It's difficult to see through the canopy below, and as the prop plane banks into the sun, I'm momentarily blinded — squinting into white light before refocusing on the endless sea of green treetops that flow by us a thousand feet below. The single-engine Cessna hums in the humid air of mid-morning, and the drone of the propeller has me daydreaming out the window. I adjust my headset and watch the altimeter tick down as the plane descends toward a rough airstrip — a muddy slice of land splattered onto the verdigris canvas of northern Cambodia.

The seemingly untouched forests below mask, among other things, a country that has been ripped apart by decades of civil war and the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge. It's staggering to think, as we descend to the airfield, that as many as two million people were either executed or starved to death here only 30 years ago. It's an especially distressing fact, considering that the entire population of Cambodia is only about 12 million people. Imagine a reality where nearly 20 percent of everyone in America is killed. It's a shocking statistic here that is reflected in every corner of the population; there are very few elderly people in Cambodia.

We transfer out to battered SUVs and press on toward the village of Oyadao — a tiny (and I do mean tiny) little town hidden somewhere within the dense jungles of Ratanakiri Province. Our mission here is to speak to a girl named Rochom P'ngieng, who was born in 1979 and went missing as a young girl. On the 13th of January, 2007, a naked, filthy and long-haired woman was captured on the edge of the village of Oyadao. Sal Lou, father of the missing girl, claims that this "Jungle Girl" is his long-lost daughter. Her re-emergence from the forest and return to society made international news (Tarzan references abound) and has begged the question: How did this girl survive alone in the wild, and with who (or what) was she living all this time?