The Adventurer's Son(36)
Roman continued northwest on a lesser-used track mentioned by Frenchfrog. He hoped to bypass the Dos Lagunas ranger station by heading more directly to Naactun through the jungle. As the side track braided, he applied his volcano-climbing rule and followed the best-used tracks headed toward his destination, confident with his route finding: “Marching merrily along, avoiding bullhorn acacia [a small tree protected by painful stinging ants] and spiny climbing palm, I’m thinking about how well my trip is going, and if this is jungle travel, you sure as hell don’t need to be a Navy Seal.”
But soon the track thinned and he trail-blazed trees with his machete to ensure his return on what now alternated between game trail, dry creek bed, and impenetrable bracken, a tropical fern that grows in tangled thickets five to ten feet high. It can take hours to make a hundred yards through the stuff.
After fighting his way through one such thicket, he found he’d lost the trail. It was midafternoon. He set down his pack to scout beyond the dry creek in wetter, taller jungle with a head-high understory of dwarf palms. Intrigued by a 150-foot hill, he climbed it but lost his way on the descent: everything looks the same in the jungle, and the forest’s multilayered canopy blocks the sun’s use as a navigational handrail. Disoriented and a little freaked out by how quickly the uniformly green landscape had swallowed his trail, he was relieved to stumble back to his pack.
Tropical wilderness can be a frightening place alone. Following a bearing by compass or GPS inevitably leads through impassible swamps, tangled vines, and other vegetation hiding poisonous snakes, painful stinging insects, scorpions, and centipedes, or the spines, thorns, and rash-inducing resins of plants. Nights are long. Big cats—and desperate humans—sometimes take the lives of solo travelers.
Camping his third night, the coldest yet, he stuffed plastic bags for insulation into his clothes. Up at three, he waited around a fire for dawn. “I decided that there was no trail to follow, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I should go exhaust my options on the jeep road.” But instead of turning back, Roman further explored the jungle. He caught a lizard and killed it. In his journal he wrote: “tried eating a lizard. Gross.”
He ended up spending about half the day around his campsite looking for a trail that might lead west to Naactun and El Mirador. There definitely was a trail there: an ancient Mayan road in the forest. It ran for maybe two hundred feet in a perfect line, six feet wide and three feet high—a raised walkway called a sakbe—that ended in a ruin excavated by looters. Intrigued by the ancient route, he went deeper into the jungle. He had plenty of water—almost thirty-five pounds worth—but his burden forced him to drop his pack while cutting trail and return to shuttle it onward with ants, spiders, dead twigs, and dried leaves stuck to his sweaty neck and arms.
One of his blazed trees wept white sap below the unmistakable V scars of rubber tappers. Encouraged he might still find a trail, he pushed onward until dusk. He stopped at the edge of a giant limestone sinkhole. Hoping to find water he found “nothing at the bottom but wasps, crumbling limestone mud, rotten logs, and the promise of never being found.”
That night, his fourth in El Petén, he learned that if he draped his plastic tarp over his mosquito-net tent he stayed warmer and slept well. Fire was tough to start in the dewy morning with his candle wax, but he found that the flaky, flammable bark from the “tourist tree” (so-named because it looks like a peeling, sunburned tourist) brought the fire to life.
“The next day I went exploring for four hours before deciding it was time to go back and find Dos Lagunas. The jungle was making me claustrophobic and I wasn’t sure how well I could follow my trail back out.” He discovered it was much easier to walk out than walk in: a trail that took two days to hack with a machete took just three hours to the jeep track.
Roman strolled into the Dos Lagunas ranger station just before sunset. There he found “an old white guy” wandering around and “four somewhat standoffish, if curious rangers. On a whim, I told them I was going to El Mirador. They said I could camp there.”
Pleased to be welcome and happy to have company after five days in the jungle alone, Roman dropped his big pack, wiped the sweat and dirt from his face, took a long draw from his water bottle, and pulled on a dry shirt, wondering what the other gringo was up to so far from the end of the road.
Chapter 17
Finding Carmelita
Campfire in Mexico, January 2014.
Courtesy of the author
A young ranger grilled Roman on where he was from, probably since the “old white guy” was a paunchy, middle-aged Russian without any Spanish. The rangers hoped Roman could communicate with him. But he did little better than they, learning only that the Russian restored museum paintings in St. Petersburg and hoped to make it to El Mirador by way of Nakbe.
In Spanish, Roman told the rangers what he had done and what he wanted to do. He showed them his sketch map and compass. In response, they gave him a recent, color map of the route between Dos Lagunas and Naactun. Over a shared dinner of beans, tortillas, and Nescafé, they told Roman that the rangers at Naactun would have better information about getting from Naactun to Nakbe. They asked if he wouldn’t mind traveling with the Russian. Roman explained he didn’t have enough extra food for the Russian’s slow pace. Knowing it was safer to travel together than alone, the rangers offered some of their food to take. Roman accepted a package of ramen noodles and said he’d watch out for the Russian by marking trail and leaving water.