During an excursion to the Canyon of the Lost in Peru, Andressa Alexandre, 27, and Paulo Ricardo da Cruz, 32lived moments of great anguish and despair.
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The couple was part of a group of tourists who were assaulted and left on foot in the middle of the desertwith no cell phone signal and no transportation. To find help, their only option was to walk through the arid Peruvian landscape, covering a total of 25 kilometers.
“You’re walking through a place that has nothing, just straight sand, and you have no idea how far you need to walk to get to somewhere with civilization. It’s very frustrating, it makes you start thinking a lot. It was even curious, because sometimes people started to hallucinate, seeing things that weren’t there, that makes a movie,” Andressa recalled about the distressing experience.
This incident occurred in May and gained notoriety last Monday, July 8, when the couple, residents of Cascavel, western Paraná, shared their story through a video on social media. Andressa explained that, in the absence of reference points in the desert, orientation was crucial to approach the road and increase the chances of finding help.
The assault and the walk
The couple said they booked the tour with a Peruvian travel agency and traveled to the canyon with a group of about 24 people. When they finished the tour and headed to the place where the vans were waiting for them, they found a scene of chaos.
“There were no longer two vans, there was only one. There was a little girl lying on the ground, her foot half bloodied and crying, another girl who was with her was also crying and the two drivers seemed scared,” Paulo recalled.
As the group explored the canyon, Armed robbers attacked the vehicles, tied up the drivers and stole everything they found.Paulo mentioned that a tourist tried to resist the theft of her passport and was almost shot. The thieves escaped in one of the vans, running over a person in the process, and took the battery of the second vehicle to avoid being pursued.
After escaping from the attackers and providing first aid to the injured tourist, the group faced a difficult decision: stay in the desert and risk spending the night there, or walk to find help.
“That saga started, right? We had to decide, because the options were: either we were going to stay there forever, until one day another agency, a resident or something like that appeared, risking sleeping in the desert, or we went looking for help until we got it,” Andressa said.
The group splits up
Finally, the group decided to split up; One part walked in search of a cell phone signal while the other headed towards the road“Whoever managed to find help helped others first,” said Andressa. Paulo mentioned that the fear that the thieves would return or that night would fall and temperatures would drop was constant.
After five hours of exhausting walking and just before dusk, they spotted a car. Initially afraid that it might be the attackers, they picked up stones to defend themselves. However, the vehicle approached and turned out to be people sent to help them.
“It was a situation like: ‘Are they friends or are they enemies?’, because that car only showed up in five hours. Everyone started collecting stones like Neanderthals. Then there were three old men who said they were warned by the guide and I went to find whoever needed it the most,” Paulo recalled.
Back in civilization, Paulo and Andressa went to the local police station to file a complaint. Although they initially encountered resistance from the authorities, they finally managed to formalize the registration after five hours of insistence. “A trip that we were supposed to return from at four in the afternoon, we returned at three in the morning,” Andressa said.
Despite the theft…
Despite the incident, the couple said their stay in Peru was positive and recommended visiting the country, but with caution.
“This experience does not sum up the trip. It was like 20 days [de viaje] And it happened in one afternoon. We experienced some amazing things in Peru, we made friends there. Peruvians are attentive, kind, very helpful, it felt really good there,” Andressa emphasized.
Mariah Colombo / G1 O Globo (GDA)
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*This content was rewritten with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on information from O Globo, and was reviewed by a journalist and an editor.
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