To this day, Ricky Megee does not know how he ended up in the desert. He only remembers picking up a hitchhiker along the road. According to the Australian, the young man slipped something into his water while Ricky wasn’t looking. After that, everything went hazy… Ricky came to without his car, surrounded by nothing but sand.
Only the merciless sun and not a drop of water
It’s worth noting that winter in Australia – is like a sweltering Asian summer. And the desert would greet Ricky Megee, as one might expect, harshly and brutally. The young Australian had involuntarily thrown down a challenge to it. The scorching sun overhead, venomous insects, rattlesnakes and other serpents. Every step the young man took was an enormous risk. He would later recount: he kept moving forward, more on instinct than consciously. Yet, to his own surprise, Megee even managed to build a hut out of stones, where he slept and took shelter at night. Venturing outside was dangerous. A pack of bloodthirsty dingoes howled right at the entrance, making no secret of their intentions.
It seemed Ricky Megee had doomed himself to a long, agonizing death from thirst and hunger. All the more so since there was no point hoping for help from the outside world. None of the Australian’s relatives or friends had any real idea where he had wandered off to this time. Alas, Ricky had an eccentric streak and sometimes did unpredictable things.
Hunger and thirst drove him mad
At first, he quenched his thirst with – pardon us – his own urine. But this could not go on for long. And by some miracle, after a week Megee managed to make his way to a lake. Now he was no longer threatened by dehydration, which leads to death faster than hunger. Unexpectedly, food appeared that helped him keep up his strength. «I ate raw leeches. I ate grasshoppers raw too. The only things I had to cook were frogs».
By the end of the tenth week of his ill-fated ordeal, Ricky Megee had dried out like a mummy. And fate would once again grant him a saving chance, taking pity on the poor man. Quite by accident, Ricky stumbled onto a road, where he was spotted by a passing farmer, Mark Clifford, driving by. Megee’s appearance was, to put it mildly, horrifying. Filthy, unkempt, and so emaciated that his ribs were sticking out, he badly frightened his rescuer.
Rescue and recovery
The «conqueror» of the Australian desert spent only six days in the hospital. The doctors pronounced him healthy and sent Ricky home. For a time, he was even considered something of a hero in his native Queensland. Soon Ricky Megee would write a book in which he described how he fought for his life and saved himself from certain death.
By the way
In 1981, a trainee and future geologist, Natalya Kosorukova, wandered through impassable taiga for 36 days. And she survived. It’s worth saying that the young woman showed a foolish stubbornness. Natalya hid under pine trees from the search helicopters. She so badly wanted to prove to herself that she could reach people on her own. Kosorukova was found about a hundred kilometers from the tent camp.
Born under a lucky star: an 8-year-old boy fell into a 100-meter volcanic crater and survived
