amazonrainforest

I’ll set the scene:

Me (purple, floaty trousers, black and green Hawaiian shirt, slightly tanned, curly hair tied back), lying in my hammock in the “porch” of our “mansion”. It is HOT today, so hot in fact that I got in the “shower” earlier fully clothed just to cool down a bit. The sun is shining and the river flows idly, the grass is quite overgrown and bright, little seeds cling to my socks and trousers whenever I walk anywhere. Insects are constantly buzzing about, jumping up from the grass and circling through the air which hangs heavy and still with humidity. Frogs and mice occasionally peep out from their homes and the geckos in our “mansion” crawl silently across the walls and the ceiling. The crickets are buzzing and the birds chirping and every so often the rumbling of a motor crawls past as members of the community travel up and down the river. The giant leaves on the banana trees rustle slightly in a gentle breeze, and the sound of the shallow water dancing over the rocks in the river floats up from the bank. I can smell the rich scent of tropical nature, almost cloying and almost sweet. And I feel calm. The heat has soaked into my bones and it is bliss to lie here, embraced in the warmth of the air and the peace and serenity of the trees.

I have spent the morning working on my project. Hours and hours and hours of data collection and analysis, with hours and hours and hours to go. My ears are ringing from listening to my music too loudly, my mind is buzzing with thoughts of work, and my fingers are sore from clicking and dragging and typing. I’m taking a break. Whether it’s well-deserved I’m not so sure, but the heat and limitless time we have make it hard to concentrate.

Heather and I have been at the station for 9 days now. Just us. Here. Alone. In our paradise-like prison, or prison-like paradise; depending which mood we’re in. We’ve been on rations for a few days now because our food supply is dwindling so meals have been delightfully creative or completely boring. The flies are out in full force so we’re both covered in bites, but I think we’re more used to them now so they don’t bother us as much. Evening is settling in, the air is cooling slightly and the sun getting lower.

I’ll get back to work now. The tab of my spreadsheet is staring at me disparagingly from the bottom of my laptop screen and, as much as I wish they would, the photos won’t start sorting themselves.

*”quotation marks” used to indicate the metaphorical nature of these descriptive nouns. We don’t actually live in a mansion, but a 4 roomed, open, wooden building built on stilts. The porch refers to the area at the front of said building. We have a structure which does a very good imitation of a shower, but in reality is 3 small concrete walls and a shower curtain with a barrel that we pump full of river water when it gets low, and a tap coming out of it.

So it turns out that the rain forest is actually a fairly harsh environment to live in. Who would have thought?

Gone are our misguided delusions of tanning in the sun, swimming laps across the river, being fluent in Spanish within the month and keeping up our physical fitness.

These activities have been replaced with 1) doing everything we possibly can to not sweat buckets constantly and 2) limiting insect bites to just a handful a day. Sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we’re not.

My biggest complaint of life here are the bites. They are everywhere. The soles of my feet, behind my knee, the base of my neck, those too hard to reach parts of my back. There is no relief from the constant itching. No object is above being used as a scratching implement, sometimes I’m completely unaware that I’m even itching. Once, I only realised when I needed to put the lid back on my bottle and saw that I had been using it to itch the bottom of my feet. It’s become an unconscious reflex. Bite spray, tiger balm and long clothing only get you so far. Those bastards are canny. They get you when you’re distracted, unsuspecting and vulnerable.

Heather and I have insects fly straight into our faces on the regular. Sometimes they hit an eye or fly up a nostril, and they come out of nowhere. The main culprits are moths, crickets and giant flies. The sound of buzzing or a slight skin tickle is enough to set us both on edge and start flapping about at an invisible enemy, deranged and panicked.

Insects are also annoyingly good at crawling into food and drinks. It’s a rare occasion when you can get through a meal without the appearance of a boiled ant. Heather once found 3 moths in her stew, she was pretty shaken.

The weather here is almost always hot and humid. The temperature is mostly mid 30’s and the humidity above 60%. This causes a lot of sweating. Constant, all-consuming, itch-inducing, salt-producing sweating. Sometimes the only thing you can do to not go crazy is just sit still, calm down and distract yourself. Waking up in the middle of the night sticky with sweat and tangled in sheets is not very pleasant. So tanning isn’t much of an option, sitting in the sun exposing your skin to insects is the last thing you want to do. Relief from the heat only really comes with a storm; it’s the only time the dense air lifts and a cool breeze travels across the river.

Other minor complaints are that the water tastes like chlorine: we put chlorine tablets in the water to purify it. And it’s actually pretty difficult to do anything without a conversational level of Spanish. The station manager, Javier, is great and looks after us really well here, but his English is basic and so we are constantly uninformed about stuff that’s happening and have to blindly follow him around sometimes, not knowing where we’re going or what we’re doing. We are getting Spanish lessons and have downloaded DuoLingo, at least on this matter we have some control.

We are both hoping that we manage to acclimatise somewhat to the heat, and become less appealing to hungry insects, although we’re not sure when this will happen, if ever. This post will serve as a reminder of how we felt during the first couple of weeks, and be interesting to compare to how we feel in a few months time.

I think I need to mention, just at the very end, that we both love life in the jungle. We’re in awe every single day at the life that exists here and both feel so amazingly lucky to be living here; but that’s for a different blog post.