[Image: Flickr]
A Brazilian woman is trapped inside an active volcano in Indonesia after plunging more than 1,600 feet—that’s around 487 metres inside the volcano – when her hiking guide allegedly ditched her mid-trek.
Juliana Marins, 26, was trekking Mount Rinjani, the towering Lombok volcano that’s as beautiful as it is brutal, when things took a nightmarish turn. According to her sister Marianna, who spoke to Brazilian TV station Fantástico, Juliana was “abandoned” by her guide after asking to stop for a rest.
“She didn’t know where to go,” Marianna said. “She didn’t know what to do. When the guide came back because he saw that she was taking too long, he saw that she had fallen down there.”
“Down there,” in this case, means wedged on a rock ledge more than 1,600 feet into the crater – basically halfway to the Earth’s core.
Drone footage captured by Gunung Rinjani National Park shows Marins lying still on the ledge, sparking fears she may not have survived the fall. But then came a sliver of hope: rescuers later heard her screaming for help, the BBC reported.
Still, three days in, no one has managed to reach her. The rescue operation has been a slow, fog-choked slog. Helicopters are out of the question, and rescue teams have been forced to retreat multiple times because of the dangerous conditions.
“For safety, the rescue team was pulled back to a safe position,” park officials explained—though that didn’t go down well with Marins’ family, who are furious at the pace of the mission.
“A whole day and they advanced only 250 meters below, there were 350 meters left to reach Juliana, and they retreated,” the family fumed on Instagram. “We need help, we need the rescue to reach Juliana urgently!”
On Monday, the family brought in two experienced local mountaineers with the kind of gear that says, “Yes, we actually do this for real.”
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Marins, a publicist from Niterói near Rio de Janeiro, had been backpacking through Southeast Asia and chronicling her travels online, from beachside bliss in the Philippines to jungle hikes in Vietnam. Her family says they only discovered she was missing thanks to social media. A friend later posted a tearful video, claiming Indonesian officials have been inconsistent with updates.
“We’re living in a nightmare here,” the friend said.
As the search effort inches forward, the Brazilian embassy in Jakarta is reportedly trying to coordinate communications between the family and the tour operator. But they’ve offered no public statement, and time is running out.
[Source: Independent]
