Hell can't be this bad

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Tara sat hunched over on the rock, with her shoulders resting on her knees and a stream of sweat trailing down her face. Maybe her time as a bank accountant in Australia had softened her a bit. I had been traveling around the world for twelve months, lugging sixty pounds of essential travel items (don’t ask what), so I had an advantage. I also had boundless energy that day and felt like I could walk at least another five miles. "You’re a wuss, Tar," I thought. But to Tara I said, "You know, this is a good place to stop. Let’s get some rest. I’m sure we’ll feel better tomorrow."

I brought Tara the stove, a pot and four packages of curry noodle soup, and she stirred dinner while I pitched the tent. We were now thirty miles upstream on the banks of the Sungai Tahan, which was about seventy-five feet wide here and flanked by thick jungle bush. The trees lining the river seemed almost desperate for space and grew at sharp angles, dangling out over the water. Thick brush, vines and other less fortunate trees hung in their shadows and created a wall of plant matter so dense we couldn’t see into the woods beyond them. It was a calm, idyllic setting, though, and appeared to be the perfect place to camp. With a steep, brushy slope on one side of us and ten feet of rocky riverbed on the other, there was just one spot to put the tent—in a manmade clearing at the foot of the hill, about thirty feet from the water’s edge.

A late-day shower hit as dinner was served, so we ate in the tent, leaving the dirty dishes outside for morning (in retrospect, not a good idea, but luckily they didn’t attract any animals). Tara collapsed from exhaustion while I fumbled with my journal, trying to record the day’s events before light disappeared. Our "long-lasting" flashlight batteries had died the first night in the jungle, so we were forced to bed at sundown, 7 p.m. Tara can fall asleep before the stars are fully awake. I can’t go to bed before midnight, regardless of how tired I am, which is why I took two sleeping pills around seven o’clock and then drifted right off to sleep. It seemed only minutes later when I heard a distant voice.

"Hey! Wake up!" Blah, blah. Swish. I fused these sounds into my dream.

Shhhh . . . "Kari!" . . . Shhhhh. Was I dreaming of a waterfall?

"Look!" Blah, blah. Of someone beckoning me to come see, as frothy water plunged over an embankment into a crystal-clear pool?

Cashoosh. Or maybe a flushing toilet?

"Get up! Get up! It’s coming in here!" Tara now yelled into my ear, trying to snap me awake.

"What?" I asked, which was the only word I could form with my sleepy tongue.

"I said, it’s coming in here! The river," Tara insisted.

"Oh, Tar. That’s not the river," I said, as water gushed through the bug-net door and slapped against my sleeping bag. "We’re too far away from the river," I thought to myself. "It can’t be the river."

I lay in a dreamy haze, refusing to believe what was happening, but then, swooshhhh—another wave hit and my survival instinct kicked in. "My god, it’s the river," I suddenly realized. I threw on my rain pants and jacket and scrambled to the door.

"C’mon. C’mon," I muttered, jerking and tugging at the rusty zipper. "C’mon. It won’t open!" I yelled. Tara rustled around for a knife to slash our way out, but the zipper finally came unstuck. I yanked open the door and we lunged outside, like birds spooked from their nest. The river, once calm and soothing, was now a thundering torrent, carrying prickly vines, palm trees and logs as big as telephone poles toward us.

"Quick, Tara. Get the boots! We have to find the boots," I shouted over the rumbling floodwater.

Several short, scraggly bushes kept the debris from hitting us while we scrambled to find the smelly boots and dirty dishes we’d left outside under the rain flap for the night. Faint moonlight filtered through the trees, but our eyes hadn’t adjusted enough to see. Frantically, we combed the water with our hands.

"I found one!" yelled Tara, chucking a boot onto the hill.

"Great! Just three more," I called back, still searching.

But within thirty seconds, the water rose from our ankles to our knees, and the current made it nearly impossible to stand. We had to escape. I threw on my backpack, ripped the tent out of the ground and ran—tent pegs, dishes and boots still floating somewhere behind us.

Barefoot and hunched over, we clawed our way up the steep, muddy slope behind our campsite. The igloo-shaped rental tent I dragged behind me was still set up, and I could hear poles snapping as I forced it between trees. When I looked back, Tara was about fifteen feet away, grasping for branches to pull herself up and struggling to see without her glasses.

"Whatever you do, don’t fall," I yelled. She didn’t know how to swim. And, truthfully, I didn’t want to have to save her. With my luck, we’d both get swept away.

After Tara made it up the hill, we sat in the mud, staring down at the angry river.

"Good Lord!" she said. "Do you think we’ll ever make it back?"

"Not a chance," I snapped. "We’ve trekked thirty miles into a jungle without a guide, we never registered or bought permits to enter the park, no one knows we’re here and the path is long gone." I didn’t know yet that our photocopied map was also completely soaked and illegible.

I fought to swallow the lump welling in my throat—a combination of tears, vomit and desperation—and hugged my knees so they’d stop shaking. Tara didn’t reply. We sat in silence for a while, until I eventually gathered my courage and said, "We’ll make it, but it won’t be easy—especially without boots."

Along with our camp stove, dishes and tent pegs, three boots had washed away. We passed the one surviving boot back and forth, taking turns feeling and smelling it. It was definitely mine, we agreed. Then we curled up on top of the collapsed tent and wrapped ourselves in emergency blankets. Tara was understandably terrified of the rising floodwaters and had wet her pants while scrambling up the hill. The sharp smell of urine added to the brew of jungle odors. It was going to be a long night. The sky was now perfectly clear, moonlight dancing across the whitewater below and water dripping from the trees overhead, making a crackling sound as it hit our aluminum blankets. Chilled and exhausted, I hoped the sleeping pills were still in my system. Something, sleeping pills or shock, finally knocked me out, and I slept seven solid hours on a wet tent with my feet in the mud.

The next morning, the sun shone brightly in the clear blue sky, and the river, although brown with sediment, had partially receded. We slid down the mucky, chewed-up slope to survey the damage and do a full inventory of our gear. Amazingly, I found my metal cooking pot about ten feet from where our tent had stood. It was sitting upright, in between the exposed roots of a tree, half filled with sand and topped off with water. 

Without that pot, we’d have had to chew on dry rice and dehydrated soup for three days. 

The stove was gone, but we had fuel tablets and could easily make our own cooking platform.

As it turned out, the surviving boot wasn’t mine. My $190 Garmonts were somewhere downriver. "That’s that, so get over it," I told myself. But I watched with envy as Tara laced up her left boot, then put a thick, red sock on her other foot. Unlike Tara, who’d bought new clothes for the hike (this being her first big trekking adventure), I was wearing stuff I’d had for months. None of it was pretty, and most of it was just barely functional. I glanced down at my threadbare socks and then twisted them around until their holes peered up at me. We slathered our feet with salt to keep the leeches at bay, and then, after one more fruitless search for my boots, began our three-day, thirty-mile jungle trek back to safety—in four socks and one boot.

I enjoy walking barefoot—around swimming pools, on beaches or across soft grassy lawns. Otherwise, I am a footwear type of person. I wear sandals when I kayak in case I have to step on slimy rocks, and I don’t touch bottom when I swim in murky ponds. Normally, I wouldn’t dream of walking more than a few feet from a campsite without shoes. I was truly dreading the idea of hiking through a leech-ridden jungle, even with socks.

Although the river had receded somewhat, we were no longer able to cut across the riverbed as we had the day before in order to avoid the densely overgrown patches of trail along the embankment. Instead, we had to clamber over downed trees and piles of debris deposited at bends in the river by the flood (so that’s how they got there). It took a while to climb over these four-foot-high mounds of tangled brush or scramble through thick vegetation to skirt them, yet we always managed to get back on track.

The path eventually led away from the river, along narrow, slippery ledges that hadn’t seemed as treacherous with boots. One ledge was only wide enough for our feet; we had to shuffle along its slick surface with our backpacks protruding over the edge. I lost my footing just as I cleared this section and fell sideways down a steep slope, saved from dropping any further by a thin tree.

Just an hour into the
hike, a huge splinter lodged itself into the soft cushion of my left heel. 

At first, the biggest drawback to not having boots was that whenever I walked—especially uphill—my muddy socks crept down until about two inches of stretched-out, wet sock material flapped off the tips of my toes. That’s when my mini bungee cords came in handy. They were also useful for keeping my socks in place during river-crossings. Overall, walking in socks wasn’t as bad as I had expected, as long as we took our time and watched every step. And, at least the first day, the clay and dirt ground typically cushioned our steps. So we continued on our way, slipping, clutching branches, concentrating hard and stepping gingerly through the forest.

We eventually arrived at a campsite, which, judging by its corrugated surface and the washed-up trees, appeared to have flooded the night before as well. Tara and I prepared dinner and then pitched our tent in the highest spot we could possibly find—about thirty feet above the river—just before the sun disappeared and the thunder began. No rain fell that night, but we planned our escape routes and slept fully clothed on the hard ground inside the tent—just as a precaution.

The next day, the path led us deeper into the woods, where the trail was covered in roots and sharp stones. Dragging one’s feet when tired is not an option when walking barefoot, especially on steep terrain; the rocks and thorny vines underfoot brought tears to my eyes, and I stubbed my toes—hard and painfully—several times. Just an hour into the hike, a huge splinter lodged itself into the soft cushion of my left heel. It was in too deep to dig out along the trail, so I spent the next four hours walking on the toes of that foot.

Tara, wearing just one boot, takes a long break atop the twenty-sixth hill, on our fifth day hiking in the jungle.

Tara’s hurdle that day was getting over the twenty-seven hilltops again. She almost made it, but then collapsed on top of number twenty-six and lay motionless for half an hour. When she finally sat up, she vented her frustrations. She had taken a break from accounting work and set out to travel, she said, hoping to have a few adventures along the way. Now, she said in tears, she didn’t think she could handle it.

"Tar, I can assure you this is not a typical adventure," I told her.

We spent the rest of that day in a worn-out stupor, sliding around the muddy track and tripping over fallen trees. Despite having the security of the one boot, Tara spent a good portion of the final hill on all fours. Finally, we slipped and tiptoed our way into the next campsite—another dirt clearing next to a small stream—where we would spend our last night.

While I dug the splinter out of my foot, Tara repaired the tent poles and set up our oddly shaped "dome" on top of giant fern branches for added comfort. Then I realized I had gotten my period—two weeks early and totally unprepared—from the shock of the whole experience. I discovered this, of course, right after washing all my clothes in the stream.

Just as it was my turn to eat (we had only one spoon between us), it started to rain, so we dashed into the leaky tent and watched a puddle form in the middle of the floor. The downpour lasted only about an hour before the moon and stars came out, shining brightly on that calm night. Then we discovered how the whole flash-flood process worked. About an hour after the rain, we heard a distant rumbling grow louder and louder as floodwater came rushing toward us from upstream. It roared past us, driving up the stream’s water level within seconds. Under the moonlight, we could see whitewater bubbling over the top of the embankment, but much to our relief, it never reached the tent.

The last day, with feet as swollen as sausages and numb to any pain, we hiked through a level, muddy forest where the leeches seemed much more prevalent and aggressive. Tara and I had different tactics for leech removal. I shrieked, cringed and then quickly flicked them off my legs. Tara, for some unknown reason, was a more appealing target, and therefore had developed a more mellow approach. She would sit down on a rock or tree stump and quietly talk to herself as she used matches to burn the wormy creatures off her calves.

That final afternoon, we collected more cuts, scrapes, bruises and bloodsuckers, up and down both legs—good conversation pieces, we agreed—yet our spirits remained high. Just several miles from the trail’s end, we came upon a foot-deep marshy area that could be crossed in one of two ways: by walking along a downed log that connected one embankment to the other, or by shinnying, hand over hand, along a rope tied to a tree on each side of the mucky bog. Tara chose the log. Given our experiences along this trail, and my sense of adventure that sometimes exceeds my luck, I should have known better. But since we were nearly finished with our trek, I was beginning to feel more daring again. With my pack on my back, I reached out and grabbed the rope with both hands, leapt up and swung my feet around the rope and, in an instant, plunged into the mud pool. I lay in the mud, backside down, like a flipped turtle, and Tara and I laughed harder than we had all week. Two hours later, we made it back to park headquarters, filthy and temporarily scarred, but otherwise just fine. Recently, we’ve even talked about attempting the trip again, on a shoestring budget, with walking permits and two pairs of boots each . . . and water wings. 

—Kari Bodnarchuk