Leeches and Waterfalls

I am skeptical of our guide. He is significantly shorter than me, skinnier, appears to be younger in age, and has a wide toothy grin that makes me mildly nervous. He is also wearing flip flops, which has the pretentious gear junkie in me scoffing and the 2nd Lieutenant of Marines in me wanting to buy him a pair of good hiking boots and smartwool® socks like I'm wearing. Everything I've ever learned about hiking tells me that his feet are going to be ripped up at the end of the day, and we're going to be stuck out in the woods with a Cambodian who can't walk and no idea of where we are.

There is a much more quiet voice in the back of my head telling me that this teenager with his wickedly curved scythe-like machete has been born and raised in these woods, and that there is a very good possibility that he knows a lot more about staying alive out in the woods than I do, and can hike for longer, go faster, and carry more than I could in this particular environment.

I listen to the quiet voice and shake his proffered hand, nodding my head respectfully and asking his name. He responds with something that sounds like a cross between a cluck and some consonants, and I mentally resign myself to not being able to say, remember, or understand it. Of all the languages I've encountered so far, Cambodian is my least favorite and least understood. Carlos would later give him the nickname "Machete", which he seemed to like.

Amanda and I are paired up with two other trekkers, Charlie and Carlos, two of perhaps the most interesting people I've had the pleasure of encountering on my trip so far. Along with the four of us there was Machete, another guide who we called Red Socks, for the blood red knee socks that he wore under his flip flops, and two cooks. Charlie and Carlos are on a 5 day trek, but their route is exactly the same as ours until the very last day, so they might as well have been on the same trip.

Machete points down the one road in Chi Phat, and without any fanfare we start walking.

 

 

Hiking is the kind of physical suffering that I love. Pack weight usually doesn't bother me, nor does walking for hours on end, in heat, cold, mountains, whatever nature, and the route thrown at me usually fades away with the satisfaction of crossing distance under your own power. I love to hike to places; I'm a caveman like that. Real, physical progress makes me feel accomplished, and it is an accomplishment. Humans don't walk enough. 

Hours later, as I always do, I am regretting my decision to walk somewhere with a pack on my back. Sweat drips down my face, my muscles burn and my breath is ragged. My fancy hiking boots are soaked through, courtesy of walking through a few streams just wide enough to be unjumpable while not being wide enough to justify taking my shoes and socks off, wading across, and then putting them back on. I am seriously concerned about my feet because of this; wet feet and hiking are no joke, but no one else seems worried enough to put up with me slowing them down. "Its good training, we understand?" I mutter to myself in my best Sergeant Instructor growl.

The jungle we are hiking through has given me a realistic understanding of how badass any Korea or Vietnam Vet really is. The temperature is unreal, and I've only been hotter in Quantico; this is supposed to be winter for Cambodia, too. After walking through some rolling open plains, we enter triple canopy jungle, following a path that is sometimes wide enough for a Ford Explorer, and other times seemingly non-existent. The few times we've deviated, Machete had to hack us a way through, slowing our progress unbelievably. It takes mere hours before I come to the conclusion that we should never ever fight in this kind of terrain again, and pray that we won't have to. Why can't the bad guys ever fight over some place pleasant, like Southern France . . . Wait, sorry Grandpa Wood.
 

 

 

It really is beautiful though. The plains are dominated by waist-high grass and water buffalo, and provide a great view of the Cardamom Mountain range to our North. The jungle is vibrantly alive with everything from monkeys to birds to a centipede that scared the shit out of Machete when he noticed it on the path. Apparently those things are poisonous. I gave it a wide berth while at the same time trying to get a good look at it.

Around noon on the first day I got my first leech. I didn't notice it until I was stripping my shoes and socks off to cross the first major river we'd run across. I was still hoping I'd be able to keep my feet dry while hiking, and was switching over to sandals to cross to the opposite bank, where our guides were setting up lunch. Just down the river was our second waterfall, the first of which we had stopped at briefly around 10 am. Both were amazing, but this was the larger of the two, by an order of magnitude, and I was looking forward to jumping in.

 

 

So it was with some surprise that I hiked up my pants and realized that the left side of one of my socks was soaked in blood - MY BLOOD!

Huh.

Red Socks looked over and nodded sagely, "Lychee."

I felt no pain. Apparently when these guys bite you they hit you with an anesthetic and a pretty impressive anti-coagulant. They take their fill, and drop off when finished – leaving you bleeding and wondering what happened. I am more curious than frightened or irritated. The leech was gone, and I was already bitten; no point in getting angry about something I couldn't control. My leg bled feely for a while, and eventually stopped, leaving a small ugly bruise the size of a sharpie mark where the bite was.

We dipped in the waterfall, swimming right up next to it and sometimes through it. After hiking for four hours through the sun and jungle it was exactly what we needed.

 

After was lunch. I learned more about setting up a cook fire in those 4 days than I had in all my years of Scouts. One of the deep reservations I have about the scouting community is that, while it puts an emphasis on a lot of very good things, like community service, leadership and appreciating the outdoors, practical outdoor survival skills are not actually practiced by most troops. I never learned how to make a cook fire in Scouts. I learned how to make a fire, but not once did I cook over one. This is true of many "outdoor skills" like water purification, improvised shelters, and about a dozen other things. They may or may not have been covered in classroom form, but rarely did we ever get a practical application lesson. (Mr. Meyer, if you're reading this, I don't want to offend, and would love to lead a camp out sometime that focuses on these things next time I'm back in NM).

Lunch (and dinner and breakfast) for the entire time out the woods was rice, with cabbage, pork, carrots, and some unidentifiable local vegetables. With breakfast we got an omelet which was essentially just scrambled eggs that hadn't been cut up. Sounds pretty boring, but was actually delicious. Cambodian hot sauce (a more badass version of Siracha) is a good way to mix things up, but I didn't want to all that often.

It was after lunch that the leeches came in force. Our guides had cut some sticks for us to flick them off our shoes and socks, and sometimes pants, but they are determined little bastards. By 4 p.m. we were nearly running through the jungle despite our packs, our exhaustion, and the danger of running through such terrain, simply because it made it harder for the leeches to latch on. Despite this, I would estimate that I had upwards of thirty on my body by the time we pushed our way through a stretch of tall grass and made it to that night's camp.

Camp was a raised platform of bamboo that the leeches were too stupid to climb up for some reason. It had a thatch roof and open sides. The jungle pressed in, obscuring the view of a river that you could hear burbling just out of sight.

It was heaven.

We stripped down to our skivvies, desire to get rid of the leeches overwhelming any sense of modesty around our guides or our new friends Charlie and Carlos, who did the same. The little bastards had gotten everywhere, but my worst fears were assuaged when I stripped my trousers off and discovered that the compression shorts below had kept them all away from my crotch. I had several bite marks along my waistline, but nothing had gotten through the spandex.

The guides, making the rest of us look lazy, set up camp, retrieved water, and started a cook fire all in the space of time it took us to get changed into camp clothes. I almost objected when they started setting up my hammock for me, but it had only taken a day of hiking with these guys to figure out that they were significantly better at everything in these woods, and that everything would go a lot more smoothly if I just shut up and went with it.

Night falls quickly in the jungle. During dinner it felt as though we were suddenly thrust into darkness, with the only illumination coming from two candles our guides had set up just before dinner. These flickered and sputtered, yet somehow glowed brightly, illuminating a sphere of faces.

Food is perhaps one of the greatest morale improvers out there, and where we had been really too exhausted to converse much before, after dinner Charlie, Carlos, Amanda and I stayed up in the light of the candles and got to know each other. Charlie was a concert promoter in the States up until four years ago, until he got tired of the lifestyle and decided to do something else. Something else amounted to getting his dive instructor qualification and traveling from job to job teaching scuba diving. This had the side benefit of allowing him to travel from paradise to paradise, and get paid to do it. He met Carlos in Puerto Rico, and the two became fast friends. Carlos is a fast talking and fun loving Puerto Rican native, and perhaps one of the funniest people I've met. His self-effacing humor is both endearing and utterly hilarious, and he would fill our quiet moments with little gems like, "I dated this girl who had this fetish: she would dress up like herself and act like a total bitch."

Carlos and Charlie are both incredibly thoughtful and intelligent people as well. Before they came out to Chi Phat for this trip, they spent ten days in total silence at a Buddhist retreat in Thailand – total silence for ten days, two meals a day, and sleeping on hard stone beds just like the Buddha. Both of them described it as one of the most profound experiences of their lives. Ten days is a long time to be alone inside your head, and I found myself wondering how I would do if all I could hear was me.

Scary thought.

The candle burned low as we talked, and it was with the sudden realization that we would have to walk just as far or farther the next day that we decided to sleep.

-Doug