Trekking through the Jungle

Okay, I will admit it before you get too excited: it wasn’t a jungle. It was more like a steady flow of water and rocks that made up a ravine surrounded by trees and thick foliage. So if you stretched your imagination a bit, it could feel like a jungle. Except that the wildest animals I saw were birds, spiders, endless webs, one buck and a single crab.

At first our walk just consisted of happy rock-hopping to avoid stepping in the shallow water and getting our shoes soaked. The real adventure began when it become impossible to hop from rock to rock and we had to move onto land on one side of the ravine. That would have been a piece of cake if the “land” wasn’t covered in thick bushes and thorny plants that we had to force our way through. And there was an abundance of those deceptively pretty flowers attached to thorny stems that inflict poison into your skin to produce red and slightly swollen scratches if you dare to come into their territory.

Sometimes we were forced to go out into the open, away from the water and bushes, and then had to put up with the humid sun. Then, when it was again possible, we would curve back downwards to the ravine. Once we had to climb up a small, but steep, wet rock-face since our way was once-again blocked by resentful shrubbery. Later, after we had walked awhile, we climbed back downwards, using a small, sapling of a tree for support. At one spot, we even startled a deer, which, poor thing, disappeared out of sight instantaneously. We crawled under fallen trees, along the bank while clinging onto whatever we could and, believe me, I nearly slipped several times on this venture.

Finally, we had well-earned rest on a big, flat rock where we chewed on dried mango strips and ate thick slices of banana bread smeared with butter. We sat there for awhile, just listening to the beautiful sound of flowing water and looking up at the sun shimmering on the leaves that made up the sky above our heads. We then took the road instead of the “jungle” on the walk back home, our arms and legs bearing proof of a battle with thorns, branches and mud. There is something satisfying about those scratches and mud patches though; they are the evidence that we braved and survived a trek through the “jungle”………….

All pictures taken by Jess Leigh