Annette Herfkens and her fiance, Willem van der Pas, had been together for 13 years when he booked them on to a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast. After six months of working in different countries, it was meant to be a romantic break. Van der Pas was a banker, Herfkens a trader. The plane was tiny, just 25 passengers and six crew. Being claustrophobic, Herfkens initially refused to board. To placate her, Van der Pas – “Pasje” as he was to her – fibbed that it was only a 20-minute flight. But 40 minutes had gone by when the plane dropped sharply. Van der Pas looked at her. “This I don’t like,” he said nervously. The plane dropped again. He grabbed her hand – and everything went black.

When Herfkens came to, the sounds of the Vietnamese jungle were coming through a jagged hole in the fuselage. The plane had crashed into a mountain ridge. A stranger lay dead upon her. Pasje, a little way off, lay back in his seat, also dead, a smile upon his lips.

“That’s where you have fight or flight,” says Herfkens. “I definitely chose flight.”

The next thing she knew, she was outside in the jungle. She still doesn’t know exactly how she escaped the plane, remembering the experience mostly in pictures, an instinctive sensory edit – she has worked hard to forget the smells.

She sounds matter-of-fact, but she has had time to become analytical about her behaviour: the crash happened 30 years ago, in November 1992. “That’s probably self-protection,” she says now. She is speaking on a video call from her holiday home in the Netherlands (she is Dutch, but usually lives in New York). “It must have been excruciating pain to get out of there.” First there was “the emotional pain of seeing Pasje dead”, and then the physical pain: 12 broken bones in her hip and knee alone; her jaw was hanging; one lung had collapsed. “So I must have crawled out of the plane and lifted myself down. And then I must have crawled another 30 yards” – away from the wreckage.

The most vivid image from the hours that followed the crash, and from the subsequent eight days Herfkens spent in the jungle with the moans and cries of her fellow survivors slowly silencing, was of being “surrounded by leaves”. Green and golden, sequinned with dew, sunlit through her eyelashes. Time and again, Herfkens turned her focus on them, their light, their colours, movements, away from the man beside her, now dead, away from the white worm crawling out of his eyeball and the leeches on her own skin.

“If you accept what’s not there, then you see what is there,” she says. She calls this idea the “elevator pitch” for her book, Turbulence: A True Story of Survival, as well as the film or TV series she is writing. (A famous actor wanted to make the film before Covid, but the project stalled in the pandemic.) “I accepted that I was not with my fiance on the beach … Once I accepted that, I saw what was there – and it was this beautiful jungle,” she says.

Beautiful? Did she really see it that way? Far from fearing the jungle, Herfkens says that since her escape she has sought it out in her mind. For three decades, it has been her “safe place”, somewhere to will herself back to at times of stress and emotional need or even in transcendent moments of meditation. But how could the very place her life had crumbled around her – her partner dead, along with the future they envisaged together – shift from being a place of peril to a haven?

For Herfkens, the transformation began in the hours immediately after the crash. While she lay injured and thirsty, waiting to be rescued, she thought of the bond markets. She had been working for Santander in Madrid, and had been the only woman on the trading floor. She also thought of her mother back in The Hague. It seems incredible, given that she had no food or water, but while she waited for the rescue party, who eventually carried her down the mountain on a hammock, what Herfkens did not think was that she was going to die.

“I stayed in the moment,” she says. “I trusted that they were going to find me … I did not think: ‘What if a tiger comes?’ I thought: ‘I’ll deal with it when the tiger comes.’ I did not think: ‘What if I die?’ I thought: ‘I will see about it when I die.’” She describes this experience of “moment after moment after moment” as mindfulness before its time, before we all knew the word for it.

In some ways, this mindfulness was foisted upon her by her body. When