German backpacker Carolina Wilga tells incredible story of surviving 11 nights lost in WA’s outback

When escorted into a chair sat between four TV cameras to relive life’s most traumatic memories, excitement is not the emotion most interview subjects would be feeling. 

Carolina Wilga’s exuberance was, however, the first hint of the rehabilitative journey she’s been on in the year since spending 11 nights alone and facing death in the West Australian outback. 

WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Survivor opens up about 12 days lost in WA outback

“Sometimes it feels super surreal,” she says. 

Carolina is unrecognisable from the malnourished and frostbitten 26-year-old ushered into a WA Police jet. 

Talking today, she smiles and jokes and while no physical scars remain, her full memory of that ill-fated drive from Beacon to Perth has never completely returned. 

“I saw lights coming from in front and it was a car,” she recalls. 

“I got such a weird gut feeling and a crazy feeling of danger. I turned the steering wheel into a fence. It was an irrational moment out of fear.” 

It’s an understandable chain of events on an outback road. 

The aerial images of her abandoned Mitsubishi Delica van left little room for doubt for people at the time hoping she’d be found alive. 

But the question of why she left shelter to face the elements barefoot confounded Australians then, and even her today. 

“There was a noise, kind of like an alarm for me, and for me I felt like I have to wake up,” she says. 

Outback hallucinations follow fateful decision

But she walked, likely concussed. 

“It was terribly cold, like freezing cold, but I was still hallucinating. Like the stars were falling down from the sky.” 

As bizarre as her recollection sounds, today as then, the now-27-year-old is insistent on how “real” what she was seeing felt. 

It’s here where Carolina’s disposition in the interview changes. 

Confronting her mind’s rapid change from delirium to a fixation on survival. 

In one night she’d lost her bearings and car. 

After three nights she was no closer to where she began. 

She had no food or water and the only thing she remembers breaking through her fixation on thirst, are thoughts of death, and that her family might never see her again. 

“They will probably never find my dead body,” Carolina tells me. 

“That was the moment I fully broke down because that’s the worst thing for me.” 

Despair leads to shocking act

But in her memoir she explores a deeper despair. 

As brutal as the outback sun was, it’s the freezing nights that stand out more than anything. They’re so traumatic they function as clear markers in a muddled recollection. 

The prospect of facing another is so horrifying, she makes the first of two suicide attempts during her ordeal. 

“I just wanted to make it faster because for me, it was clear I’m going to die but the way I’m dying is super painful and I just wanted to make a cut there to not experience it any longer,” she says plainly, clearly having come to terms with the choice she made. 

But her body’s survival instinct and the thought of family kept her going. 

“I made my mum a promise that I will walk until I die, that I will not give up, I want to live,” she says. 

‘One realistic theory of mine is I had already died and this is hell’

On the eleventh night, her ordeal brought more dilemmas. 

“One realistic theory of mine is I had already died and this is hell,” she recalls. 

Again, she doesn’t retreat from the certainty she felt back then at the seemingly nonsensical. 

Her chance rescue at the hands of Tarnia Henley from Bimbijy Station feels just as unlikely today. 

“I could not believe it. I was still scared when I was looking at her like, ‘Is this real? Can I be happy?’”.

Carolina’s smile has returned and only grows wider when we bring in a laptop with Tarnia on the other line of a video call. 

Not as unlikely as their first chance meeting but a surprise nonetheless. 

The two make light of how the 27-year-old looks far better now than she did last July, before committing to see one another face to face. 

It’s of course nothing close to the onslaught of emotions that can strike Carolina more than a year on when caught off balance by a reminder. 

There’s a sense the ordeal isn’t completely over, but the worst is behind her. 

Guilt over what she feels she put her family through remains, the introspection that comes with writing a memoir tested her too. 

But being able to put to paper what she learned about herself, about what can be achieved in the face of impossible odds, has done more than ease ongoing anxiety. 

Sitting opposite her, the same strong sense of purpose back then, is clearly still pushing her now. 

Watch Ben Downie’s interview with Caroline Wilga - only on 7NEWS tonight at 6pm.