I have always been afraid to travel by plane, countless plane crashes that I have read and seen on the internet fill me with fear and had always taken away my desire to travel.
But one day I got a message from some friends who are in Italy, where they invited my wife and I to travel to Italy and stay and live there, for us it was a great joy, since we were expecting our baby and we wanted to give him a better life than he could have here in Venezuela.
So we were happy and began to pack our bags to start our trip, but when we were told that it would be a flight with stopovers in several countries, we were not very convinced by the idea, but as you can't look a gift horse in the mouth, we decided to go.
The plane would leave from Venezuela, but it would have a stopover in Brazil, then from there it would make another stopover in Spain to finally arrive in Italy. I did not have a good feeling about going through the immense Amazon jungle because at a certain point that connects Venezuela and Brazil, thousands of airplanes had been lost and were never traced again due to bad weather or magnetic phenomena that altered the instruments of the airplanes and caused accidents.
But since the weather in that area was perfect and the technology in airplanes has advanced a lot and our plane that would take us to Brazil is the latest technology, we felt very safe. So we left our house and traveled to the airport of Maiquetia, we took our plane of the airline Aerosucre Airlines and waited for everyone to board, with nerves on edge, but safe.
The trip passed with total normality, but arriving to the tepuys the plane began to fail showing failed readings or the radar was not working the same as the radio, and when we were about to finish the plane landed forcibly almost crashed because the engines failed, many people died, but my wife and I were very badly injured but alive.
But we were in the middle of nowhere, the nearest towns were more than 100 kilometers away and as we were badly wounded we could not walk and as my wife was pregnant I did not want to leave her alone in the middle of the dark and terrifying jungle.
When night fell, we saw that at a distance of about 20 meters an old man was passing by with a basket of leaves, I was surprised because I thought we were in the middle of nowhere and without any human being nearby. So I shouted for help and the old man approached us. This old man did not speak Spanish very well, but as he saw us badly wounded and hungry he prepared us a meal and with some plants he tried to heal our wounds.
When we had finished eating, the old man left us a clay jar with a tea that smelled very tasty with notes of chamomile and green tea with honey, but it was bright purple, he said the words "Sacred Tea " then told us a brief story of greedy men who sought the fountain of youth, destroyed villages and deforested entire forests to find this source of youth and eternal vigor.
But this fountain of youth was not water or some magic potion, but it was the tea of some plant leaves that at first glance did not seem important but when combined in boiling water resulted in one of the most important drinks in the history of the Indians, as this way they remained healthy and could extend their years of life.
So after this brief story and leaving us a jar of this tea, he left and disappeared into the fog of the jungle. We thanked him, but as we were unsure whether or not to drink this strange looking tea, we decided to do so because we were very tired, and when we drank it we fell fast asleep.
The next day we saw an aircraft flying over the area looking for survivors so I don't know how we did it, but we started to run very hard and we managed to reach this helicopter when it landed 5 kilometers from where we were, they rescued us, but they looked at us with strange eyes, as there were still many people behind this miraculous fountain of youth and it felt like we were still in danger.
