Everything
is going just fine. We have made it to this small dot of a country in
the underarm of the Yucatan Peninsula, on the Caribbean coast. We are
leaving the small Garifuna fishing village where we spent the night
hidden in tents in the underbrush of a beach. But Vance starts screaming.
You know, not the scream of anguish - the scream of the willies. The
monkey scream. Pulls off his shoe, and this giant spider crawls out
- you know, a furry half-dollar that starts running all over the truck.
"I felt this pulsing in my shoe. Something tapping," Vance
said. Then he yells. Not the yell of the willies, but the yell of the
creeps. "The spider was just trying to get out of my shoe."
The
spider crawls under the floor mat, underneath the dashboard, and we
can't find him. This would mean the bugger would be creeping under the
floor mat for the duration of our route to Monkey River Town.
There
is a lesson with this spider. It is the first rule of tropical camping.
Don't leave your shoes out at night. That goes along with the second
rule. Always keep your tent zipper closed. The third rule is probably
this: cover your body in deet. We had acquired a large amount of ninety-percent
deet. A potion of mosquito repellent that is so powerful it stains your
clothes and swells your skin into rash.
Malaria, yellow fever, Dengue fever and cholera are not fatal if treated
appropriately, but they are also avoidable with a healthy lathering
of deet. The real bugger you have to watch for in the Caribbean lowlands
of Central America, however, is the fer-de-lance. This pit-viper has
a bone in its body that vibrates proportionately to the amount of weight
of a nearby animal, allowing it the sense to estimate how much venom
to inject you with to send you to your grave based on a calculation
of your weight. The fer-de-lance, approximating the weight of a horse-bound
jungle traveler and his horse, has been noted to slash the horse with
an amount of venom based on both the horse and the rider.
This
lends credence to sticking to the trail. Nobody walks outside of trails
in the dense riverine jungles of Central America. Even the Mayans who
inhabited this region built paths and roads. Too dense to walk, too
dangerous to consider.
Old Highways of Peten From Belize into the jungles of Northern Guatemala, we travel with redheaded triplets who insist our theories about the Mayan past are all wrong.
The Howling Coast From the isolated Pacific Coast of Nicaragua to its bustling center.
Granada Libre Nicaragua from its tourism mecca, and the choices it faces as it enters a brave new world.
Jungle in the Sky A walk in the Nicaraguan volcanic cloud forest of Mombacho with an odd cast of characters.
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