Remember the Jungle
Unearthing old diaries to understand the wild swings of life on the road
To travel from New York City to the mountains of Minca, a small village in the jungle near Colombia’s northeast coast, one must fly six hours to Bogotá, catch a connecting flight to Santa Marta, hire a taxi into that town’s square, haggle with a crowd of drivers for a seat on a twisting, hourlong ride in a converted school bus to a small village set in a sweeping valley, and then, depending on the weather, hire a man on a motorcycle, for around two U.S. dollars, to carry you and your luggage up a steep dirt road into the clouds.
The last leg of the journey, on the motorbike, depends on the elements because, on occasion, it rains so much in Minca (the town receives around 90 inches of precipitation a year) that its many rivers, streams, and creeks are prone to flood the single dirt road which ascends away from a quaint town center. When I visited Minca, just over two years ago, one such downpour had just begun, and the moto drivers, upon the arrival of myself and two freshly minted friends, were immersed in a debate about how feasible a trip up the mountain—to our accommodations—would be given the wet conditions. Some drivers were more confident than others. The three of us had packed relatively light, each with one large and one small backpack, but our luggage still added a not-insignificant weight to our pre-existing, and highly varying, loads.
“Eh, ¿por qué no?” the boldest of the drivers allowed after a few minutes of dithering. It was the ringing endorsement we’d been waiting for. Two of his buddies, with palpably less gumption, reluctantly joined the party. We had our rides up the mountain.
It was immediately evident why the drivers had been so hesitant. I’d have had serious reservations about driving up that road myself in a hefty four-wheeler on a dry day; with the rain dumping down on us that afternoon, it was barely traversable. The bike’s wheels—weighed down by the combined heft of myself, the driver I was pressed against, and the backpack I’d buckled on with every conceivable strap on the apparatus—sunk into the slick road, shiny like soft, light clay molded with dripping hands. I dug my wrists into the driver’s hips, completely at his mercy as we swerved around precipitous barriers and splashed through pockets of water determined to banish the word “puddle” into obsolescence. At the most harrowing points my driver would look back with a smirk (I’d been assigned the devious one).
After an hour of herking and jerking (including the traversal of a raging river which had formed amidst the downpour, replete with dozens of hollering local spectators and an infinitesimal moment amidst the crossing when I felt the wheels of the bike lose contact with the ground), we arrived at our destination, which turned out to be a combination of a small lodge and a primary school (obviously). Class was in session as we straggled up, and the giggles and screams and sobs of a dozen or so small children coincided with the most remarkable thing: the sun came out. In a flash, the sky transformed, torrents gave way to a distinct crispness, and Minca revealed itself. The three of us, through commiserating with our cackling drivers, dropped off our things and took a soggy walk amidst the most outrageous natural beauty I’d ever experienced.
That night, sipping from a thick, ceramic mug of hot chocolate on a candlelit patio, soaked shoes and socks drying to my left beside a crusty welcome mat, surrounded by silence with a cat named Cosmo in my lap, I took out my journal and wrote the following:
Here, in the middle of the rainforest, surrounded by green, reading, with conservation and animals and life the center of my focus, I feel alive, true. I do not need anything here. I do not need to write. I do not need friends. I only need the jungle, the forest, the connection to the Earth, to the animals. I am returning to concrete but I do not know why. This is a power—a superpower—I do not have to be in the jungle to feel a part of the jungle. I am living with irony, sarcasm, too close to my heart. My heart is free of these. My heart is the trees, this feeling of purity. Accept more than I reject. Open my heart, stop filtering myself. Stop living in relation, or in opposition, or holding judgment, of others. I started doing that by writing today. Great writing holds no judgment, is open, free. I am open, free. I belong to the jungle. I am in the jungle even when I am not in the jungle. Remember the jungle.
Reading this now, a moto, bus, and two flights away, with honking horns and sirens and gossiping neighbors humming out my window, it’s really hard to know what to think about these words. My first reaction is to downplay the drama, cast it aside as a fresh-faced, wide-eyed young man’s overeager reaction to being exposed to the world for the first time. “Gringo sees mountain; becomes enlightened”; Some version of this meme gets played on a loop on the Latin American backpacking circuits I traversed. The journal has always been my place to let loose, but it’s pretty goddamn intense, what I wrote: “I do not need to write. I do not need friends.” Even granting myself the raw vigor of the moment, I completely disagree with both those sentiments. I sort of do need to write, to feel good, and I very much need friends to feel whole. Sitting in my room, considering my life today, it’s difficult to recognize the voice in that passage.
Yet, even now, having gained a wealth of context and experience in the two-plus years since I penned that entry, I can understand, pretty clearly, what I meant when I wrote, “I belong to the jungle” despite spending half a day in its midst. The passage is emblematic of an intensity of feeling which defines a long solo trip of the type I embarked on a few years ago—a situation within which huge, existential questions tend to emerge as suddenly and effortlessly as the sun poking its way through the puffy cover of a cloud forest.
This is a ferocity I rarely experience anymore. I did something pretty bold last week, the type of thing I’ve always wanted to do. I was really happy with myself, high on life and all that; in the aftermath my friend caught me skipping down Eighth Avenue. But the feeling I had, after doing the satisfying thing I’d done, came nowhere close to matching the elation, the total contentment, utter nirvana, which I routinely felt whilst traveling alone (my entry from that night was actually pretty circumspect, all things considered).
How do I come to terms with this? How can I possibly live on in this relatively mundane fashion, surrounded by concrete, a world away from Minca, when I know how relatively near I am to the sorts of tantalizing, revelatory highs awaiting me in parts unknown? I’m asking myself a version of these questions all the time as I try to navigate, well, what the fuck I should be doing with my life.
The answer is that the intrinsic intensity of traveling alone, in the fashion I did, cuts both ways. It’s very easy for me, sitting alone amidst the dank, shortened days of November, or recalling clean, open wave faces sparkling at sunset to drooling surfer friends climbing the corporate ladder, to wax poetic about the clarity of moments like the one I experienced in the jungle. But the truth is that for every Minca moment on the road, there was at least one—and, more realistically, many times more—low, desperate, flailing moments of hopeless and irrational frustration to match; moments when I felt not just lost but wasteful, selfish, valueless.
The duality of these extremes is the nature of solo life on the road, and it’s yet another reason why I keep coming back to William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days,” which I first wrote about a few months ago. Finnegan’s memoir frequently veers into the existential dread which so often accompanies the long, in-between periods which make up the majority of time on the road. Here he is in Australia, for example, right after a frenzied, glorious dozen-page description of surfing Kirra, one of the world’s most spectacular waves, in the late seventies:
But I did wonder what I was doing with my life. We had been gone so long now that I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from?...I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things—what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required, to take a big surf trip. But did it really need to last this long? (229)
Turning to my own old travel journals, it took me half a second to flip randomly away from the Minca entry and discover the following smattering of optimism and cheer:
“I had a two-hour ‘why the fuck did I give up the NYC apartment’ panic when I first got here.”
“My left foot is covered in bug bites/scratches/god knows what. There have been ten total minutes where I've been free of all chafing/itchiness/stickiness/sweat. Will I get used to it?”
“A man just checked into the hostel wearing an almost green, bright teal nineties t-shirt with ‘SHAMU’ and an orca printed on the front, with ‘Sea World’ underneath. For some reason this has made me viscerally upset.”
And, the kicker, from my first month:
It’s hot and humid in a way which makes New York Augusts feel like San Francisco Aprils, and I’m sticky all the time and the chafing on my chest, armpits, thighs, knees, and nipples from my surfboard kept me out of the water for two days, and I’m having terrible night sweats accompanied by fever dreams, and I’m homesick, and I realized today that I was codependent on Trader Joe’s to survive in America, and I’ve talked about the Alchemist four too many times already, and I’m also chafing on the insides of my feet from my new flip-flops, which I had to buy after the ones I bought were stolen on my third day here, all of which I experience with deep existential guilt because I chose all of this with my goddamned privilege and often all I want is to be somewhere else even though if I was there all I’d want would be to be here.
The deepest shames and insecurities I felt at home, before my trip, didn’t vanish upon crossing the border—they were exacerbated. There they are, right on the page: “guilt” over “privilege,” insecurity about reading habits, shame over national identity. This is the point I always try to hammer home to anyone considering a long, solo trip: do it (one hundred percent: do it), but be prepared. Because when you’re traveling alone, and the exact pain which had been plaguing you when you ditched whatever monotony you thought you’d left behind begins bubbling up again, in the exact same spot as before, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself for it. Really. No family turmoil to pin your woes on, if I just had better friends-themed excuses, anachronistic “if only it were the sixties” diatribes to lean against. You chose this, and now it’s just you, and the only way to get through it is to figure it out. Alone. It’s all self-imposed, of course, but it’s precisely that self-imposition which cranks up the temperature of the whole experience.
This can be a really lonely, dark place to find oneself. Taking the trip I did was the best possible thing I could have done for myself at the point in life I found myself in when I left. It was full of more Minca moments—more flashes of brilliance, jolts of understanding, thunderbolts of empathy—than I’ve experienced over the rest of my combined life. It was also packed with some of the lowest nadirs I’ve ever experienced, subterranean, spiraling caves within which a rash under my armpit, a failed conversation in Spanish, the tiniest of social rejections, was prone to corkscrew me into existential dread over the human condition. I’m really proud of myself for hanging in there and working my way through these problems on my own. It required a level of honesty—harsh, harsh honesty—which had theretofore been unknown to me. I’m eternally grateful I stuck it out. But it was hard, really fucking hard, to navigate the profound and incessant swings which seemed to linger in my shadow at every stop along the way.
In Minca, abandoned swimming pools, vestiges of some foolish developer’s aborted imposition into sylvan bliss, overlook dark green cloud forests so thick it takes real imagination to picture the orange daggerwing butterflies, giant toads, and spotted jaguars roaming in the valley below. I’m so far away now that it’s difficult to believe it’s all there, at this very moment, breathing. I fear there’s no combination of plane, bus, or motorbike capable of truly taking me back. Can you blame me, though, for refusing to give up the dream of a return?