How the Laos cave survivors found the courage to rescue themselves

By Will Ripley, Kocha Olarn, Rebecca Wright, Isaac Yee and Laura Sharman, CNN

Xaisomboun province, Laos (CNN) — Hungry and weak, the Laos cave survivors huddled together in damp darkness for 11 days, clinging to hope as a wall of water blocked their way out.

When they noticed the water finally start to recede, they somehow found the strength to attempt a daring escape, completely unaided –– shocking the rescue team above ground when they appeared at the cave entrance on Saturday.

Their courage was born from fear, one of the survivors told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Through narrow, treacherous tunnels, some waterlogged and cold enough for wetsuits, others so tight oxygen was scarce, the men navigated 260 meters (approximately 850 feet), from the chamber they’d been trapped in to the cave’s mouth, a distance equivalent to the height of a 78-story building.

One member of their group, who had entered the cave searching for gold, was guided to safety by a multinational team of cave experts using diving equipment a day earlier. The other four were left to wait for when conditions were safe enough.

“I was afraid because we were there alone,” Mee Singfamalai, a 23-year-old barber, told CNN from Long Tieng Hospital, where he is recovering.

“We had been there for a long time and the water had dried up. It was too cold inside, so we decided to crawl our way out,” Mee said.

The water was at least a meter deep in sections of the cave.

“Sometimes we had to dive, sometimes we had to crawl. We crawled slowly. The passage was just about the size of a person.”

The rescuers had first reached the group of five on Wednesday, an entire week after they had entered the cave and become trapped when heavy rain came down over the jungle outside, during the humid Laotian summer.

Exhausted and surviving only on water, they slept as much as they could, and they prayed that salvation would come.

“We slept hugging each other. Four or five of us,” he said. “It helped a lot. We didn’t have any blankets.”

And they held onto the hope of being reunited with loved ones to distract themselves from their hunger.

“I always believed I would survive. I had to make it back out to see my sisters and my mother,” Mee said. “When we stepped outside and saw people cheering for us, it felt like I had been given a new life. It was overwhelming. I suddenly had hope.”

This torturous ordeal marked Mee’s first time entering this cave, located in the foothills of a mining project near the village of Long Tieng, hours away from the nearest cities and on muddy roads that have been lashed by the rainy season.

An informal mining economy has expanded across parts of Laos in recent years, particularly in remote limestone and river basin regions where formal livelihoods are scarce and enforcement is limited.

Having found gold elsewhere once before, Mee and his friends decided to try their luck in the cave in the hope of earning some money.

“We’re villagers. We go into the mountains to make a living. We heard there was gold, so we went in looking for it. Then the cave flooded and we couldn’t get back out.”

Mee said he was thankful for “everyone who helped (him) survive.”

A massive rescue effort had been mounted to save the men, involving divers from all over the world, large pumps to drain water from the cave and heavy machinery to clear makeshift roads to the remote location.

Asked if he would venture into the cave again, Mee said: “Never.”

“You would have to send me to death if you want to force me in,” he added.

None of the villagers had prior diving experience, yet were faced with the hellish reality of getting out of a flooded, subterranean labyrinth.

Lam, another survivor who walked out to safety, said that being freed from the cave was “like being given a second chance at life.”

“Poverty is terrifying. That’s why we fought this hard to survive and keep going,” he said in a social media post.

After emerging from the cave, the first thing Mee ate was congee, a savory Asian rice porridge. He is still only able to eat soft food as he recovers in hospital.

Two other men from the group were injured and were suffering pain and inflammation on their right side, Mee said, adding that their condition has improved with medication.

Rescue operations continue

Back at the mine site, the rescue mission remains incomplete.

Two villagers, who are believed to have entered the cave system before the five rescued men, are still missing, with their families holding a vigil at the rescue base.

Mee’s group did not cross paths with the men, and he believes they entered via a different part of the cave.

The rescue diving team – some of whom brought invaluable experience from a dramatic cave rescue in neighboring Thailand in 2018 – re-entered the cave on Sunday on a mission to search deeper in the cave network for the pair.

A map from the survivors has provided crucial information about the cave layout, revealing another chamber which could be where the pair sought refuge.

“From what we know, there is a significant air pocket that is considerably further on, another 100 meters or so, through fairly lethal passage,” Australian diver Josh Richards told CNN.

That “even tighter and more unpleasant” passage is beyond where divers have traversed so far and is the “only place they could still be,” said Richards.

The operation was put back on hold because of rising water levels, caused by heavy rain, which endangered the team’s safety.

However, crucial new information has now been uncovered.

Rescuers have been exploring the jungle covering the mountainside to see if they can find other entrances into the cave, scanning the terrain and listening for changes in sound while tapping on rocks surrounding the complex.

This led to the discovery of a vertical shaft that drops down around 100 meters. The rescue teams are hopeful that it could connect to the chamber where the two missing men might be located and would allow the divers to avoid using perilous flooded roots to access that area.

Rescuers are prioritizing water management and exploring the vertical shaft, Thai diver Kengkard Bongkawong said Monday.

This involves draining more floodwater and blocking its source, along with building more water retention ponds to shield the cave system from the full impact of recent downpours.

“The team has already descended approximately 40 to 50 meters into the shaft where a large void, or chamber, can be seen clearly below,” Kengkard told CNN.

Richards called Sunday “a big day” and the shaft an “exciting” development, offering a new way into the cave that might circumvent the highly dangerous diving through flooded passages.

“The current entrance is terrifying, especially with all this water at the moment. But hopefully we’ve found something that might find a different way to get to these guys,” he said in video.

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CNN’s Angie Puranasamriddhi, June Jeong and Ally Barnard contributed to this report.