A 10-year-old boy from Yunnan province, who fled his home in Zhidu village of Xuanwei city and survived for 24 days on a diet of berries, fish and barbecued snake, has been returned safely to his family.
Like a young Christopher McCandless from Into The Wild, the kid left home with no money and few possessions, relying on knowledge and tenacity alone to survive in China's rural terrain. His destination: Chongqing.
The boy, identified in one report as Miao, was determined to put a great distance between him and his parents after being beaten by his father, reported Yunnan.cn. He left home on June 29 and began the 640 kilometer journey to Chongqing. In the 24 days that followed, Miao covered a distance of almost 100 kilometers.
Miao spent his first night “on a pile of wet leaves" and kept journeying on in the rain the next day, which led to him catching a fever. But with a brew comprised of boiled water and wild herbs, a trick he reportedly learned from the elders in his home village, Miao successfully cured the fever.
With a metal dish and a lighter found on the road, Miao was able to assemble a makeshift stove to make the brew. On a later occasion during his journey, his knowledge of herbs also help cured diarrhea from consuming too many peaches picked from a farmer's orchard.
After a difficult start, Miao’s luck turned around when he caught and barbecued a snake for a meal on the road.
“I was so hungry, but it was quite yummy,” he told police.
Passing many a river on his way, Miao successfully caught and cooked three fish using only a plastic water bottle.
But Miao’s craftiness didn’t stop at finding food. He collected and sold plastic bottles, using his first RMB8 to buy a popsicle and some steamed buns.
After finding a cell phone, which he sold for RMB2, and scoring another RMB30 off the ground, Miao purchased some more food along with a pen and notebook.
Over the weeks, he was offered assistance from a few strangers, but respectfully declined.
But even on the most trying of days, Miao’s ethics never wavered, as he says that he “would never steal or rob.”
After weeks of sleeping in hay barns, and in one case an abandoned truck, Miao was picked up by police in Zhaotong, Yunnan, on July 23.
He recounted his experience to the officers, who then took Miao back to the station, fed him and contacted his father to pick him up.
Miao assured his parents that he would not run away again, and the father has sworn that he will no longer beat his son, a happier ending than that of the late Christopher McCandless.
Several years ago, another runaway teen in Zhejiang left a note for his parents in Morse code, insisting they decrypt it to find him. When the parents finally decoded it, they learned their son had run away because he felt pressured by school work and needed a few days' 'rest.'
[Images via Yunnan.cn]
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