Juliane was under the canopy. The searchers were above it. They never found each other from the air.
## Following the Water
Her father had told her: if you are ever lost in the forest, find a small stream and follow it downstream. Small streams flow into larger streams. Larger streams flow into rivers. Rivers flow toward people.
She found a small stream and began following it.
The details of the eleven days that followed are known primarily through her own account, given in her memoir, in interviews, and in the Werner Herzog documentary. As with any account of a traumatic and disorienting experience, the specific chronology is not precise, and Koepcke has herself noted that memory and exhaustion and injury blur the timeline. What follows is drawn from her attributed testimony and not reconstructed as objective fact.
The walking was painful. The knee injury made each step a negotiation. The forest floor was not flat terrain — it was roots and mud and stream crossings and vegetation that required constant navigation. She was moving through water much of the time, wading in the creek rather than along its banks, which had two advantages: the water was easier to walk through than the dense vegetation on either side, and moving through water rather than on land reduced the exposure to insect bites.
Her dress provided almost no protection against the insects. By the accounts she has given, the insect bites accumulated across the days until she was covered in them, swollen and inflamed.