[Serious] Redditors who have been lost in the wilderness, stuck somewhere deserted, lost at sea, what's your story?

Fucking score, have I got a story for all you! The time I drove a motorbike through a tropical swamp come forest. At night. By moonlight. With a broken leg.

Let's set the scene; it's an island in the Philippines. Now you're probably imagining old growth forests and jungle, but the wilderness on this island was mostly palm forests and swampland. Probably tropical savannah if one was pressed for a classification.

As you will find on most Visayan islands, there was a beachy resort area with a few tourist lodgings of varying quality. Catering to the tourists at said establishments were rental places renting out vehicles of even more varying quality. I, being young and therefore both poor and foolhardy, rented the cheapest Chinese made dirtbike exant in the town. I used said bike lightly for a day around the beach and in unwitting preparation for my great adventure the following day, a component in the rear broke and had to be replaced at the shop.

Now you see, I'd seen some maps and there was a second town (Town B) with a beach several hours distance away by provincial highway. The highway itself took a large detour around an area of forest, skirting the coast and keeping as far away from the area as it is possible without physically propelling yourself into the ocean.

However, there was a map sneakily hidden in the darkest corner of a local restaurant that told a different story. The map was faded, as the mining or plantation venture it was produced for had long since folded, but behind the brown tinge and 60s typography was the unmistakable dotted line of a trail cutting from one curve of the highway to another and eliminating half the distance.

So the next morning I got up bright and early to drive to Town B, packing some beach gear and making emphatically sure not to pack something totally unnecessary like a torch. I trundle along the highway for a little while, being passed at break neck speed by trucks and jeepneys belching black smoke, until I hit my turn off. The initial part of the secondary road was cement (good sign) and I followed it through some villages. Rice paddies gave way to more and more palm trees and the road itself became gravel. With every passing mile the houses became scarcer, the palm trees became denser and the road became wetter, more rutted and more orange with clay. Roughly an hour passed between the final house I saw on one side and the first one I saw on the other. The road itself was literally a walking track in width for a good 45 of those minutes, all mud and rock with deep drainage marks criss crossing the surface and puddles elsewhere. One pool was almost an engine killer in depth and length and required a lot of coaxing to get the bike to not suffocate. I was absolutely filthy. My wrists and biceps were aching. My teeth were almost rattled out of my gums. But I'd made good time and it was not even noon when I reached Town B.

Going from A to B had been a complete success, so as you could imagine I strutted around the beach all afternoon with the smuggest expression humanly possible.

Anyway, during the afternoon I decided I could backtrack through the same route because I'd done it once and if you do something once nothing bad can ever happen in any of the subsequent times because you know everything there is to know.

By the time I reached the last house on the side of Town B it was dusk. Logically I sped up, because the secret to avoiding the dangers of reduced visibility is to outrun it. Now the back of the bike was bouncing around like wild, but I was making good time. That was until the part that was fixed the previous day gave way again.

Of course that wasn't immediately clear at the time. What it felt like was the bike making a hard right into the foliage, while I clung on with one hand. Until the side of the bike went THUNK into a tree and THUNKED me off into the mire. I went flying one way, landing on my back, and the bike went bouncing another, landing quite miraculously on the road, or however you'd describe it.

I don't know if you're meant to pass out after that kind of thing, because my body did the opposite and I basically flung myself on the bike to get it upright. Unfortunately adrenaline can only do so much and I soon felt this ridiculously intense throbbing rising from my right leg. My kneecap took the full force of the tree trunk and basically all the skin was hanging off. Bone and muscle was not visible, but a lump of skin about the size of my palm was hanging down and the kneecap itself was visibly strange (later learned it was fractured in several places).

Amazingly the bike motor was still running and, although basically all the brake pedal and protrusions on the right side were bent up against the bike and every piece of bodywork was hanging off, the only fundamental problem with the bike was the broken rear axle. In a stroke of luck that could only have come from a divine power, the axle rod that had been taken out of the bike the previous day was still in with the tool set provided in the storage. I know it sounds contrived, but rather than fix the issue the owner had replaced one axle rod with an even older one

/r/AskReddit Thread