With my sister and brother in law working in Colombia, I decided a little trip to go visit them was in order. I’d never been that far south, and it sounded like a party. So after losing an argument with my mother about what type of luggage I needed to bring (my choice of backpack was apparently not acceptable) I was off sporting a full set of proper luggage to the Amazon Rainforest. As part of the argument I lost included the use of a neck pouch. For those who are unfamiliar with such a thing (lucky people you are) it is a pouch worn around the neck to store your passport and money so as to ‘prevent pickpocketing’. Unfortunately, it also serves to inform everyone with the gift of vision that you have things worth stealing and are concealing in the bulbous pouch hanging around your neck. “Hey Carlos, did you see that idiot with the neck pouch?... Yeah, let’s stab him, take the convenient neck pouch which saves us the time of searching his corpse, and then stab him again while our amigos shoot wildly into the air while maintaining their angry stare and shouting...” Ecuador is a beautiful country, but stepping off the plane and immediately being swarmed by children trying to steal my shoes while fifteen men with rifles stared angrily at the jackass with all the luggage, I decided against the pouch. I think I made the correct decision. Mom was happy I wasn’t stabbed, but I think a little sad I did not use the neck pouch she was so proud of. But I digress.
Let’s skip ahead. Looking at the Spanish language form I was signing, recognising only a few words (the Spanish words for ‘death’, ‘injury’, and ‘will not come find you’ were in bold and repeated several times) I thought ‘how colourful! This is adorable. They’re trying to scare us like the pirate ride at Disney world! We’re going to see some butterflies and shit. This luggage is heavy. Where can I buy a diet coke?’ (FYI Nowhere.) So I signed their cute little document in front of an old man laughing and a younger man looking crestfallen as he handed us galoshes and walked towards the ‘bus’.
As the bus banged along the mountains, the trees becoming more and more dense and terrifying, a man at the front of the bus beer (I think? Could have been something else. The can had a picture of an Incan priest and he looked angry) in hand and drunkenly began yelling at my brother in law in a language known only to him. My brother in law being 6’2 and this man being at most 4’11 I was less concerned about the situation degrading... but then I remembered where we were and thought ‘he might pull out a knife and stab him!... Or throw a spider at him or something. That’s a thing right? Throwing spiders at people?’ and we asked the bus driver to handle it. In this case, ‘handle it’ meant literally Spartan kicking him through the door into the black jungle and driving off hours from any last seen civilization. That man most definitely died. The jungle swallowed him almost immediately. Come to think of it, I don’t recall him getting on the bus. I think he was just asleep on the bench when we left. I guess I’d be pissed waking up on a bus in the jungle hours away from where we started. Maybe we’re the villains in this story.
The bus rattled to halt in the pitch black in front of a camp of what seemed to be a gaggle of 10-16 year old kids, who immediately ran to the bus, grabbed my luggage and literally ran, danced and swung into the trees with it. Now my first reaction was ‘well they were going to steal that godforsaken luggage eventually. Good riddance. I’m a jungle man now. Hand me a rock with which to fashion a loincloth (That’s how loincloths work right?)’ But the driver instructed us that they were just bringing the stuff to the camp. We stepped off the bus and it clanged away and a shadowy figure stepped out from behind a tree. I would call this person the ‘head boy’ as he seemed to be in charge. He looked at us with some type of contempt mixed with jungle-pity and motioned for us to follow. His Spanish wasn’t bad (I say boldly as an Irish Frenchman) and he gave us a tour of what I will call ‘the treehouse’. Different rooms, and huts in the trees, up against the mountain. It was rather impressive. There was a fire going in the main sitting area and ‘food’ was being served. I say ‘food’ as people were eating it, but that’s the only thing that would qualify it as such. We ate some as my sister asked what it was and the head boy replied that it was the tarantulas that reside under the huts. We looked over the near one and I shit you not, a giant fucking tarantula poking out from a hole under the wall was looking right at us... I think with malice. He then informed us that that was our hut, but not to worry, they don’t attack people. The terrified silence was broken by a freaky bird shriek by the village parrot who I swear was smiling eerily.
As I lay on top of the ‘bed’ listening to the horrors of hell crawling around under the largely gapped ‘floor boards’, thinking that there was no way we would survive the next day, I slept like a goddamned baby. First and only time in my life. Maybe it was the knowledge that I was surely to die in the immediate future, maybe it was the ability to dismiss all concerns and stresses of normal life due to the previously mentioned looming death, maybe it was that creepy parrot who liked to watch me sleep and lick its beak while groaning... I can’t say for sure. But my God did I sleep well. Like a real person. It was magical.
Part 2 (Have you ever seen a snake fight a spider and lose? I have.) Tomorrow.
