchid fever
Speaker 2: takes over. He had to explore this irresistible array of flora,
Speaker 2: so he asked the gorillas to come with him.
Speaker 1: I asked if we could go on these armed or
Speaker 1: kid patrols to our captors that untied as by them
Speaker 1: and were reasonably nice. They wanted to kill you, that
Speaker 1: talked to you and kill you, but they were nice
Speaker 1: to a decree, so they allowed us to gun these
Speaker 1: old orchid controls, bring back orchist to the cap and
Speaker 1: I started to make gardens. I started to make these
Speaker 1: orchid gardens, Bromeliad gardens. Was quite bonkers, and it was
Speaker 1: aware of me, completely distracting myself from from the thought
Speaker 1: of execution. The scariest time was three months into our captivity,
Speaker 1: during the sixteenth of the year two thousand, when they said,
Speaker 1: you've got five hours mate, before before we blow your
Speaker 1: heads off, and horribly talk to you beforehand. Then blow
Speaker 1: your heads off. Oh okay, And as he turned his back,
Speaker 1: he was just thirteen in this chat with a gun
Speaker 1: that was with rocket launcher attachment, about four foot taller
Speaker 1: than in.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's terrifying. How do you find solace when
Speaker 2: you're in captivity? You got endless time to kill and
Speaker 2: are a constant threat of being killed. But Tom was
Speaker 2: finding ways to both kerbis fears and fill the hours
Speaker 2: gardening and planning, and.
Speaker 1: Opened up my diary and started scribbling. I started to
Speaker 1: draw a mini map of what would turn into the
Speaker 1: world garden. Were just a way of distracting myself, ware
Speaker 1: of me trying to think of Granny and to try
Speaker 1: and show them who I was a gardener.
Speaker 2: Turns out the kid never returned to finish them off,
Speaker 2: and as time went on, Tom started thinking more and
Speaker 2: more about this world garden idea what.
Speaker 1: Turned out to be the next six months in captivity
Speaker 1: until Christmas, drawing and fantasizing about this garden that I
Speaker 1: could do in the Tuaca Old area back home. It
Speaker 1: literally saved my life, just distracting myself from these murderous thoughts.
Speaker 2: Far from home and far from his dream garden, Tom
Speaker 2: kept tending to his orchid plot and his captor's encampment
Speaker 2: until one day it was all gone.
Speaker 1: When they really became very murderous. They burned all the orchids,
Speaker 1: so I never had any orchids to bring back. Of course, Leek,
Speaker 1: I can't bring them any orchids back anyway, but they
Speaker 1: burned them, They stamped on them all in the end,
Speaker 1: and never brought one back.
Speaker 2: Tom the gardener was now without a garden. But then
Speaker 2: around Christmas time, after months in the jungle, one of
Speaker 2: the gorillas turned to Tom and Paul and began speaking
Speaker 2: in Spanish.
Speaker 1: And my Spanish was not brilliant, so it was very
Speaker 1: much trying to get everything, trying to desperately understand some
Speaker 1: us what they were saying, you know where we're gonna
Speaker 1: die or not, And they just turned around to Just
Speaker 1: and said, Happy Christmas. Get lost. If you come back,
Speaker 1: will horribly kill you. And if you bring me friends back,
Speaker 1: we'll kill them as well.
Speaker 3: Not everyone is conscious of how what they do affects
Speaker 3: the natural world and how much we've displaced. The house
Speaker 3: that I live in is in a very beautiful neighborhood.
Speaker 3: We've got wild open spaces and pastures. But I look
Speaker 3: out my window and I don't see any native plants
Speaker 3: in my environment. The land that I live on was
Speaker 3: once a sugar plantation, so all the native plants that
Speaker 3: were here were removed to plants. We've completely altered the
Speaker 3: landscape here in terms of the plants that are here.
Speaker 3: The only native plants that you can find are often
Speaker 3: in very remote areas, often on cliffs that are inaccessible.
Speaker 3: And I think this is true all over the world.
Speaker 3: True native plant communities are incredibly difficult to find, and
Speaker 3: all of them are threatened by climate change, deforestation, exploitation
Speaker 3: by humans.
Speaker 2: Tom Arenda pinpoints one of the great ironies of a
Speaker 2: place like Dari Gap, it's not suffering from these problems.
Speaker 2: It remains one of the most biodiverse, species rich places
Speaker 2: in the world. And it's not because it's a protected area.
Speaker 2: It's because people are too afraid to go there. In
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty study in Scientific Reports, researchers wrote that
Speaker 2: armed conflicts can create quote positive effects for biodiversity. Conflicts
Speaker 2: have disrupted illegal timber poaching in Nicaragua and harmful farming
Speaker 2: practices in Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, some peace agreements have been
Speaker 2: shown to hurt the environment. When FARK, the armed guerrilla
Speaker 2: group in Colombia, signed a peace agreement with the government
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen, a significant portion of Colombia's land finally
Speaker 2: became open to exploration. Now after that truce, the rate
Speaker 2: of deforestation increased forty four percent by some accounts. And
Speaker 2: that's the cruel reality Tom hart Dyke faced when he
Speaker 2: was a prisoner in the Darien Gap. All of those
Speaker 2: new orchids, all of that great biodiversity he observed, much
Speaker 2: of it new to science, was being unwittingly protected by
Speaker 2: a bunch of teenagers with guns. After being released, Tom
Speaker 2: and Paul plunged into the jungle, leaving their captors far
Speaker 2: behind them. They had gotten everything back, their passports and
Speaker 2: bank cards. The militants even gave them directions.
Speaker 1: Their directions were so rubbish. We got completely and utterly
Speaker 1: lost in the swamps and spent four days starting to
Speaker 1: really acquire trench foot that we ran out of food
Speaker 1: and we were just a jungle was killing us and
Speaker 1: we were sleeping on floating logs, barely floating. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were just soaked for days, and our feet it
Speaker 1: was trend trop Our feet were beginning to split and
Speaker 1: just began to decompose. I've got on my toes now
Speaker 1: and everything's fine, But any more of that and we
Speaker 1: would have had serious medical problems.
Speaker 2: That's when Paul realized they would have to go against
Speaker 2: every instinct and do what they felt impossible.
Speaker 1: So Paul turned around to me and said, we've got
Speaker 1: to go back for directions. We had to go back
Speaker 1: for a map. So back up the hill, this is
Speaker 1: honestly true. Back up the hill we went. We followed
Speaker 1: where we'd been. We'd had a machete still, and we'd
Speaker 1: marked the trees with the machete so we could tell
Speaker 1: where to go. We went to this radio mass, some
Speaker 1: sort of tower that our captors were to be captors
Speaker 1: for a few more minutes anyway, reguarding, and you could
Speaker 1: see them put their hands on their heads shake that
Speaker 1: dropped their guns and no, it's those two idiots from England.
Speaker 1: We can't get rid of them. They'd come back for directions.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was almost you can't make it up.
Speaker 1: So back up the hill we went and explained that
Speaker 1: it as our fault we got lost. It was their fault, really,
Speaker 1: but we blamed ourselves to not aggravate them. And they said, okay,
Speaker 1: you turn right instead of left, you idiots. All right,
Speaker 1: so we knew the mistake we'd made, and they gave
Speaker 1: us money. They paid us, our captors paid us to go.
Speaker 1: In the end, I mean, it was quite extraordinary. They
Speaker 1: re released us with better directions, and within forty eight
Speaker 1: hours I was back here in England via a speedboat,
Speaker 1: private jet, bulletproof cars and the ambassador's residence in the
Speaker 1: Colombian capital, Bogatar.
Speaker 2: When they arrived in Bogata, they were greeted by the
Speaker 2: British ambassador to Columbia and his wife, who presented them
Speaker 2: each with a box of Pherrero Rochet chocolates.
Speaker 1: The ambassador's wife is spoiling as the chocolates were amazing
Speaker 1: Me and Paul demolished the chocolates, thanked her very much,
Speaker 1: and she turned to us and said, you two are
Speaker 1: walking ghosts. Mate. When you're kidnapped, you either die, you're
Speaker 1: either ransomed off, or you have some sort of prisoner
Speaker 1: exchange of some description. You two have just walked straight
Speaker 1: out after ten months in captivity. That will never happen again.
Speaker 1: And I've been in this post for years and I've
Speaker 1: seen everything, and I can tell you in fifty years
Speaker 1: as a civil war, I've never seen that.
Speaker 2: Shortly after Tom decided to dedicate his life to building
Speaker 2: the World Garden, the idea that helped keep him going
Speaker 2: in the jungle in his own backyard.
Speaker 1: That experience was the embryonic start to it, but the
Speaker 1: enthusiasm it's got even stronger because you survived that experience.
Speaker 1: It's turned me even more towards the passion for life,
Speaker 1: which is mere shown through the world of brilliant plants
Speaker 1: and so on. And I think that Colombian experience, as
Speaker 1: the word galvanized, it really into even more stronger sense.
Speaker 1: I'm meant to do this. I'm meant to talk to
Speaker 1: you to broadcast the enthusiasm for plants I have and
Speaker 1: to generate interest in that field. It's almost like a mission.
Speaker 1: It's turned into all thanks to kid kids that were
Speaker 1: just in their teens beguns. I mean, the more you
Speaker 1: think about it, the more it's a very unlikely story,
Speaker 1: but it's absolutely true.
Speaker 2: It's a silver lining and if anything, a cautionary tale
Speaker 2: because our favorite plants aren't just located in some of
Speaker 2: the world's most dangerous places. They're also being picked and
Speaker 2: sold by some of the world's most dangerous people too.
Speaker 2: Coming up. If people are willing to pay high prices
Speaker 2: for these things, criminal networks wouln't want to supply that.
Speaker 1: So in this vacuum, institutional vacuum, that's where we believe
Speaker 1: that the Mafia ROAs.
Speaker 2: I'm Summer rain Oaks, join us again next time for
Speaker 2: Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of
Speaker 2: Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm Your Host Summer rain Oaks.
Speaker 2: Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer,
Speaker 2: and Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is
Speaker 2: by Savannah Hugily and Zoe Farrow. Original music is by
Speaker 2: Claire Campbell, sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Development
Speaker 2: was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Our show art
Speaker 2: is by Pam Peacock. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley,
Speaker 2: Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.