{"id":304,"date":"2011-11-08T17:27:32","date_gmt":"2011-11-08T21:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/?p=304"},"modified":"2011-11-08T17:27:33","modified_gmt":"2011-11-08T21:27:33","slug":"today-i-got-lost-in-the-jungle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/2011\/11\/08\/today-i-got-lost-in-the-jungle\/","title":{"rendered":"Today, I got lost in the jungle."},"content":{"rendered":"

(from Monday, October 31)<\/p>\n

\"Ready
Ready for Anything<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I hiked alone from our house, out through the gate that surrounds the center, accompanied only by my newly acquired bush knife and bilum.\u00a0 The sun was shining and the clouds disappearing.\u00a0 I knew it was going to be hot.<\/p>\n

I followed an old road that is now only a path on a mission to learn Tok Pisin.\u00a0 After a ten minute hike the road ended and twin trails split from it.\u00a0 I knew each led to a different house line, but which should I take this day?\u00a0 Looking up, I spotted a lone national man standing on a ridge along the path to my right.\u00a0 That decided it for me.\u00a0 I went his direction.<\/p>\n

I stopped and greeted him and tried unsuccessfully to start up a good conversation.\u00a0 He appeared to be waiting for someone, or something, but I’ll never know what.\u00a0 I moved on down the trail.<\/p>\n

The trail followed the ridge before taking a dip into a shallow valley and climbing another hill.\u00a0 Atop that hill stood the beginning of a long line of houses.\u00a0 Down this line of houses I went talking with anyone and everyone.\u00a0 I spent a good portion of the morning with one young man who showed me his house and many of his possessions.\u00a0 I already had met this man once before, a meeting that found me trading my flip flops for a decorative spear.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Young Man<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Morning came and went and I knew it was time to return home.\u00a0 That was when trouble struck.<\/p>\n

I was passing by the final house along this house line, on my way back, when a familiar woman met me on the trail.\u00a0 She was of Tom and Ben’s family (whom I’ve previously blogged about) and told me I should go find the two guys on my way back.\u00a0 She told me not to take the mountain trail on my return, but to take the garden trail and I would find them.\u00a0 “Sure,” I said thinking, easy enough!<\/em> The problem was the path doesn’t just split once, it splits twice.<\/p>\n

The first split I knew which way to go.\u00a0 To the right was the way I had come (the mountain road), therefore the left was the way I must go.\u00a0 At the next split I was less certain.\u00a0 Actually, I was completely uncertain.\u00a0 I had taken the path to the right before and I knew it was a shortcut back but I also knew there weren’t any gardens along it for the first half of the distance home.\u00a0 The path to the left was unknown to me.\u00a0 I took a few steps down it and realized it ran along the western edge of a big garden.\u00a0 This had to be\u00a0 ‘the garden path’.\u00a0 How wrong I was.<\/p>\n

I kept my gaze on the garden as I meandered down the trail but no soul met my eyes.\u00a0 Eventually the garden ended but the trail, smaller now, kept on.\u00a0 I had already come a ways and had no intention of back-tracking, especially since that would mean going back uphill.\u00a0 The trail was in the woods now, down in a valley between two hills.\u00a0 I persevered on, into the unknown, despite the slow disappearance of my path.\u00a0 A giant spider web stretched across the path in front of me confirming what I had been suspecting for a while.\u00a0 No one uses this path anymore.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was too stubborn to turn back, and besides, I had my brand new bush knife to try out.\u00a0 Hacking a web apart is about as fulfilling as it sounds, but better just that than stumbling across a deadly snake.\u00a0 I knew roughly where I was.\u00a0 I knew following the valley would put me close to home and in familiar territory again.\u00a0 I went on.<\/p>\n

Its hard traversing this land without a path.\u00a0 Its not thick jungle like I’ve seen in South America, but there’s enough waist high grasses, prickly bushes, and clustered trees to make it difficult.\u00a0 I remember swatting at least three different spiders off me and numerous times considering turning back.\u00a0 What kept me moving forward was the certainty that a journey backwards would be a much longer route home.<\/p>\n

I suddenly found myself amidst someone’s coffee garden and the going became considerably easier.\u00a0 Although, I was worried I would be discovered\u00a0 in the middle of this garden off a public path and figured that would probably be seen as suspicious activity.\u00a0 No one witnessed my going until I exited the garden and found myself in a familiar yard.<\/p>\n

The national man who was owner of the yard heard me from inside his house and came out to investigate.\u00a0 “Did you come from the path or from the bush?” the man asked.\u00a0 “From the bush,” I answered sheepishly.\u00a0 I told him my story and we had a good laugh.\u00a0 After a few minutes I got back on the real ‘garden path’ that goes right by his house and down into other gardens–where I found Tom.<\/p>\n

\"Lost
Lost Somewhere Out There<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(from Monday, October 31) I hiked alone from our house, out through the gate that surrounds the center, accompanied only by my newly acquired bush knife and bilum.\u00a0 The sun was shining and the clouds disappearing.\u00a0 I knew it was going to be hot. I followed an old road that is now only a path […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":488,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/488"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/chris-hostetter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}