American Rescued After 6 Weeks in Australian Desert

American tourist Robert Bogucki was rescued Monday after trekking alone for six weeks in the Great Sandy Desert among towering sand dunes and thick scrub in some of Australia’s harshest outback terrain.

“I just wanted to spend a while on my own, just nobody else around, just make peace with God, I guess,” an exhausted Bogucki, of Fairbanks, Alaska, told a television crew that found him walking through thick, waist-high grass in the Edgar Range in Western Australia.

Asked whether he had made peace with God, he said: “Oh yeah.”

A bearded Bogucki, dressed in shorts, T-shirt, beach sandals and carrying a backpack, and with large blisters on the soles of his feet, was walking along a dry creek bed when spotted.

Bogucki, a 33-year-old builder whose parents live in Malibu, had attempted an epic 500-mile bicycle and hiking trek across the Great Sandy Desert, which boasts 36-foot-high sand dunes.

He left a roadhouse 610 miles north of Perth on July 11. A massive manhunt was launched July 26 after his abandoned bike was found on a desert track.

By Monday morning, Bogucki had walked an estimated 214 miles across a stretch of Australia too harsh for even traditional nomadic Aborigines to eke out an existence.

“I am hungry. I am tired,” Bogucki told the Channel 9 camera crew that picked him up in a helicopter.

“Enough of this walking around. I didn’t have the strength to walk a couple of days ago. When I finally got some water in me, I figured I could get out,” Bogucki said.

It is winter in Australia and outback temperatures are in the low 80s, unlike the blistering summer when temperatures can soar to 120 degrees.

“At the start, I was walking probably 25 kilometers [about 15 1/2 miles] a day, sitting down during the heat and then during the evening try to walk some more,” he said from his hospital bed in Broome. He said he lost 40 or 50 pounds.

“Basically, I couldn’t tell you what I was eating--plants, flowers and things, just a few things here and there to keep my mouth moist,” Bogucki said.