This weekend I escaped from Tena and entered the rainforest. True to form, as is its divine prerogative, it rained all day. The very heavy type of rain that leaves you wet through and wondering why you didn’t put all your dry, now wet, clothes in plastic liners.
But it’s just so fantastic. Not to come across anyone in the jungle for at least 24 hours. And how refreshing. Nothing appears, at least on the surface, to have changed in the jungle. We rest in a wooden hut mid afternoon and listen, damply swaying in hammocks , to the sound of the heavy rain on the tin roof and to the running river we just crossed to arrive on this island.
Our guide suddenly pricks up his ears and says “listen!”. The truth is I am listening, quite intently so in fact to all the sounds. But suddenly I understand. I hear a deep roaring sound getting closer and closer. It has been raining in the mountains further upstream and now a huge swell of water is rolling towards us down the river. Our guide seems unfazed by this and we watch from our hut through the trees as observers of the force of nature at work. The river which moments earlier was aqua blue, white in places where the water hit the rocks to form rapids, is transformed into a angry swollen mass of churning brown water. The river rises two metres in an instant, swallowing gigantic boulders in its wake. This river that eventually joins the Amazon and ends its journey thousands of miles away in the Atlantic.
We eat, we listen more than talk and hear the high pitched tones of tree insects and a cacophony of different types of frogs. We sleep beneath black skies and above the glow of a flickering fire below.
The morning light washes away the damp and smokiness of the previous night. We’ve walked through the humidity of the forest to a beautiful Laguna. I jump in leaving my flip flops at the water’s edge. I’m in heaven, the water is clean and fresh and clear. I lie floating on my back as I watch the blue sky and dreamy clouds high in the troposphere framed like a picture by the silhouette of the forest canopy.
It’s heavenly but I can’t float around in Lagunas all day! I go to get out the water. I am faced with a somewhat puzzling conundrum. Why is there only one flip flop at the water’s edge? It takes a few moments before I figure that the only possible explanation is that the river has nibbled away at the sandy bank and my flipflop slipped away in its grasp.
I mourn the loss of my best flipflop. I used to have two best flipflops, crossing continents working it to the exact shape of my foot. Now it’s useless by itself. And I feel guilty being one of those countless careless owners of shoes who have let one get away.
Perhaps, we joke as I manage to see the funny side hobbling back the remaining two hours trek, my flip flop will arrive one day far away in the basin of the River Amazon, no doubt with many other such well loved items of footwear.
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