Belgium: Lost in the Jungle- I

“OK, I will watch the back”.
God where did that come from? I never knew this audacious me! Plus for god’s sake it’s the forest, pitch black and alarmingly quiet. Though we were told that there are no wild animals or any sort of danger in here, but my weak heart doesn’t care for logic.

Anyway, now that we have to find our way back through this stupid jungle to the final meeting point and all we have is a map, compass and some torches, I thought I will lead the group to victory. (From the back??)

So… here we were, in the jungle walking in files of 2 (finally Ist yr NCC came in handy), trying to find our way back through the paths, which seemed like it was hexed to restrain us from walking upright. But who cares… someone back there said it’s just a matter of an hour or two. So that’s good…. I can go and get some sleep.

The first hour passes. “I think we should have seen the Iron Cross (first land mark) half an hour ago”, said the girl with the map. “What??” said the entire group in unison. We could have walked over a kilometer in the last 30 min and that would mean that either we missed the giant of a cross, which was very unlikely, or we were off course. “Lemme check”, I said. Frankly, I never trusted the navigators. How could you, when the guy with the compass was more concerned about lightning his sutta than he was about direction and the girl checking the map thought she had walked half a mile every 10 min.

“Forget it. We are on course. We have the river on our right… that shows we are going in the right direction.”

“But dude… we were supposed to go downstream while we are going up. The river is flowing in the wrong direction! Or we are going in the opposite.”

My heart began to sink. We are lost. LOST. No shit… how can we be lost? We have the map, which has all the routes and turns. What if we had missed one?

“Ok lets go back and retrace our path till we find something familiar.” For the next hour or so, we were walking blind, looking for any sort of signs or traces. And with every min that passed we were getting tired and that made it increasingly difficult to estimate the distance traveled.