Cambodia’s “jungle woman,” whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has fled back to the jungle, her father and the local police said on Friday.
Rochom P’ngieng, now 29, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province, around 600 kilometres northeast of the capital, Phnom Penh. In early 2007 the woman was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer. She was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging on the ground for pieces of dried rice.
“She must have fled back to the forest on Tuesday evening while she was going to take a bath,” Sal Lou, the man who says he is her father, said by telephone. “I and my son are looking for her in the middle forest now,” he said, adding that he believed “forest spirits” guided her back to the dense jungle. Local police chief Ma Vichet said the authorities had also begun a search but had found no sign of the woman.
“We also believe that she fled back to the jungle,” Ma Vichet said. Immediately after being taken from the jungle in 2007, Rochom P’ngieng could not utter a word of any intelligible language, instead making what her father calls “animal noises.” Cambodians described her as “jungle woman” and “half-animal girl” and since rejoining society she has battled bouts of illness after refusing food.
In December she began speaking normally, instead of making animal-type noises, and helping out around the house, according to her father. The jungles of Ratanakkiri — some of Cambodia’s wildest and most isolated — are known to have hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past. In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they had supported. Rochom P’ngieng has previously tried to flee back into the jungle but was stopped by her family.