A Brit woman taken hostage by an indigenous group in Peru with her partner and son has described the horror of being surrounded by machete-wielding Amazonians with little water in sweltering conditions.
Around 120 people were detained by locals as part of a protest following constant oil spills in the Cuninico River, before being freed on Friday at 2.30pm local time.
Speaking to the Mirror from the boat, retired Charlotte Wiltshire, 54, said the situation had been “grim.”
She continued: “When you have got 120 people squashed into a very small amount of space you're getting tense because everybody's just getting fed up with the situation.”
Ms Wiltshire, from Cardigan, Wales said they were given 40 litres of water on Friday morning, “but that's 40 litres between 120 people, so it won’t last very long either".
Backpacking across South America for around four months with her son Luke Bunker, 28 and partner Ken Wiltshire, 52, Ms Wiltshire said they wanted to travel like locals and were taking sleeper boats with hammocks through the country.
The family were travelling from Manacora on the Pacific Coast in Peru, then making their way to Yurimaguas inland and hoped to take a series of boats from Yurimaguas to Belem in Brazil.
At their backpacker's hostel in Taracota they were linked up with a tour guide who took them to the start of the boat journey through the Amazon.
They boarded the boat on Wednesday lunchtime, then the boat departed later that evening.
They were apprehended by the locals at 10 am on Thursday.
She said: “We were coming into this village and we were suddenly surrounded by several boats with men with sharpened stakes and machetes. There was a lot of yelling.
“They somehow boarded the boat, they took the batteries from the boat. More and more people were arriving on the banks with machetes.
“They were shouting in Spanish, but I don’t speak the language so I didn't know what they were saying. A local on the boat said they were making a speech about what's happening with pollution and lack of infrastructure and the government.”
Community members told local media that they would hold the tourists until a solution was reached over the spill of 2,500 tons of crude oil, but it is unknown why they decided to eventually release the hostages.
The detained tourists were citizens from the United States, Spain, France, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and include two pregnant women, a young baby and a diabetic, Ms Wiltshire told the Mirror.
She said they were ranging from a one-year-old baby to a 70-odd-year-old.
“It's very hot, we have no power, no way of charging phones”, Ms Wiltshire said on Friday.
She continued: “We've got the river water being used to pump out the toilets, but then of course, once the toilets are pumped out the water then gets pumped straight back in for us to wash and so you can imagine what that is like.”
The family are very experienced travellers, having spent nine months in Southeast Asia on a sabbatical, but Ms Wiltshire said: “I have never been in a situation like this before.”
She continued: “Being hysterical won’t help anyone, I have become a temporary godmother to the baby on the boat and we are trying to stay calm.”
Community members had told local media they would hold the tourists for between six and eight days until a solution is reached over the spill of 2,500 tons of crude oil.
Watson Trujillo, the leader of the Cuninico community, told Radio Programas del Perú (RPP Radio): "[We want] to call the government's attention with this action"
Trujillo said his group had taken the "radical measure" in an effort to put pressure on the government to send a delegation to assess the environmental damage.
The Foreign Office confirmed the hostages had been released.
