the Jungle Book

Jumping off a waterfall is perhaps one of my favorite things to do. After hiking through the Cambodian jungle for five hours, the cool water and mild adrenaline rush make you feel less like a wrung our wet rag and more like the human being you're supposed to be.

We started pretty early. In the jungle you wake up whenever the sun comes up, because that's when the animals wake up and start making noise. The night before, our guides had assembled a shelter out of nothing but bamboo and some tarps. It took them about half an hour, and was better than anything I could have put together in that amount of time. We were a little crowded, but the tarp kept the rain out, which is the most important thing.
 

We'd spent most of the day before hiking, with a short detour to a jar burial site that was over three hundred years old. It was mildly interesting, but also anti-climactic after all the grand tombs I'd seen over the last two months. I was secretly hoping for some Indiana Jones style boulder dodging, or at the very least a cliff jump, but what I got was a rickety ladder and some broken jars. After that, it was hiking through bamboo forests and a few open fields.
 

So it was a bit of a surprise today when just after lunch we turned off the main trail and found the biggest camp we'd seen yet. It was exactly like the first camp, but with multiple raised platforms, a no kidding toilet (drop toilet, no water) and a picnic table. It was paradise.

 

After dropping our packs Machete led us of down a short path to a series of waterfalls, and then surprised us by asking if we wanted to jump. It had been forbidden at our pervious ones.

Charlie and Carlos broke out their GoPro and proceeded to do some back flips off the rock. Amanda and I stuck with cannonballs. Not all of us can be skydiving, dive instructing, Buddhist retreat going adrenaline junkies.

A few hours later we rested in the shallows, watching some monkeys play in the trees across the water. They jumped from tree to tree, chasing after each other, visible as they ran along exposed branches and then disappearing, but still easy to track through the moving bush. As we watched, we talked, chatting about anything and everything. In a shockingly short time we had become good friends – a team. We shared equipment, stories, and food.

That night I broke out the powdered Gatorade I'd been saving for a rainy day, and we shared the sickly sweet drink – the first not water we'd had since starting this adventure. It was magnificent.

In the morning we would part ways; Charlie and Carlos going for the last leg of their trip, while we returned to Chi Phat, and then on to Phnom Penh and then Siam Reap. That night, I reflected on how lucky we were to have met them and had them as hiking partners. We'd made friends, shared a great experience, and learned a lot, couldn't ask for much more. 

 

-Doug