We arrived in Lacanja village in the early afternoon. The sun was beating down, and it felt good to have reached the final destination before heading into the jungle. Lacanja boasts the largest village for the South Lacandon tribe. Due to the concrete that is provided by the government, there is a feeling of remote village rather than jungle tribe. We found Rosa, who was to be our host, and moved our belongings into the room that was available for us.
It was time to have a little exploration of the local area. As you can imagine, there wasn’t very much there, but it did turn out that they occasionally got visitors and they had built a pathway through the jungle to a waterfall. We walked down the entrance way of bent branches and into the jungle. Throughout the walk you could hear the waterfall sounding temptingly close but just out of reachable distance. Finally, through the foliage we can see it and what a welcome sight it is. Down the rocks and it only takes a moment to get undressed and slip into the refreshingly cold water, nudging myself between a set of rocks and allowing the falls to massage my back and neck. Fifteen minutes later and refreshing has become disturbingly cold! I hastily retreat from the water into the sunshine and enjoy the warmth, as I slowly recover to a normal temperature! The walk back to the village was longer than the walk in, at least it seemed that way. We decided that we may as well sleep in our hammocks that night, and so began the first time I had set my hammock up on location! I got it up quite quickly and was fairly happy with the result before I turned around and saw Mark’s. What was on the other side of the veranda made my hammock look like a cot next to a king size bed! A little extra instruction was required. It didn’t take long, and a few handy hints on ways to prevent the hammock from ever landing on the ground, and my hammock was now at least a bed size in comparison to the king size bed behind me.
I was happy with my afternoon’s work. For any of you who have been to remote locations, you will know that once it begins to get dark there is not much to do except to get dinner ready and head to bed, and that is exactly what we did. Well, when I say that we got dinner ready we went into the little cafe that was in the village and asked for some dinner. I feel that I need to explain what I mean when I say cafe. Cafe is the word I am using because I do not know another word that would be suitable. However, it is not a cafe in any of the ways that we know a café. The closest resemblance is that it is a building that you enter, and it has cooking equipment and raw ingredients. After that the resemblance ends. There is no choice of what you are eating and the food is cooked on portable gas grills. There was also absolutely no chance of us getting fat, the portions that were served was smaller than you can imagine! It was time to finalise the negotiations with our guide Lukas. We had met a couple of people during the afternoon who were prepared to take us into the jungle, and we had decided on Lukas. We were just waiting for him to confirm that he was prepared to go in, and we were hoping to have another guide joining him as well. As we wandered back through the village to Lukas’s home, the fireflies started to come out. Slowly the surroundings were lit up with little glows making the scene magical. After agreeing with Lukas that we would meet him for breakfast at 8am and then head off, we made our way back through the fireflies that breezed through the night air to our hammocks. There was nothing left to do for the evening, and so it was time to read a bit of a book and get some sleep before we began the trek early in the morning.
I woke up in a sweat, it felt like I had been asleep for centuries. A claustrophobic sensation surrounded me in the hammock. I unzipped it in a hurry and got onto the veranda. The air was still thick in the heat of the night. I went into our room, found the bathroom in the dark and splashed my face with cold water. I found my watch and checked the time. I had been asleep for just over two hours. I found some water and sat down on the edge of the bed. Wondering why I had woken up with this feeling, I decided to go back outside and read for a little bit in my hammock. I took the water with me and made my way back outside. The light from my head torch lit up the surroundings like a beacon, and I quickly angled it away so that I didn’t wake Mark. Climbing back into my hammock and nestling in I got my book and started to read. My concentration wasn’t there and about 15 minutes into reading I became distracted. It would be better if I tried to sleep again I thought turning off my light. Sleep came and went just as fast. I felt sick and dizzy, made my way back to the bathroom and sat there wondering what it was that might have caused this. The night dragged on slowly while I slept in fits and starts, swapping between my hammock and bed finding comfort in each for only short periods of time.
At some point in the night, I realised that I drunk very little water over the last day, and having been seriously dehydrated once before in my life, I came to the conclusion that this could be the thing that was wrong. After all, Mark had eaten exactly the same things as I had, and there were no bites on me so it couldn’t be anything else. Mark woke early around 6am and we packed our bags. It had been decided that if I didn’t feel any better after some food, then we would wait to until the next day to head into the jungle. Breakfast was as exciting an affair as dinner had been, and I ate about half of the scrambled eggs and bacon that was served. A few glasses of water later, and it was getting near 8am. It was time to make a decision. Although I wasn’t feeling perfect, the knowledge that it had been a lack of water the previous day, and the breakfast, had started to make me feel better. Hanging around in a village with nothing to do for the next 24 hours was not particularly appealing, and the exercise would undoubtedly do me some good. 30 minutes later we were waiting at the cross-roads of the village with our bags, and some biscuits which we had purchased from the village shop. Lukas came strolling up the path with his son. Having been unable to find somebody who was free to join us, it meant that he was going to be guiding us on his own. His ten year old son, Juan, didn’t have anything to do and so we invited him to come with us. We needed to take a chicken with us to kill and eat, otherwise all we were going to eat for the next few days would be fish, the meat would go down well. It was clear that we needed someone to carry the chicken, and Juan was more than happy to oblige! As we walked down the path towards where we would enter the jungle, the sun beat down on us from above and already the heat of the day was beginning to rise from the ground. It was going to be good that we would be walking in the shelter of the forest.
If you have never walked through a jungle the noise is the first thing that hits you. It is loud, louder than you thought and life is taking place all around you. It may not be possible to see much of it, but you can sense it with every fibre of your being. You can feel the world living all around you, there is nowhere else in the world that you will get such a sense of being alive. This on its own makes the trip worthwhile, and it is this feeling that is addictive and makes one keep needing to go back.
We entered the jungle with the sunlight streaming through the trees, causing patterns to fall on the leaf cutter ants that are permanently walking through the jungle floor building their homes with a never-ending effort. Lukas stopped and crouched down by a branch going off into the undergrowth, and there, sitting on the branch, was a lizard around 10 inches in length.
After a few minutes we decided to leave the lizard in peace and carry on with our journey. Our destination was a lake in the middle of the jungle, there was an island on it that we could use as our base, and from there trek out into other parts of the jungle. There was rumour that a jaguar feeding ground was quite close by, and so the opportunity to see their tracks was something not to be missed as this is very rare. The possibility of seeing a jaguar is so rare that nobody wanted to mention it, as to see one would have made the trip truly exceptional. We chatted for a little bit until we reached a section of path that required the use of Lukas’s machete to make our way through. After making a throughway he pointed to a branch that made its way diagonally across the path. This branch contained many spikes of about an inch in length, which on closer inspection looked particularly vicious. These spikes apparently could kill you if they got stuck into you and you didn’t realise. They would bury themselves into your skin until they reached the bloodstream. Once in the blood they would get carried through the body, and although it would be more likely for them to come out of your back, it is possible that they could make it to your heart and kill you. During the Zapatista war, the Zapatistas caused much damage to the military by guiding them through parts of the jungle where a particular plant only requires you to go within close proximity of it, for you to be poisoned by it. Effectively anything can kill you in the jungle, even down to the wasp stings. Having said that, it is really pretty difficult to catch something. It is even harder to catch something without realising it, and most insects aren’t going to bite you unless they feel threatened.
The journey continued with me enjoying every step, and following Juan’s increasingly unhappy chicken. I spent a few moments of my time wondering if the chicken knew what was going to be happening to it, if not today then in a couple of days, and if it didn’t, was it just confused as to what was going on? We carried on, sometimes on a pathway, and sometimes making our own path. By the time it had gone 1pm we were all ready for a break. We sat down on a fallen tree and brought out our biscuits and water bottles. It wasn’t much of a lunch I have to admit, and even to someone who was as knackered as I was, it didn’t give much satisfaction. There was no way we were going to have time to do anything else though, and so I was going to eat it whether I liked it or not! I had already gone through most of my water, as I was determined that I was not going to get dehydrated again like yesterday and have another night like the last. About fifteen minutes later we got up, and got our things together and carried on the trek. My own fitness level surprised me. I am not the fittest of people, and although I had been trying to do regular exercise before leaving, I had never done anything like this and so far I seemed to be holding up pretty well. A few hours of walking remained, during which I was following Juan and kept marvelling at the sheer size of what I was walking through.
Concentrating on the path ahead, I didn’t notice that Lukas had stopped until I almost walked into him. We had come to a rest beside a large tree that had fallen over. Lukas handed me a stick that was a little bit taller than myself, and then passed another one to Mark. He then hopped up onto the tree and started to walk down it with Juan behind him and so we both followed. The end of the tree came out from the canopy of the forest and onto what looked like a marsh. Some quick Spanish, that I understood very little of, took place between Lukas and Mark. Translated, it went along the lines of: this is quicksand so don’t fall in because you could die! Again!
Quick sand is in fact marsh and it was this we were overlooking, surrounding it was four foot high elephant grass. Elephant grass is a razor sharp grass that can cut you if you brush into it in the wrong direction. Clothed in shorts and t-shirt I surmised that this was likely to happen. The boats that Lukas kept by the lake, were on the other side of all this, and so happy in the knowledge that we were armed with our sticks to test the solidity of the ground, Lukas and Juan disappeared. Now, how you can walk through a possibly deadly marsh at the speed they did, with no sticks to help, is beyond me. While I was pondering this they disappeared on the other side, and I decided that I had better catch up before we lost them forever amongst the elephant grass.
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I really enjoyed reading about your exploits in the jungle. I thought it was very well written and would make an excellent piece of travel journalism, perhaps in diary form, and a travelogue too, with the accompanying photographs.
Keep up the good work and I look forward to reading more!
thx for sharing this one!