In the Jungle

05May07

Ok, for this post we are going to need some jungle drums:

Dum Ba-dum Ba-dum Ba-dum Ba-dum Ba-dum Ba-dum

Ahh the jungle! The most beautiful and captivating of environments, they truly are the most prominent edifices to Mother Nature’s powers. For centuries the words of men have painted dark and terrifying images of those shadowy worlds. Those places where beasts rule and even the mighty sun is not permitted without the earthy hues of it’s chlorinated screen. Stories are told of giant apes and killer feline predators hiding amongst the thick canopies. How could you not be tempted to visit such a place?

The jungle has always held a certain appeal, and on our journeys through the Southern paradises of Thailand, I felt the itch to do them some justice. Having just pulled off a sprightly border-hop (our apologies, Malaysia! We will do you some justice on another journey) we had just arrived on the island of Ko Yao. It was true to it’s guidebook-description of a sleepy little island with little to do but watch the local Muslim fishermen clean their nets. It did have one or two appeals to us though; the crystal-clear waters, the thick jungles and, not least of all, the complete lack of farang. Turns out that it had one thing that we hadn’t been wishing for. The monsoon. The rains were heavy and relentless for the last week. Bangkok was poised for major flooding and was busy preparing emergency services. The roads down south lasted about half an hour before surrendering to nature and becoming full-blown rivers. We watched the rain out our windows while clawing at computer screens, begging the forecasts to change. But, in spite of BBC warnings and the ominous darkness of the previously cloudless skies, we strive forth. I will have my jungle adventure!

A day on the island, and Paul is not so convinced. The rain has been thumping down all day and the roads of the little village are streams of red mud. We’ve found an abandoned “resort”, which is more of a Muay Thai boxing camp with a few rickety huts for rent. I intend to find a quiet strip of beach and spend the days practicing my Kenpo forms on he sandy flats and the nights lying in my hammock under the heavy canopy listening to the jungle sing. Paul looks at me like I have my head so far in the clouds I can’t see the cow turd I’m standing in, but agrees to sleep on it. That night it feels like our hut was in the midst of a tsunami, and the storm continues well into the morning. The next boat leaving is that afternoon, and Paul was on it. Bah!, I thought. I’m made of stronger stuff than that man! I turned and started the short hike to my jungle camp.

Now, to call the jungle a habitat in it’s own right is incorrect. What it is, is a million habitats all piled on top of each other. It’s an insane ecosystem that encourages a disorientating number of species to fight for every inch of space, normally using extremely violent methods. The concept of creatures harmoniously living in one biotope is one that never reached the depths of these tropical forests. It’s a vicious, cut-throat environment where loving your neighbour is something that some guy once told you just before you ripped off his head and stole all his stuff. In some ways it reminds me of the Ballymun flats; nobody has enough space, you have as many neighbours on the vertical as the horizontal, and you’re occasionally forced to eat one of your own young.

This was the world I entered with my packfulls of gear, army boots and high hopes. The jungle denizens must have paused on their first glimpse of me, and either shook their heads in pity or rubbed their mandibles together and salivated. Now I am not a first-timer to the jungle world, though you may find that hard to believe. I have camped on the river-sides of the mighty amazon some years back, and even made a fleeting renewal of friendships in the Chitwan national park. I even went for a hike through the Northern Forests of Chiang Mai. Even still, it is my humble opinion that anyone who tries to live in this deranged otherworld goes through several stages of metal breakdown. After the initial shock and awe at the sheer diversity and amount of life around you, over the next day or so you go though the five stages of jungle realisation:

Denial

There is no way those ants are throwing themselves off the tree just to get me. That’s not possible, I’m imagining it. And those mosquitoes are NOT biting me through my t-shirt. I’ve covered myself in Deet and everything. And there is NO WAY those things are biting through the ropes of my Hammock!

Anger

All right! The next little git to bite me is OW!! Aaaargh!! Die! (Grabbing a big stick and bashing everything around me, only to look down and realise that it was home to a nest of little red things that start swarming up my sleeve) Aaaahh, F#*k!! I’ll kill every one of you! Get off!(Stumble back into a spiky tree that rips my clothes) What!? Oh, the trees better not start on me now! And that F#*KING MONKEY BETTER NOT THROW ANY MORE COCONUTS!!

Bargaining

Ok little friends. We’ve had our differences in the past but I know OW! that we can put those behind us. I tell you what, why don’t I leave you some food? I know OW! that you’d like some of my dinner. Then we’re even? You leave me alone, I’ll give you more food than you could ever imagine? What do you say? OW!

Depression

Whats the point in trying? Why don’t I just lay down and let them eat me alive? Nothing I try works. Deet wont keep the bugs away. Clothes wont keep the bugs away. They’re there in the day, in the night, when it rains, when it’s dry. They hide in the bushes for me to pass. There’s nothing I can do!

Acceptance

Us squishy human kind are nothing. The insects are true masters of the Earth. I bow before you! All hail the insect overlords!

 You laugh now, but you should have seen me on my knees telling the ants that they had won…

My plan was to set up a hammock, with a tarp shelter above it to keep the rains off. Then I would cook on my newly purchased (and laboriously carried) gas stove the supplies which I had stockpiled. I planned to stay two or three nights, more if I enjoyed the experience as much as I hoped. The cooking went well enough, though I did flee the jungle line and head out to some rocks on the sand. The flies weren’t so thick out there, where the breeze kept them at bay, but the main reason was the sand crabs! These guys are brilliant, and in them I found my only ally of my adventure. Queer, nervous little guys, but predictable, and best of all cowardly. They had no interest in taking a pop at me. They valued their lives, unlike the brain-dead insect realm past the tree-line. They also had one other useful attribute. Just as sure as they would run from anything bigger, they would gobble anything smaller. Including, to my enormously devious pleasure, any insect that touched the sand. The number of times I ran shrieking from the jungle covered in creepy-crawlies to get my twitching, slightly manic pleasure watching the little gits scurry off across the sand. The crabs, ever wary of the big fleshy thing standing there, would side-scuttle about, testing it’s daring for getting to the prize. It would do it’s best to look like it was simply scuttling past the thing. Not interested in the slightest. And then it would watch you a while. Then it would scuttle back for another passing. No reaction from the giant. Then it would shoot, quick as a catapult, for the little thing trying its best to find shelter. Grab it in a claw, freeze (no reaction! I’m home free!), pull a bit off and gobble it, pause (just in case it changed it’s mind…), pulled another bit off and gobble it. This was the manner of the most efficient little bug-hunter I’ve ever seen. But they were cute enough to know that the ants were efficient in their own way, and that it would be their death if they crossed the border from their territory into the jungles. It was like warring border, with the opposite sides patrolling incessantly but never daring to cross. Brilliant though, my own little guard dogs!

When I say that the crabs were my only allies, I don’t exaggerate. My equipment included. My sealed Tupperware food-box didn’t keep out the ants. My high-ankled boots attracted the ants (the little black ones actually ate the polish off them. No joke). But worst of it was my hammock.

My hammock was a pretty top-of-the-range piece of kit, not yet opened and actually designed for the jungle. It was lightweight, flexible, had it’s own fly-net attached (soaked with chemicals to kill anything that even thought about getting inside). But it hand a major flaw. It was a still a bloody hammock.

Facts about Hammocks

1 – They sag. You have to hang them ridiculously high up to allow for the sag, so that your ass doesn’t rub the wet ground all night. This means you have to be some kind of Olympic… ninja to get INTO the bloody thing. And getting out normally involves getting one leg on the ground and the other being catapulted over your head throwing you in a kind of stunt that takes skateboarders years to pull off.

2 – They actually have a special technique to sleeping in them. This is no commoner garden rope affair here, this thing was designed for professional sleepers. You see, lying length-ways will result in you being crumpled in a ball in the middle, and have no support for your spine whatsoever. To counter this you must sleep diagonally, from corner to corner. Then the little stick-man in the picture has a smile on his face. Easier said than done. Moving around inside a hammock in the pitch black was difficult enough, and the slightest bit too much to one side would flip the thing. You spent a great deal of your time trying to lie as perfectly still as possible. Trying to lie across the thing was suicide, and attempting such would send the hammock into a swinging arc that took a long time to stop. The eventual result is that you move one way, while the thing swings the other, flipping the devils chair and you come ripping out through fly-netting to land on the rain-soaked ground. Rain-soaked and swarming with ants.

3 – Hammocks make excellent rain collectors. I can just imagine that being written on some survival manual somewhere. Great when you are dying of thirst in some desert. Terrible when you’re lying in the thing, with shreds of a torn mozzie net over you, and the water is coming up past your underwear. The technique which the survival hammock uses is a simple yet effective one. Whatever you tie the hammock to, a tree in my case, the rain runs down. Until it meets the hammocks ropes, which divert the steady flow along their length to finally gather in a pool around my buttocks.

So this was how I found myself spending my first night in the jungle. Sitting in my boxer-shorts atop my soaked rucksack. Watching the monsoon thunder away and the water pooling in my hammock. In the middle of the jungle. Oh and I did receive a brief respite when the rain stopped for an hour or two and I was stalked my monkeys who obviously enjoy terrorising helpless soaked rats in their underwear. Gits. It was my first and only night, at day break I beat the insects from some clothes and staggered down the jungle paths back to village.

I was forced to admit defeat, and I feel I am stronger for it. I learned a lot in those long hours. I learned that fire-ants attack by piercing you in with their mandibles and then arching their backs to spray acid over the wound. I learned that there are a hundred thousand species of mosquitoes that Deet will keep away, but the little black and silver gits seem to love the stuff. I learned that making some noise to let things know you are walking down the path was a REALLY good idea. I learned that no matter what you think, every human runs around for the first minute of heavy rain, like a crazed chicken convinced that it can dodge the raindrops. I learned that after the first minute you get used to being wet, and you actually start to enjoy the rain. And I learned that when my companion feels something is daft to do, it probably is because it’s quite a daft thing to do.

The rain has cleared up the last day, and the forecasts are for sun for the next week. May the Travel gods forever smile upon the poor of wit and strong of will who set off from home to visit this huge planet.

But I understand that sometimes we need a lesson in reality. In such cases, I find a quick spot of monsoon works wonders.

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