Greetings from South America,
This post isn’t about cinema, but the sport is survival. Ever spent a week camping in the Amazon jungle? I have, let me share.
From the second highest capital in the world (Quito, Ecuador), the jungle trek starts with a short flight to Coca, a tiny village where oil-drillers can hang their hat at night. Then there is a three hour dusty truck ride (longer if it has rained and it often does) followed by three hours by canoe down the Amazon which is followed by a black tie affair at a private rainforest hot spot where I am the guest of honor or..¨roastee¨ by the local cannibals as a main course in savage stew. hahaha…
Dark, raw and dangerous, now I know why the jungle is a reference point for very scary things. Without a native guide, us westerners wouldn’t last an hour. There are no trails – just hacking through with a machete, the brush so thick it seems like plants grow back right as you walk past. You become disoriented in 5 minutes.
Stress? Danger? Bugs? All that and a whole lot more.
Here are just a few animals you may encounter. From seemingly docile, tiny fish with big eyes and bigger teeth like the piranha to hungry caiman/alligators hoping you fall out of the little canoe, to tarantulas crawling into your boots over night to a small frog so poisonous, you touch it then touch your skin, you die before you get three steps out of the forest. Oh and you think your well developed lungs will allow people to hear as you cry out for help? The human voice only travels about 100 yards in the Amazon jungle. And don’t forget, you are about 70 miles from any civilization, minus the local Huaroni tribe clan who communicate by hitting the base of a very big tree that echoes a long distance. Do you know which tree that is? Sorry.
The weather is not Miami, after a flooding downpour that comes from nowhere (better have on a couple ponchos) you slip crossing a creek and reach out for a branch that has poison resin, costly way to break a fall.
Always the stifling, steamy heat…you hope your drinking water lasts long enough as your shirt is soaked just a few minutes into it.
With no warning a colleague gets knocked out by a falling branch, another twists their ankle getting a foot caught in a vine that winds along the ground and to add insult to injury, they get a rude welcome with droppings from a wooly monkey screaming from high above as if telling us “Yankee go home“. Still another leaps high into the air, probably like they have never done in their life, after almost stepping on a poisonous snake as they climb over a fallen tree. That´s what the Amazon jungle can do, turn experienced hikers into Abbott&Costello.
IF you make it back to the campsite you look at the zillion insect bites hoping they are ALL benign. Then you hear there is a kind of fly, they lay their eggs under human`s skin, so their babies can eat the flesh and drain the blood…you hope all the shots and prescriptions you got back home cover this one as well. You go to see if your laundry is dry only to see an anaconda crawling over the socks on the tree branch you hung them on. And that ´s just the first day!
THEN there is the Night Hike….you don’t want to know… mother nature has an unrelenting side that I saw first hand. What an experience, but think I´ll stick to camping in Yosemite next time.
cheers
Randy
