Deep Survival in the Khao Sok Rainforest, Part II: "I have a gut feeling"

Down we plunged, turning our backs to the jungle below and our faces to the harsh edges of limestone as we cautiously downclimbed.  We reached the jungle floor, a happy place indeed for sore feet and hands.  The path was clear, our spirits high, onwards! Into the jungle primeval!

Jungle paths are queer things.  They are not like your normal hiking trail, a well-defined dirt path in the midst of vegetation.  Rather, all is vegetation in the jungle.  And the most one can hope for in the way of markings is the occasional knife slash on a tree.  Yet, they are surprisingly legible.  Eyes quickly grow accustomed to picking out the path of least resistance through a tangled web of vegetation, and that path is usually the trail.  So with some practice, one can quickly see "trail" and "not a trail" through the riotous growth.

However, jungle paths have one debilitating weakness.  When a Douglass Fir falls down on the Pacific Crest Trail, hikers must clamber over it until a chain-saw crew liberates the trail once more.  When a huge dipterocarp falls down in the rainforest, something very different happens.  All of a sudden, a patch of canopy has dissapeared, perhaps covering a few acres, and energy-giving tropical sunlight pours through the gap.  Remember, rainforest canopy is remarkably good at blocking out the sun.  This is why the rainforest understory is relatively open, and why us humans can hike through it with few problems, and not even have to worry about sun burn.  The sudden influx of sun light causes a riot of growth, and within weeks (possibly days?) the sunlit understory has erupted into a tangled thicket. 

The path abruptly ends at the beginning of this thicket, utterly lost to the eyes.  It can be confidently said to exist on the far side of the thicket, continuing its reliable track.  But for an area of several square acres, it is utterly lost.  Which means that those following its line must fan out into the bush, blindly pushing through vines and swamps and thorns and thickets until they stumble across the trail once again.

One might reasonably guess that this was the fate that befell our stalwart sextet.  Indeed, time and again, we confidently stumbled from clear, comforting path into demoralizing thicket.  Sometimes we found the trail on the other side.  Sometimes we backtracked.  And sometimes we struck out in the trackless wilderness and stumbled upon another trail (or the same trail?).  After a few hours of this, a new reality began to emerge, at least for myself and my lovely companion.

• We were defintively NOT heading towards the gap in the karsts that was our supposed target
• Reinhold was taking us in a direction that can only be said to align with his "gut feeling"
• It was late in the day, we were low on water, and we might be spending the night in the jungle
• We did not know how to find our way back, due to stumbling off-trail so many times

The last point truly scared me.  I have never been in a situation where i was not reasonably sure that i could find my way back to the starting point.  This, I believe, is what the word "lost" means.   Given the above reality, one might expect the rest of our group was similarly concerned.  Right?

Wrong.

I voiced some of the above concerns.  I was immediately shot down, most of all for the grevious sin of negative thinking. 

"We WILL make it to the lake"

 "It is only another hour in this direction, I have a gut feeling that if we just press on another hour, we will be at the lake"

"There is cold beer and comfortable beds at the lake, no way are we spending the night in the jungle"

"But, if we don't start thinking about water, we might end up in the extremely unpleasant scenario of camping without water" I protested.

"There is plenty of water in the lake, I have a gut feeling about this" was Reinhold's clever retort.*

The sun was too far to the west to reasonably argue for a turnaround.  And besides, we didn't even know the way back.  So we agreed to keep pressing on for the lake, solidly outnumbered 4 to 2.  We soon hit a logging road, a sure path straight to the lake (according to Reinhold...), and confidently strode ahead, buoyed by the refreshing thoughts of cold beer.

The logging road eventually gave out, or disappeared, or reached its final tree, or something.  It did not take us to the lake, despite Reinhold's gut feeling.  We blindly pushed onwards, and miraculously dropped into a streambed.  It was dry, no water to be had, but it was a drainage! And drainages drain to large bodies of water! So this streambed would take us to the lake!  Huzzah!  We hurried on at a feverish pace, inspired by deep dehydration and the fading light.  We pushed around each bend expecting to see the dazzling expanse of blue open up in front of us. 

We heard a shout from Reinhold, as usual out of sight and far ahead of the group.  "I have a surprise for you!" we heard.  Cold beer! Cold beer! A topless lemonade stand!  We rounded the corner, and the streambed disappeared down a hole.  Gone.  Into the karst.

I have never felt so profoundly disappointed and synchronously destabilized.  It was as if we were following a trail of sequential numbers, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 etc, looking for 99, and when we reached 98 we were informed that numbers only go to 98. 

Reality shortly intruded upon the group.  We would have to make camp in the jungle, without water, and with precious little in the way of camp amenities.  We ascended the ridge that Reinhold was on, where he had found the remains of a campfire, which gave us some scant comfort that we were in a known place.  We rationed our food and remaining water ( one liter for six of us), spread out a tarp on the ground, and spooned up for warmth and comfort.

* The clever reader will note that this retort is clearly fabricated.  Reinhold was not yet, and to my knowledge is still not, aware that his catch phrase was an object of bitter derision.