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Welcome to the home of the official Vegemite Ambassador travel blog. A chronicle of mildly amusing journeys.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

It's a Jungle Out There







On the eastern flank of the Andes, the massive mountains lower and gradually fade away, with brown-grassed highlands yielding to cloud forest and then eventually to thick, inpenetrable jungle. A wall of clouds are pinned at this frontier, precipitating perpetually into a myriad of small streams that form into rivers that soon become raging torrents of water. With all this water and constant sun all year round something big is bound to grow. This is the beginning of the largest forest in the world, the Amazon Basin, the next leg of the Vegemite Ambassador American adventure.

I have to say with all honesty that the decision to take a backpacker budget-friendly trip into the Amazon is not one to be taken too lightly. There are no creature comforts here; it is wilderness; remote and untamed. Herein still lie tribes of people that even to this day have had no contact with the rest of the world. Any chance encounters with such peoples have usually not been great and sometimes have ended with the sharing of poison blow darts. The interior of the Amazon is as raw as it comes and just tapping the very edge of it inevitably fills you with a sense of trepidation and definite feelings of biological insignificance.

Once you descend into this soggy morass you most certainly can't see the forest from the trees. There are no vantage points and you are flanked on all sides by a wall of green. The heat is continual and oppressive and the humidity taxing. There never seems to be any breeze to speak of and litre upon litre of sweat is taxed from you every day. Sometimes the only thing that cleans the sweat out of your clothes is more sweat. The Amazon is uncomfortable and you will be pushed to the limits of acceptance as to what constitutes a normal holiday.

To put it simply, the Amazon is out to get you the moment you dare enter her alluring but carnivorous embrace.

Any track into the jungle that has not been used in a week or so will have been closed over with rampant undergrowth. Hacking and slashing paths back to life with a machete makes for slow going and is hot, hard work but the only way forwards in most cases. Sunlight is very much in demand in the Amazon and any cleared path will be reclaimed very quickly again after passage through. Some vines grow so fast that tendrils will wrap around you if you sit down too long for lunch near them. Life is voracious and consuming in the jungle.

Many of the plants here don't like you. They have barbs, stinging hairs or drip irritating sap, making the machete work even more eventful up front. After any hike through the Amazon, even if for only a day, you will covered in scratches, lesions and otherwise unexplainable blemishes that invariably get worse in days to come. Every night is a constant battle to ensure your body will recover and be able to function normally the next day.

The jungle is filled to the brim with insects who also don't really like you. There are fire beetles that, when touched, mix a combination of chemicals together in their bodies that produce quite prodigious amounts of heat. Touching one is more or less equivalent in sensation to touching a lit match and you'll know when it happens.

There are ants over one inch long that seem to always be walking towards you with their mouth open ready to strike. There are the normal army of leeches and ticks to be expected of such a place, dark clouds of mosquitoes that descend upon anything without a DEET barrier and the wonderful sensation of waking up to a wasp sting is something I hope you never have to experience.

Undoubtedly the most dubiously insidious insect of all is a small beetle that has a venomous bite so powerful that local tribes people say you will die in 30 minutes of a bite. There is only one cure for this bite: to have sex within the window of death. This is probably the most awesome cure in the world ever diagnosed and in all honesty seems like a fantastic excuse to get people in the sack with you. The dialogue would be much like this ...

SUFFERING VICTIM: "I got bitten by a beetle again baby!"

CONVENIENTLY CLOSE OBJECT OF DESIRE: "What? Again? That's the third time today! Ok then ..."

*jungle drums begin*

SUFFERING VICTIM: "Ohh yeeeeah"

Jungle accommodation on a budget adventure is pretty bare bones. You are essentially provided with a simple A-Frame hut on stilt poles, in which sit some rough mattresses with mosquito nets. The shady spot underneath the huts is a prime location for giant tarantulas to set up shop and of a night time it is relatively common for very old Jaguars, looking for an easy snack, to prowl between the huts. A sobering thought when you wake up at night and need to desperately go to the toilets across the camp.

There are many animals to be seen when hiking through the jungle of a day time, but the night is definitely when the action really kicks off. The stars are vivid, legions of insects begin their various chants and fireflies weave their magic through the undergrowth. The scene is surreal and at night the reflections of animal eyes give away their positions more readily and allow you to see so much more than you realise.

A night time jungle walk is definitely not a sedate affair however, especially when it comes to stalking aquatic animals; in this case the elusive Caymans. Our guide, a gregarious cowboy guide from the Steve Irwin school of subtlety in animal appreciation, was determined to help us see a Cayman up close and for this he told us we'd have to turn our lights off and follow him into the river. Walking knee deep in man-eating reptile infested waters by the sense of touch alone definitely rates as one of the most questionable activities performed on this voyage. Each false foot fall, each splash of water near you, each muted yelp from another member of the party invites an automatic and depressing reality check. We did see Caymans in the end and they were very cool, but it was pretty damned awesome to get out of the water.

Another night expedition involved hiking to a wooden jungle platform perched five or so metres off the ground overlooking a clay-lick where animals normally come to get their midnight munchies salt fix. The platform was an exposed hut with a couple of shabby, parasite-ridden mattresses on it. Once mosquito nets had been erected, we were to remain silent and take shifts through the night at monitoring the clay-lick. It was an admirable idea, doomed to failure. The first problem was that the chef had fed us all a dinner comprised of many beans earlier, so even though there was no speaking, there was still plenty of sound coming from our look out. The second problem was a distinct lack of useful torches that could actually illuminate the observation area. And thirdly, the jungle is really noisy of a night. I mean REALLY noisy. It is very difficult to get any sleep and therefore very easy to accidentally sleep through your shift just through desperation to rest.

Needless to say, no animals were spotted at the clay-lick that night. One of the very few let downs of our animal spotting.

Really, the only other time the jungle interaction stopped was in the mosquito net sanctuary of the bed. At all other times you are generally open for business for all the animal life of the Amazon. Even in your most private moments in the shower you will have a plethora of spiders watching you, grasshoppers slamming into the wall beside you, bats fluttering in and out and frogs using you as a springboard to greater heights. At first it is easy to be horribly averted to it all, but over days comes acceptance and soon you'll appreciate the show.

And you just have to get used to the water in the shower occasionally looking more dirty than you are too.

Actually, for a place so laden with water it seems so strange to think that there is practically no fresh potable water anywhere here. For survival there is only one option; native Bamboo. The shoots of this tree hold substantial fresh water and slashing a vine to have a drink is a potential life saver. Furthermore, it actually has a rather pleasant Bamboo flavour and apparently doubles as a cure for a broken heart. Yes, a broken heart is a medical condition. Maybe it can thus help sooth your last dying moments if you happen to get bitten by the sex beetle with no one around.

An Amazon experience is life sapping but fulfilling, testing but rewarding, brutal but beautiful. This is the lungs of the world, unequalled in size, unparalleled in biodiversity. Full to the brim with quirky monkeys and overly colourful birds, the bizarre and the fantastical, the deadly and downright unfriendly, the Amazon was a true adventure into one of the last places on Earth where nature truly holds lease.

The only real regret was not staying longer.

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