It’s past midnght. Our flashlights are poking tiny pinholes in the darkness. Silently we stalk through the jungle, tiptoeing slowly between the trees and sinking our boots deep in the clay-colored mud. Our food rations exhausted, we keep our eyes riveted to the ground, looking for little furrows in the leaves. To my starving imagination, every vague pattern in the dirt is an animal trail– the footprints of a paca, a tapir, a wayward armadillo. My stomach is audibly growling; my body is sore and wet. Still nothing. Every muscle tense with anticipation. We hear the scream of a distant macaw. A flurry of bats’ wings overhead. Then nothing but pregnant stillness. The blade of my machete glows pale blue in the moonlight– I run my fingers gently up and down the handle, feeling its cold texture. Then, suddenly– the gunman spins around and hurries back to us, his face hardened into a look of restrained panic.
– “Jaguar.”
– “How far?”
– “Not far.”
– “And what the f*ck do we do if it comes”
– “Keell it.”
We press on, blindly, weapons poised. Little distinction between hunter and hunted.
An eternity ago, back in Manaus, I had asked around and gotten in touch with a freelance guide named Jungle Boy who specialized in survivalism. The plan we hashed out was simple: meet up with an indigenous guide (a hilarious little bugger named The Captain) who had a rough feel for the area; take a leaky wooden boat down the Amazon’s flooded tributaries until we found a perfectly obscure, unexplored stretch of wilderness; tether the boat and set up a base by the shore; then trek inland as far as we possible could in ten days. Carrying only basic supplies, miniature hammocks, an old rifle, and three machetes, we spent several days hacking a narrow path through untouched jungle, making knife gashes in tree trunks as we passed to mark our way. Progress was slow and difficult, as every step required us to cut through dense tangles of trees, vines, branches, and roots– some spiked, some twisted, some as hard as rock. The sun glared down on us ferociously. A layer of filth coated our skin with a slimy sheen. Ants crawled inside our clothes and bit our bodies; mosquito bites covered literally every square inch of exposed flesh; my head was swollen from the five simultaneous wasp stings I had suffered on the first morning, four on my scalp and one on my upper lip which made it somewhat painful to speak.
– “Do you think,” I asked Jungle Boy towards the end of our first day inland, “that anyone has ever been here before?”
– “No,” he answered immediately. “Not a chance.”
Because we had decided against bringing tents, we had to spend our afternoons constructing makeshift shelters for the night. The designs grew increasingly complex, but the simplest was a sort of teepee made from chopped wood and palm fronds. This first required us to find an appropriately spaced triangle of thick trees, then to clear the area between them with our machetes while keeping a careful eye out for snakes and tarantula dens. Next, we each cut down a medium-sized tree, measured out the correct distance, then fastened it horizontally to one side of the triangle at a height of about 2.5 meters, knotting it with vine. The walls and roof of the structure were formed with colossal palm fronds, each an absolute minimum of 12 meters high, which we sliced down and collected from the surrounding forest. This step was by far the longest, as each of the 80 or so palm fronds had to be individually cut, dragged to the shelter, and jammed upright into small holes in the ground, turned inward to form a canopy. When all this was done, we had to quickly string up our hammocks, tend to our wounds, then set out searching for food in the premature darkness of the jungle. On the fifth night, feeling inexplicably ambitious, we cut down, hauled, and fastened 10 large trees and about 85 palm fronds to form a rudimentary house. We camped there for two nights, fishing for pirhanas by day, and keeping a wary watch for jaguars at night by the light of our dying fire.
Nighttime in the jungle is primal and terrifying. When the sun sets on the Amazon, it doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed: either way, all you can see is pure, infinite blackness. This complete lack of visual input makes sounds much more intense– every shriek, squawk, growl, call, and cackle explodes savagely in your eardrums. The haunted-house ambience of the jungle, combined with the effects of malaria pills, makes nightmares long, cinematic, elaborate, and extremely vivid– I felt like I was lending my brain to David Lynch for four hours every night. I thought the Heart of Darkness effect was just a metaphor, but for me it turned out to be real– your brain really does tunnel into some dark burrows when night falls on the rainforest.
Here in Manaus I’m showered, shaven, well-fed, recovering. I just charged my iPod and ate a bowl of açaà gelato as big as my head, but being back in civilization still feels weird, and a little disconcerting. I’m hoping this is just a temporary aftereffect of the jungle, because in two days I’ll be heading to Sao Paulo– from unexplored wilderness to a city of 11 million in the space of five days. Right now I’m going to calm my nerves with some cheap Brazilian beer; I’ll add photos when I find a decent internet connection. Hope you didn’t miss me too much.
