“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” — Oscar Wilde

“Oh…Yeah! That’s where we left off last time…ahem*

As we continued our way across the border regions of the other side of the tribal reserve, my brother Christopher and I were doddling around…yet again. We had recently stopped at a bus stop where another true Rasta man was preaching to us about the rewards of our current pursuit, while he himself hardly had any possessions on at all… contented to move down both paved highways and virgin old-growth tropical rainforest, with total mindfulness of the beautiful paradise that surrounds him.

“Oh Yes, we do too!”, we assure him.

Always an honest man, my tall brother with an orange shirt

We sleep on the edge of a clearing just off of the side of the trail.

Althought it most certainly was the most restful night’s sleep we had had during the entire trip… the irony was the fact that we saw one last remaining indigenous AmerIndian man that night brandishing a cutlass, copper-skinned… looking at us White folk like we was the loneliest men on planet Earth.

And in many ways we were. But we slept well. We had comparably little to no incident… especially in comparison with the future SNAFU’s that we would be FORCED to repeat, non-stop, throughout the rest of the remaining 10 nights’ camping we would complete during the rest of the trip… Following this night, came only a serious of very unfortunate events.

We slept in the Kalinago Territory of Dominica, deep in a distant region of the vast Caribbean Sea.

Most luxuriant Rainforest you have ever seen!

In the morning, we packed all of our wet belongings

We knew that it didn’t matter much how wet we got… for we were wet the vast majority of everyday anyway…

My brother had been intently applying Vaseline since the first night. He’d pioneered the cotton underwear/ sythentic underwear nightly swap before bedtime each evening. We felt like pair of real hot tickets… flaunted it, so, just the same as if we weren’t a half a lukewarm ticket between us both.

I never knew my brother, Chris, to be much of a talker… in fact quite the contrary. But here he’d often comment about what elevation changes we were experiencing at the moment: inclines and declines, almost exclusively. Certainly we were either climbing or descending, at any given time – only. It was an absolute Up-and-a-Downer

(if you catch what I’m saying) The Markium was either down or it was up, or was up so it was down (up).

” I talked too”

We continue into Stickbug-infested accommodation

This is really nice. Yeah, a lot of fun. We had both, by now, run out of real snack food, but we had each purchased 2 or 3 sun-bleached plastic 1- gallon buckets, full of citrus fruits for lunch a few hours earlier. Together with a cocoa pod, a half dozen passionfruit, and a perfectly ripe mango… we scoured the premises… securing a couple small avocados and other such things that we had picked up off of the forest floor. Rot had surely been eyeballing it closer than ourselves, and before it had the chance to settle into the delicious local fruit, we would sink our own greedy tusks into their crispy skins. It would otherwise have been wasted anyway…. for here the largest land animal (to our mistaken knowledge at that point in time) were merely the colossal land crabs. We did not yet know about the wild boar.

We ate freeze-dried meals for dinner, along with a couple tins of canned sardines in olive oil.

Falling asleep was hellish for me, because I rarely have trouble really falling asleep. However, the 6 or 7 member stickbug family we discover upon arrival in our pavillion gives us a strange image in our subconscious as nightfal descends… and we slip off to slumber. Their glowing eyes reflect any light at all… whether the paniced beams of our flashlights, or the natural moonlight beams penetrating the upper-level canopy layer of orchids and lianas hundreds of feet above…. we saw their frozen, glowing eyeballs that do not rest, nor do they really move at all. They are like so many muted Rubies, shimmering in optical giggles at our unnatural fear of the surrounding natural environment. The sound of the seemingly 8 or 9 inch-long prehistoric super-sized flying insects… currently sharing a place underneath the thatched cabana roofing with us… had an effect on our ability to sleep, I think. Well, without a doubt in my case, personally. I would wager to bet that Chris lost a few minutes of shut-eye as well… if my memory serves me at all, anymore.

High-pitched chirping and abrupt metallic shrieks rang menacingly all throughout the night and well into the early morning of the following day… totally random intervals were spaced out the whole time.

As if frighten us especially well, there was no rhythm. There was no beat.

There was no Rhyme or Reason that night.

Truly horrid was it.

We complete Segment 7 by early morning

Unbeknownst to us, we had crossed a threshold 45 minutes earlier: into a virgin tropical jungle paradise. We find ourselves deep in the wilderness of a Caribbean Island that time has all but forgotten.

We continue along Segment 8. During the afternoon… into the early evening hours, and much later as the Sun sets, it becomes readily apparent that we’ve been entirely engulfed by old-growth rainforest for nearly an entire day now. Just spectacular!

And so we venture farther…

Our wariness has long ago faded. We feel growing confident in every footstep…

Well…. (most footsteps) that aren’t taken through flowing streams and creeks (no matter how refreshingly cool, besides).

We done trod with soggy footsies for days now… for days, and days, and days and for days we would continue. Oh soggy footsies….

It isn’t helping that we get turned around at a river…

…or IN a river, rather…

It’s a small river, but a river nonetheless…

and not some kind of cric, stream, or creek. We got turned around WHILE STANDING in flowing water…

Perhaps as much as a foot high in places, (although it seemed only a flooded section of the forest floor, until it was impossible to determine if it in fact was the floodwaters of the mighty Amazon river itself) we become truly disoriented at the earliest onset of dusk…

Whereupon, we discover that we are now in the Jungle Warfare Training Grounds known throughout the Special Forces British Military circles as, simply, ´First Camp`.

Eventually, we find what to our ignorant minds looks like a nice place to turn in for the night…

Chris lays his sleeping pad, and sleeping spot directly upon an invisible depression in the ground…surprisingly deep, and surprisingly large…large enough to where it surrounds him like an open coffin; ending where my side of the tent is again raised to a higher level…

It begins pouring sheets of rain down suddenly…

But in the waterproof interior of the tent…we are safe

Are we safe, even? It’s never easy to tell, even if we aren’t.

That night, I sleep as if next to a chicken coup

Only there are no feathers to speak of… and only my brother seeming to convulse the entire night long.

Apparently, he spends the entire night sleeping in a steadily rising puddle of floodwater. Half-asleep, he replays a slow-motion perpetual motion machine, in which he proceeds with hardly enough consciousness to lift his soggy footsies slightly above the rainwater… 8ths of an inch, even…

and then they soggy footsies did fall back down into puddle once more. Over, and over, and over again, moreover…

until first morning light.

It was a hard night…

Surely a bit harder for my poor brother Christopher Thomas Sawyer.

For sometimes it would seem as if he truly does not know one single thing in the whole world at all…

I crap on a rock and it splashes on a nearby fruit tree

“Doesn’t this remind you of the ancient Polynesians?”

I don’t feel good at all…

I understand (all too well) that I am doing much better than Chris, though…

He’s repeating himself VERY frequently this morning, I notice.

I can tell that he’s concerned about a topographical feature on the free map that I tried to give away to a homeless man at the very beginning of our jaunt. The name of this geographical feature is something which he mutters to himself, over, and over, among other less tasteful expressions, and eventually I join to give company to his misery…

For it is quite futile at this point to imagine anything less than torturous

up the trail AHEAD:

Mosquito Mountain

Not the most encouraging name for a Peakfinder bedeckt in orange polyester…

My brother looks at me and says:

“My feet are still wet…and we’re headed for Mosquito Mountain??”

I expect to hear him utter his old go-to catchphrase – “What the CRUD!?” but it never comes

Instead, we press onward through the wild…uncertain of whats all to come, and well aware that we have far too little provisions in our food reserves…

Definitely not enough to get us through the next segment. We will go hungry for at least another day before the nearest re-supply (which is usually just biscuits and cookies). I secretly hope that this day does not include the following evening, to boot.

We have quite literally survived on protein powder for about a day already

Between what the two of us have managed to scavenge from the dark rainforest, and our last supper of something freeze-dried, flavorless, and cold … we have a few spoonfuls of peanut butter to choke down… with a hefty dollop of Nesquik and Whey Protein Powder…

Ya know (the cheap kind that hurts your stomach)

This we WARSH down with a LifeStraw water filter – sucking stale creek water, through the rancid sugar and fake-chocolate artificial “sweet’ners” caught in the LifeStraw’s mouthpiece filter.

I keep an old rusty baked beans can handy…

When I need to, I squirt the donk water into it, to suck dry, as fed into a the beginning of the filtration cycle, from my 3L Camelbak water bladder that lives in my backpack.

“MMMMMM PROTEIN POWDER WITH NESQUIK!!!! MY FAVORITE!!!!” (Orange Shirt Man)

The next part of the story gets a little rough

Not in the traumatic way (at least speaking for myself…I’m quite positive Chris’s experience could have qualified as being “traumatic”)

But, for me, it’s only tough in the way in which you actually are just unable to physically see anything around you, at all.

Before long, its pitch black.

We freeclimb the Mosquito Mountain’s cliff-face

We are freeclimbing the side of a cliff with walking sticks in our hands.

My flashlight is hanging from my teeth; clenched tight in my mouth by it’s wrist strap.

The swaying of the light causes flashes of pure terror to dart around the wall of jungle that we scale like a strobe-light drone is trying to shake us from our agonizingly stressful grip on the steep mountainside.

Into cloudforests we Freestyle, rising into the night air until we break camp at a fairy meadow of stunted tropical trees.

We pitch our tent in a miniature Bonsai canopy

We can’t see anything… so what pictures do I have to share here? Ok this:

Maybe he’s complaining about the stump…I don’t know

Anyway, we are both totally damp the whole night long… yet surprisingly comfortable (“temperature-wise” at least…)

The aching hunger pains are another story, altogether.

I dream of food…of Salmon Sandwiches, Burritos, Mashed ‘Taters

Thinking deeply about how uncomfortable it is under great big tree…. while hungry

As if only because of exhaustion at the constant cries of our hungry bellies, we emerge in extreme pain and discomfort. We suffer with sore backs and blistered, soaking wet feet (and soggy footsies).

We carry on, only because we don’t know any better.

Now we’ve gone into real uncharted territory, it seems like….

Dreamy, and yet deadily-looking, (depending on how you look at it)

I have to admit that the only thing that keeps me from feeling a noticeable amount of paranoia, mixed with claustrophobia, is an innate force compelling me to continue along the instinctive search for sustenance .

Otherwise, I would definitely just sit down and die right here, right now.

Grueling

That’s the only fitting word for it, at this point…

Before the day is through, we both succumb to desperation in every sense of the word… we are hopelessly lost.

In the dark again, without food, without a sign of where the trail continues on… on a bamboo-filled 20ft. high cliff that precariously hangs high above a raging river with rapidly eroding box canyon walls surrounding it on three sides … we miraculously manage to utilize an impossibly perfect flat area, completely overgrown and covered on all sides with a mature stand of bamboo.

Blind though we are… we will still know it if and when the Grim Reaper comes to claim us as Dead.