Category: Tales From Green Hell 1978 -1979
-
Not the Riviera
Once we were on our way, Matt handed me some pancitos, small bread, kind of like hamburger buns. Kind of like, but these were way better! They were fresh from the oven, baked sometime today. There was a sugar coating on the top of the bread, perhaps applied when fresh out of the mud oven…
-
Alone in the Wilds of Green Hell
October 23, 1978 Today, the road was so bad, had we been in a cross country race with a sloth, we would have lost! We hardly moved. Matt drove the swamp buggy. Paul became the winch man. He was always ready to pull the cable out and hook it around a tree each time we…
-
Mud Slinging of the Soul
I drove into a new pickle for us to overcome. The heavy treads on a front tire dug into a bank of mud. It made the buggy lurch sideways, sliding it into deep ruts, but high-centered on the ridge between them. We were stuck, but it was a different kind of stuck than all the…
-
Ditching the Ditch
Thousands of butterflies, decked in pastel wings of yellow, white, and green gathered in clusters along the road, Not so common, there were occasional groups of bright colored orange butterflies. The dazzling ones did not seem to mix with the pale ones. I had often seen bunches of beautiful winged insects sucking up the urinated…
-
Floundering in Flurries of Frustration
True to form, we awoke to rain. When the weather cleared, Matt and I started working on the buggy. We decided to leave out the clutch plate that had pulled loose from its rivets and run metal against metal. If it worked, we would be on our way. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t matter as…
-
Where’s Waldo? Not Here!
Alan said, “In the Yuqui culture, there are two classes of people: high class and slave class. When a high class person dies, someone else must be killed to accompany the spirit of the deceased. Usually it is a slave, one of their own group. However, if a Bolivian or other outsider is near at…
-
English Spoken Here
We said our goodbyes to J.C. and found another pickup going our way. The driver dropped us off at the camp of United Geophysical. Again, I was surprised to hear someone speaking English. Not just English, but British English or some dialect of it. I looked around and found the speaker. He was a red…
-
On The Road Again
They were a good-natured group on men, laughing, and joking with each other, and throwing insults at the highlanders walking along the road! There was a bit of prejudice and sometimes not so friendly rivalry between lowlanders, those who were there first, and highlanders. The latter were migrating into the jungle by the thousands, leaving…
-
Foster’s Folly
We refilled our backpacks with the stuff in our little two-day bundles. I was asked to set the pace and lead the way back to Port. I paused and gave a final look around our campsite and down the river. On the sandbar, way downstream where Matt had abandoned it, was the canoe we had…
-
The End Of The Road
With fits of laughter breaking his narrative, Miguel told us about a highland man who moved into the jungle and began cutting down the rain forest to make a chaco, a farm. It was really hot work, and at the end of the day the man decided to take a bath in the creek. Soap…
Writings By Phil 