‘My mum was raised by monkeys – I’m not worried about snakes in my jungle kitchen’
When the world went into lockdown during the Covid panic of 2020, Vanessa Forero was in Colombia, visiting the mountain village of Minca in the north-east of the country. Back home, she composes music for the advertising industry and had just put in an offer on a flat in Brighton but, she explains via video call from South America, “because this is a very sacred mountain and the indigenous people at the top are very protected, there’s only one road into the village, and they closed it”.
It stayed shut for almost a year, during which time the flat in Brighton fell through, and Vanessa, feeling the country “flirting” with her, decided to invest some of her deposit locally. For about £20,000, she bought a hectare (two and a half acres) of land, further up the mountain, deeper into the jungle. She wasn’t planning to live there, exactly. “I thought, maybe I’ll just put a tiny little terrace on it, and I can put a tent on there and camp every so often.”
Three years later, she has created an idyllic wooden home in the former high cow pasture in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, home to toucans, hummingbirds, jaguars and anacondas. It’s the first escape featured in the new series of the long-running Channel 5 show Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, which captures the light-filled cabin and the surrounding tree-covered hills. “You feel so absolutely connected with nature here,” Vanessa says.
Vanessa has another connection with this part of the world. When she was growing up in Bradford, West Yorkshire, her mother told stories of her own childhood, in Colombia in the 1950s. Vanessa would hear snippets around the dinner table or when she and her mum were at the fruit and veg market and an exotic fruit triggered a sudden memory. Her mother Marina Chapman told how she had been kidnapped as a five-year-old and abandoned in the Colombian jungle. There, she said, she had survived by living alongside and copying a troop of monkeys – what they ate, where they drank, how they climbed trees. The monkeys accepted her and would clamber up on her shoulders to groom her. She claimed she had lived with them for five years, before allowing herself to be taken by hunters, thinking that they would rescue her. Instead, they sold her as a slave to a brothel keeper.
When Marina ran away from there after two years of awful mistreatment, she was taken in by foster parents and the course of her life changed. It wasn’t until many years later, though, that Forero realised that her mum’s story was so extraordinary that it could be a book. “It really came out when we sat and wrote it down as a project to share with the family,” she tells me. “I did a research trip to Colombia with her in 2007. And everything came out according to a timeline. And we were like, ‘Whoa, this is a really big story.’”
It was. Marina’s story became news around the world a decade ago when National Geographic made a documentary about her claims, which up to then had been greeted with scepticism. Yet scientists discovered compelling evidence to support her argument. A sincerely doubting primate expert asked her to identify the type of monkey she had lived with, and when she picked out the capuchin monkey, revealed that it was almost the only species in Colombia that might have approached a human and allowed her to get close to them.
Marina was able to identify edible forest fruits, and her memory of the monkeys spending time on the ground and using stones to crack nuts added veracity to her claim, as this use of tools by capuchins had only recently been discovered by academics. A test of her body’s unconscious response to visual images showed that she responded to capuchin monkeys similarly to her own family. Her bones also clearly showed a period of very poor nutrition between the age of six and nine.
One sophisticated word memory test suggested she was susceptible to false memories, but Vanessa is still frustrated that it was used on her. “Mum doesn’t really understand a lot of what people explain with words. I have to kind of translate for her, but they locked me out of the room, and she just said yes to basically everything and failed the test. It seemed a really mean thing to do.” Since then, Vanessa says, doctors have discovered that Marina has a number of rare jungle diseases dormant in her body.
However hard it is to believe that a young child could survive in a jungle, Marina’s story (her memoir, The Girl with No Name, was released in 2013) is not without precedent. There have been cases of children who have been raised by wolves and by dogs, and in recent years by other primates. Like many of these “feral children”, Marina had lost the ability to communicate through language, but she was able to learn to speak again. Some things appear to be lacking, Vanessa explains, such as the nuances of facial expression that are developed in those important years. “There’s about 300 of them, displaying anguish, shock, and other emotions; they did a test on Mum - she recognised about five or 10. She’s like, ‘happy’, ‘sad’. Very basic.”
Moving to England, Marina met Vanessa’s father, a Yorkshireman and a scientist, and they married and had two children – Vanessa, who’s now 39, and her elder sister, Joanna. Vanessa learned to play piano almost before she could speak, touring internationally with her church band as a teenager, before going on to make music for ads for Audi and others.
Vanessa is not in a relationship at present (she married a pastor’s son when she was 19, but they separated in their 30s) and says of her jungle project, “You always think that you’d want to do a project like this with someone or in a partnership. I think a lot of people might do that before they make a big move of buying land or building a house. But I just say, I don’t know if that’s gonna come for me. It would be nice. But why would I press pause on my life when this is happening right now?”
Her land is on a jaguar reserve. She hasn’t seen one of the magnificent big cats yet, she says, but when her dog Ginger died last year, she buried her at the top of her land, where it is wildest, and would go and sit there with a candle. “And I heard these sounds and thought, ‘That is way too big for a domestic cat.’ One night, I heard swishing like a kind of tail flick, and I just sensed, ‘I’ve got to go.’”
But Vanessa insists she’s not scared of living in the jungle. “I’ve had snakes in my kitchen and my bathroom, and I’ve slept with a tarantula under my bed.” She takes out her phone to show me a photo of the large tarantula she found recently on her bathroom wall. “In Britain, people move spiders with a glass and a piece of paper,” she laughs, “but you can’t do that here. I used a bucket and a chopping board, and I could feel it jumping inside the bucket.” She dashed up the hill and let the spider out.
The jungle has cured her of her arachnophobia, she says, although she confesses that she was recently bitten by a scorpion that had taken up residence in a work glove. “I shook it, but it was right inside the middle finger, and when I pulled my finger out there was the hook of a scorpion on my finger.” A workman squashed the arachnid’s stomach and rubbed its contents into the wound, saying it would help. “It was still numb for 24 hours but it didn’t hurt,” Vanessa says.
The jungle brings other perennial problems, Vanessa admits, such as parasite infections. Colombia is also a country that Fogle remembers from his time as an 18-year-old backpacker as “pretty edgy… that was a time of drug runners, cartels, kidnappings”. Drug barons, such as the late Pablo Escobar, exerted local and political control, while the interior was a dangerous place, home to Marxist guerrilla forces. The threat from both has receded in the past decade, although Vanessa notes that in some areas, the “narcos” still demand the “vacuna”, or vaccine – a monthly fee that is essentially a protection racket – but, she says, even this is waning, while anything that affects the tourist trade is heavily frowned upon by them.
Kidnapping has been on the rise, although after the return of Liverpool footballer Luis Diaz’s father by the EMC, a breakaway of the Farc revolutionaries who signed a peace deal in 2016, the guerrilla group announced that it would end kidnappings for ransom. “My mama was kidnapped, so I should probably be worried about it,” Vanessa says, “but I don’t really consider it or think about it. You know, if you look for anything, you’ll probably find it. In London, you’ll find a story of something else to be afraid of.”
Her fearlessness is something she got from her mother, she believes, and Marina got hers from surviving in the jungle day to day with capuchin monkeys. For Vanessa, who has running water, electricity and Wi-Fi, and continues to make money remotely by composing as well as exploring new possibilities as a singer-songwriter, life in Colombia is so beautiful, it can make her cry. “In the morning, I open up these doors...” – she shows me – “and all of this is glowing. I feel so grateful to be here.”
Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild starts on Channel 5 at 9pm on Jan 2 2024
