Underthecurrent

I don’t remember exactly why I wanted to go into the jungle but it made sense at the time.  I know that I had some notes made long in advance about how to get to this place but that I wasn’t exactly sure it would be there when I arrived.  I had tried to go to another place but it did take bookings and it was full.

More than an hour truck ride down dirt roads and a long hike up a hill, just when I thought I was maybe in the wrong place after all, I walked down a cleared path and was greeted by a long term guest and de facto receptionist who pointed me to a bunk room and told me that I could pay for whatever I owed in beer and accommodation when I decided to leave, which could be whenever I felt like it.

Power was intermittent and could go out for days.  Showers were always cold, not that it matters in a tropical climate. The neighbors were howler monkeys with big eyes and stern looking lips that would urinate on you if you stood under their tree canopy.  The bar was a stockpile of bottled beer, replenished monthly, and a tiny fridge with a notepad to keep track of personal consumption.  The kitchen was a gas burner and plastic bins to stop the ants and other insects from carrying away everything.

The highlight of any given week was the once or twice that the Food Truck would somehow make it to a nearby road, everyone would jump out of hammocks and off the floors and run to catch it.  If you’ve spent a bit of time in Latin America you may be familiar with the grocery trucks, usually produce related, that loudly announce whatever they might have to sell that day to call potential purchasers.  The truck that, somehow, made it up the road to us sounded like CEBOLLAPOLLOPAPAYA and was a flatbed full of fresh groceries that proved to be more than enough to keep everyone living in the trees able to avoid trips to town.

We spent our days in the ocean and wandering around the paths and dirt roads nearby, nights slowly drinking beer, making elaborate meals out of whatever the food truck had produced that week, playing cards, telling jokes and stories, dodging the occasional scorpion.

Sometimes, someone new would arrive, always looking confused about whether this was the right place after all.

It was always the right place.

A year or so after the trip I found a video of all of us from the jungle on a destroyed cell phone.  We’re drinking a bit, dancing a bit, mugging for the screen, content.  I sent it out to everyone at once and we all talked about a return to that place that will never happen.

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I am aware that by most measures this is done wrong.  This should be a report about amazing sights or the people of the country or something more exciting that the man who sells groceries from his truck.

That this is projecting a Beach-like fantasy of a lost world where foreigners go to be largely unproductive, perhaps avoiding much of what they came to see.

Or perhaps there could be some summation about the simple life and a Thoreau-style rhapsody about the joy of living without what we do not need.  But the truth is we did have intermittent wifi and not that far down the road there was an actual high end retreat, also hidden, that served fancy blended fruit drinks and avocado toast, which hosted famous people and which we made fun of mercilessly though some of us snuck in from time to time for a fancy blended drink.

And there are other aspects of this same leg of travel that are omitted from the narrative.  The week spent in an off-season resort recovering from a sick stomach.  The days in a couple of busy hostels questioning my own mortality and the state of travel in a world where everything is passively connected.  Anyone writing about a trip is always omitting from the narrative, rotating a lens to choose what is seen and how close up.

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This is about some travel two years ago, just before the long haul trip.  I’ve been considering writing a late but sort-of contemporaneous set of entries about the long haul trip, now being an optimal time to start.