Between Two Jungles: A True Story of Survival, Secrets and a Lost City

After Jim Woodman’s mother was sent to prison, he and his brother and sister were sent to live with their father. Rather than disrupt his new family, their father devised an extraordinary plan for his two sons: set up a base camp in Honduras and search for Ciudad Blanca, the legendary lost city hidden deep within the rainforest.

Their father, an eccentric adventurer who had founded the International Explorers Society, gave the parents of three other teenage boys every reason to believe the journey had been carefully planned and the risks properly considered.

It hadn't.

He sent seventeen-year-old Jimmy, his sixteen-year-old brother Henry, and three of their friends into the remote and largely unexplored Honduran jungle. To guide them, he hired a Vietnam veteran and snake hunter—a man he had never met—in exchange for a couple of airline tickets and the promise of $500 upon their safe return.

What began as the adventure of a lifetime soon became a fight for survival. As the five teenagers traveled deeper into the Mosquitia rainforest, navigating swollen rivers, venomous snakes, relentless rain, and almost complete isolation, their guide became increasingly erratic and threatening. Eventually, he threatened to kill the boys and leave their bodies in the jungle. The man hired to protect them had become one of the greatest dangers they faced.

But Jimmy had been learning how to survive unpredictable adults long before he ever set foot in Honduras.

Growing up in Miami, he and his siblings had been drawn into their mother’s secret world of shoplifting, scams, and deception. They learned when to speak, when to stay quiet, how to read a room, and how to recognize when something wasn’t right. In the jungle, those instincts took on an entirely different significance.

The expedition later inspired stories in Sports Illustrated and on ABC Television. But those accounts told only part of what happened. They never revealed the increasingly dangerous situation unfolding in the rainforest—or the troubled family history that had sent the boys there in the first place.

Between Two Jungles is the story that remained untold for fifty years: a true coming-of-age memoir about five teenagers searching for a legendary lost city, the dangerous man entrusted with their lives, and the unexpected ways surviving one kind of jungle prepared a seventeen-year-old to survive another.

“Few people understand the dangers of the Mosquitia rainforest better than I do—and Woodman captures them with striking authenticity. But what makes this memoir unforgettable is the psychological jungle he was navigating at the same time.”

—Steve Elkins, Leader of the Lost City of the Monkey God Expeditions