An Aussie woman has turned into an icon after surviving being stranded in a forest alone for an extended period of time off only lollies and wine.
Lillian Ip from Cheltenham went missing on April 30 when she was travelling to Dartmouth Dam in Victoria. On the way to the dam, she was driving along a forest road when her car got held up in a puddle of mud and would not move. Uh oh.
To make the road trip from hell even worse, she had no phone reception, health conditions that meant she couldn't walk long distances, and all attempts to get her car moving failed. So, she stayed with her car.
“I tried lots of ways to get the car unstuck,” she told the Herald Sun. “I tried to walk down the hill but it was too far.”
“I was worried I would end up getting lost.”
All she had to drink and eat was ol' reliable road trip lollies and a bottle of wine bought as a gift for her mum (sorry mum!).
Lillian, who's allergic to alcohol, thought her chances of survival were slim.
“I thought I was going to die,” the 48-year-old confessed. “I didn’t know how they were going to find me.”
As it turns out, her decision to not travel away from her vehicle is probably what saved her. A Victoria Police helicopter spotted her and her car during a search sweep.
“She used great common sense to stay with her car and not wander off into bushland,” Martin Torpey, the Wodonga Police Station Sergeant, told 9News. That “assisted in police being able to find her.”
“After being lost in the bush for five days, she was extremely relieved and grateful to see us and we were just as happy to see her.”
Lillian is in the hospital as she is suffering from dehydration but is otherwise okay. Hopefully, she will come out nice and healthy with a heck of a story to tell!
