At Henry’s house we drank a coffee and exchanged pleasantries as Henry and his friend loaded up a trailer with all our provisions for 5 days. Then we set off with me and Lizabeth in the front and everyone else sitting in the back of the pick-up, heading for the vast emptiness of the Nothern Peten. After an hour or so we already felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, following a long, unpaved road through the forest that would take us to the village of Carmelita. Then we spotted a large tree lying across the road up ahead. We got out and inspected it. The tree completely blocked the road, and it was far too big to even consider moving. We wondered how recently it had fallen, and then someone remembered that a pick-uphad overtaken us only 5 minutes before and as it was nowhere to be seen, the only conclusion was that the tree had fallen in the last 5 minutes! The wood was crumbly and dry, and alive with termites. Liza got out her tiny Swiss Army knife saw, and we lauged the thought of how long it would take to saw through an entire tree with it. Henry knew that our only hope lay in driving around the tree, and he leapt into the forest at the side of the road, swinging his machete. Two or three local workers who were also standing by watching plunged in to give him a hand. In surprisingly little time they’d cleared a path around the obstacle, and thinking that the problem was over, Richard got out his camera to record the moment. Then one of the tyres on our truck burst with a slow wheeze, and Richard quietly put the camera away again.
We could hear howler monkeys roaring in the distance as Henry and his friend tried to remove the trailer from the truck. It got stuck. The local workers watched impassively. We began to wonder if someone didn’t want us to go on this trek... but finally they managed to disengage the trailer and went to work on the wheel. Maarten, master of the one-liner, waited until Henry was lying under the truck, covered in sweat and gripping the new wheel, then piped up in a whingeing tone “Henry... queremos cafe” (we want coffee). Henry laughed long and hard. During the wheel operation another pick-up arrived with a man, woman and baby on board. They parked and waited to follow us through the makeshift hole in the vegetation. Our truck powered through, bouncing like anything, while we all held our breath fearing for the other tyres. It emerged with a violent lurch on the other side of the tree, and then the second truck began to inch forward. The second truck didn’t have 4-wheel drive, and it struggled considerably. All of our party had to push as it groaned and flailed in the vegetation, spraying everyone liberally with dirt from the free-spinning weels. Eventually, after we piled pieces of wood under the wheels, it made it through, and the family was on its way. Our final task was to completely unload the trailer, (of course everything was tied in place with string), lift the trailer over the tree and then re-pack it. But finally we were ready, and again set off for Carmelita. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we rounded another bend and saw a machine digging up the road ahead of us. But after bouncing violently over the churned-up road for another hour we made it to our destination.
Carmelita was a small settlement arranged around a large open field where horses and mules were grazing. It was a poor place – houses typically had an outdoor toilet in the garden made of a plank with a hole cut into it, and the houses themselves were made of wood with bare earth floors. We went for breakfast in one house, while Henry supervised the loading of our mules. The lady cooked us coffee, eggs, beans and tortillas, (the typical Central American breakfast), and we ate while watching chickens climbing all over her neatly-made bed. We were all still very sleepy and quite awed by the distance that lay ahead. After breakfast we set out... our mules would follow in the care of the muleteer Helario and his son Luis. We took one mule with us, a little white one called tortilla. As we crossed the field Henry handed her reins to Stefan while he popped to the local shop, and told us to go on ahead. But the mule wouldn’t budge. Several people tried to pull it, but it made no difference. When Henry emerged from the shop we were all still standing in the same place, grinning stupidly. He showed us how to pull the rope really hard, “sin amor” (without love). But the mule moved very slowly when led, so Henry mounted her and we followed him out of Carmelita and down a wide path. Then we turned off into the woods and the hiking began. In places the path was wide and in others it was so narrow that we brushed vegetation on either side as we walked. The ground was dried mud, rutted with hundreds of hoof-marks which made it quite hard to walk on. We moved very fast, and there was hardly any time to look around as we had to constantly watch where we put our feet. We would take it in turns to ride the mule, as we kept up a better speed if someone was always on her back.
After a couple of hours we came to a big pile of vegetation, and Henry cut each of us a frond to add to the pile. Apparently a man had died there, killed by his friend in an argument over a girl. After a while we emerged into a clearing where there were some rough shelters made of sticks and palm-fronds. There we waited for Helario, who was bringing our lunch. Henry told us about the Chicle workers who live part of every year in these encampments while collecting gum from the Chicle trees, (it is used to make chewing gum). Several of the trees had the tell-tale criss-crossed cuts in them. Then it began to rain, and we squatted underneath one of the shelters, but it passed quite quickly. Richard went off wandering and found a horse’s jawbone on the ground, surrounded by other large bones. Then our mule-train arrived. Helario and Luis’ first appearance was very dramatic – they swept in with Helario on the first horse, a shotgun across his back, and Luis bringing up the rear barechested with a red bandana around his neck. We ate ham and cheese sandwiches and slices of pineapple, then the mules went on ahead and we continued hiking. We had one more break that day before reaching camp, in a clearing where I suddenly realised that we were standing in the middle of an army-ant swarm. Soon everybody was leaping about, slapping their legs where the ants were biting them. Richard was covered in so many that Henry dragged him behind a tree and told him to remove his trousers. Then after we were done evicting ants we drank fruit juice and ate biscuits, then started out for the final push to the campsite.
After a total of 25km over about 6 hours, we reached our camp for the night. I had finally submitted to sit on the mule, and to my concern it had trotted off pretty fast down the trail, until I could no longer see or hear the others. I knew that Henry would run on ahead if he got worried, but it was still a bit scary to be completely alone in the jungle. And I wasn’t sure how to make the mule stop... pulling on the reins just seemed to make it angry (I found out later that I was pulling them too gently, and that there was a command of “ssh”). I assumed the mule was running on head as we were near the camp and it wanted to reach its friends and have a rest. But it had chosen the wrong path several times earlier, so I was a little nervous... eventually I heard footsteps and Henry ran up behind. “How do I make it stop?” I whimpered. But by then we were only about 5 minutes from camp, and the mule gave a half-whinney, half-bray of happiness. We emerged into a large campsite with larger structures than then one where we’d eaten lunch. They were all of sticks and thatch, and there were several shelters for hammocks as well as kitchen areas with tables and benches (all made of sticks).