Day Twenty-One: "One Thousand Skips"

At one time, this was my vision of hell. I was on Day Three of my Amazon experience. My group had started out with just three: guide, cook, and me. It had grown to five when a couple from Florida joined. But a terrible zip-line accident later, we were back to the original three--shaken and stirred. It could just have easily been me that went into a tree at 50 miles an hour and destroyed my entire leg. Heck, it could have been a lot worse.

We carried on with the kayaking and hiking in silence--I had thought about giving up and going back to the city of Manaus, but accommodations there were so terrible and depressing anyway that I decided I would feel better continuing in the jungle. This is my hammock with a mosquito net over it. It is unbearably hot, over 100F constantly. It is unbearably humid at 100% humidity. The entire forest breathes and so it is constantly steaming and raining. Your camera lens fogs up in 2 seconds when you take off the lens cap. All your clothes smell like "swamp" even when you keep everything in a dry bag. It is so wet you get blisters when you walk. Oh, and the mosquito net doesn't do much when the ants all crawl inside and you are awoken by hundreds of them sinking their jaws into your flesh--and these aren't your average garden ant.

I love nature, I love the outdoors, animals, plants, insects, the wild, whether it's on the lakes of Canada, the sun-scorched Andes of Peru, the windswept dunes of the oven known as the Sahara, swimming with iguanas and penguins in the Galapagos or sidling up next to lions on safari in South Africa. But the Amazon kicked my ass. It was the most difficult three days I've experienced in the wild, and I can say unequivocally that I do not recommend it for the faint of heart.

You know what else used to kick my ass--what else I used to think of as hell? JUMP ROPE. But it doesn't. Not anymore. 1,000? No sweat. I don't have the best form and I definitely exert more effort than Patrick does to complete them, but I can get through them just fine.

Tomorrow should be an interesting test. I haven't seen my girlfriend in about ten days as she has been sick. So we'll see if she notices any changes when we meet up on Saturday.