Imagine growing up in an environment where grilled bat wings are as tasty and common a snack as crisps. Where people keep skulls of deceased family members on the walls to remember them by, instead of photographs, writes Rosita Boland

Where, unbeknownst to your parents, aged six, you try to trade kitchen utensils for a baby crocodile, to add to your menagerie of animals, which already includes two ostriches, a tree kangaroo, a parrot, and several spiders the size of side-plates

German citizen Sabine Kuegler, now 33, was born in Nepal. At three, her parents took her and her two siblings to what was then called Irian Jaya and is now known as West Papua, in Indonesia. They lived in a simple wooden hut on stilts in a remote jungle area, among the Fayu tribal people; a tribe that had only very recently been discovered by outsiders. The three children, Judith, Sabine and Christian, grew up in the jungle, living there until their late teens.

"For years, I never talked about my childhood," says Kuegler on the phone from her current home in Munich. "For me it was normal, and what was exotic was life in the West. I didn't think my childhood was interesting at all."

Kuegler's German parents, Klaus and Doris, trained as linguists. After they married, they both wanted to go out to the field in developing countries and work as linguists and missionaries.

"My parents were missionaries in the sense that they are Christians. They wanted to serve the people, to help and support them where they could. And they wanted to learn the language. They had to leave Nepal because of the political situation, which is why we went on to Indonesia."

As a child, Kuegler disliked the lessons her mother made them all do, preferring instead to hunt with the Fayu children, using her own bow and arrows. She rarely wore shoes. Nothing scared her about the jungle - not the scorpions she shook out of her clothes in the mornings, nor the crocodile-infested waters further up-river, nor the rats that invaded the hut every night, nor the primal ways of the warring tribes that surrounded them.

She loved it all; loved the freedom and the jewel-coloured birds and swimming in the river every day. She loved that she fell asleep each night by an open window with no glass, and that the entire vast jungle was her exotic playground. She spoke fluent Fayu with the tribal children; English during her mother's home-schooling hours; and German with the rest of her family.

"We really were wild as children," Kuegler admits. "Especially Christian and me. My sister Judith was not quite so much into the jungle life as us."

There were very real dangers involved in living such a remote and simple life. Her brother escaped death twice. Once he fell into the family's cooking fire and was rescued by her father, who ran to dunk them both in the river, and once, he was almost swept away by a sudden current in a flooded river. Again, he was rescued by their father.

Both in Nepal, and later in Irian Jaya, the family was supported by money that arrived from private donations back in the West, from churches, and some American universities. But there was never very much money. One of the long-term consequences of this fact was that the Kueglers could not afford to take their children to the West periodically. Added to the fact that complex politics in Irian Jaya made it very difficult to get flights out of the country, this meant that the three children grew up totally isolated from western culture. They were all teenagers by the time they went on an extended visit to relatives in Germany: teenagers who had grown up in the jungle, sharing a tiny hut with their parents. As a result, they had few western social graces, and no direct experience of the world their parents had been brought up in.

"It was very hard to adjust during that visit," Kuegler admits. "Even the rich food. We weren't used to it; we kept getting sick. But it was everything - the traffic, wearing shoes, the noise, the number of people everywhere. I couldn't wait to go home to the jungle."

There followed a further two years for Kuegler in Irian Jaya. But nothing was ever the same again: she began to wonder where she belonged, and where her home was, questions which endure to this day. For their parents, life continued as normal, studying the language and observing the Fayu culture, but all three children were now restless. Judith left to go to Europe to study art. A year later, Sabine went to a finishing boarding school in Switzerland, paid for by an uncle - perhaps the most surreally artificial introduction to western life after 16 years living in a wooden hut among a tribe, with no running water, no electricity, no schools, shops, popular culture, media or any of the many things the West takes for granted.

"Today, there are summer camps in the US for children like us, who lived in remote places; camps where you can go and be introduced gradually to western culture, and meet other children, and where there are trained psychologists and counsellors to mentally prepare you for another way of life. They set them up when they realised children were having problems adapting. I wish we could have gone there. I was culture-shocked in reverse when I went to Switzerland," Kuegler reflects.

Within two years of leaving the jungle, she was pregnant. She tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. She went on to have four children, and has been married twice. Neither marriage lasted.

"Writing the book has helped me get over the last 15 years, which have been very hard. Writing it, I began to understand why I never made decisions beyond a week: I thought like someone in a tribe, not an individual. And my pain threshold was really, really high. I slept though the contractions of my first child, for example."

Kuegler's parents still live in the jungle, among the Fayu people. Her siblings are both married to Americans, where they went to college, and they both now live. She has never been back to the jungle, but intends to travel there next month - a big journey into her past which she hopes will be a healing one.

Her remarkable childhood has left many legacies. She still gets disturbed by traffic and finds it difficult to cross roads. And after having all those exotic animals as a child in the jungle, as an adult, apartment living in Europe meant pets were permanently forbidden.

"I really wanted spiders," she confides. "They would have been allowed. But my eldest daughter protested. Imagine, my own daughter, being scared of spiders!"

Jungle Child, by Sabine Kuegler, is published by Virago, at £10.99