WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT: A Cambodian farmer’s attempt to collect some organic fertiliser for his crops resulted in a harrowing four-day ordeal in a cold, pitch-black cave
A Cambodian farmer found himself “wishing for death” after being trapped in a pitch-black cave for four days – with one terrifying picture capturing his ordeal.
While most UK farmers tend to use industrially-reduced fertilisers, in many other parts of the world, traditional solutions, such as bat poo are still used.
One farmer from Cambodia’s north-western Battambang province, named Sum Bora, knew from experience that certain inaccessible caves in Chakrai Mountain had rich deposits of the foul-smelling fertiliser.
Podcaster Mr Ballen explained: “Other people in the area that went out harvesting bat guano wouldn’t go into this cave, and the reason for that is the cave was really really narrow and tight and frankly dangerous.”
However Sum, who was a particularly slim 28-year-old, knew he could slip into spaces that were too narrow for many of his neighbours so happily set off in August 2019.
By the dim light of his torch, Sum could see the walls of the cave up ahead “moving,” a sure sign that the narrow cavern was home to a huge colony of bats – and that meant there would be plenty of guano to harvest.
But disaster struck when he stepped over a tiny six inch-wide crevice. He had accidentally dropped his torch below and, in a bid to retrieve it, ended up tumbling down and becoming traped.
Sum was something of an expert at collecting guano, and would often be gone for days at a time in search of the richest deposits, so his family were not immediately concerned when he failed to return home that evening.
But what they didn’t know was that, in an effort to retrieve his lost torch, Sum had inadvertently rolled into the narrow crevice, and became wedged with no way of extracting himself. As hours turned into days, Sum began to lose hope.
Completely alone, and with no way of calling for help, he began to fear that he would starve to death in that cave. “He was totally wedged,” Mr Ballen said. “No food, no water he was going to die and he knew it.”
Sum later told the Khmer Times newspaper. “I had lost hope of staying alive and if I had a knife with me I’d have committed suicide.”
But, after having heard no word from him for three days, Sum’s family had become worried. One of his guano-hunting buddies, another small-framed Cambodian farmer, knew that Sum had been talking about hiking up to Chakrai Mountain, and decided that was where to start the search.
As Sum’s brother made his way into the narrow space he heard a faint cry, and shouted back “Is that you, Sum?” He heard his brother weakly calling back, but couldn’t work out where the sound was coming from.
It was only as he, himself, crawled over that narrow crevasse that he spotted Sum, tightly wedged in the crack and hanging over a drop many hundreds of feet deep.
Sum’s brother was unable to reach him on his own, and it took a 10-hour operation involving around 200 rescuers before the stricken guano-hunter could be freed.
Sum made a full recovery from his ordeal, but his days of solo guano harvesting are over.
