A British tourist who became hopelessly lost in the Australian bush was saved after he scrawled a desperate plea for help in the sand. Geoff Keys, 63, of Dartford, Kent, became lost in the Jardine national park in north Queensland after making “one of the stupidest decisions ever” to try to take a short-cut through the bush back to his camp.
He tried to retrace his steps, but Keys, who had left for a trip along Canal Creek to Eliot Falls wearing a hat, swimming trunks, shorts and a T-shirt, and in his bare feet, ended up more than 7 miles from camp. After a long swim from his camp and with no sign of Eliot Falls in sight, Keys admits that his big mistake was in trying to find a new route back.
Keys said in a blog post: “And here is where I made one of the stupidest decisions ever. Instead of turning round and swimming back upstream, I decided to take to the bush and cut across to the track. It was nearly dark. I had no shoes. What was I thinking of?
“Well, I was convinced the track was nearby, and walking back would have been easier than swimming. So I took a bearing off the setting sun and the rising moon and headed north, back the way I’d come.”
He felt confident that this would point him in the direction to walk back to the camp, but he was wrong. Keys found another stream and wrongly believed it would lead him back. He said: “It took me about two hours to realise it wasn’t the same creek. I kept swimming – it seemed the sensible thing to do.”
At 2am, he sat down and waited for dawn to come. His friends had reported him missing and the distant sound of helicopters overheard was a sign that he might be rescued. Keys wrote an SOS message – ”HELP 2807”, along with an arrow pointing downstream towards his location – in the sand, in the hope that a helicopter might spot it.
He said: “It seemed a good idea to help myself as much as possible, so I got out of the water, found a stick and wrote a message in the sand, just in case the helicopter came down that way. Help, today’s date and my direction of travel. I thought this would be enough to get any helicopter that saw it looking in the right place.”
He became increasingly tired as he looked for the path back. He tried to work his way through the undergrowth and waded his way downstream as his increasingly battered feet started to become more uncomfortable. He did not have any food with him.
It was as Keys rested in the sun after an hour-long swim that he heard a helicopter coming down the river. He successfully caught its attention by waving his hat and jumping up and down. He was eventually winched to safety in another, bigger helicopter that was called out to deal with the rough terrain.
Keys, who was then checked over in hospital, told the Mirror: “I feel stupid but lucky. I’m sorry about the worry caused to friends and family.”
Keys, who is separated with three grown-up children, now plans to travel to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the US.