We got up quite early, and had streamlined our morning by filling my thermos with hot water the night before meaning we didn't need to play with fire before our brains had woken properly to get our instant coffee and porridge.
I was confident about getting some good distance that day, after traversing the ten kilometres length of the lake we had a fierce uphill stretch to two more lakes at the end of the Cochamo Valley - and we didn't have enough food with us to mess around.
The trail was demanding though. I'd seen a couple of big horseflies the previous day, but by 10 a.m. there was a permanent presence of them, and I-shit-you-not they were three centimetres long. It became apparent they enjoy biting humans, but the real surprise was that these monster-sized ones could bite you through your clothes. And it hurt.
Now mosquitoes can be annoying. But to be fair they have an audible approach, you have a good chance of feeling them land as they need bare skin to bite, and then show the courtesy of anaesthetising you for their visit. After all that they're slow and dozy enough to murder without any ninja reflexes.
These horseflies trump them on all points.
Roots, ruts and rocks made the trail slow going, but the pace helped me appreciate the bizarrities that lived in the valley. Where the previous days' trail-side bushes contained small, brown lizards around ten centimetres long, today's had double-sized ones which were bright orange and green.
Every now and then a giant, demented spider web stretched across the track - I never hung around to see their creators, but judging by their appearance they were surely fevered minds. Then what really sparked my imagination was the two metre wide leaves sprouting from the trails edge.
If yesterday was The Lord of the Rings, then today was Jurassic Park. I started a loud rendition of John Williams' score to the film, and must have kept it up for two hours solid.
While Crichton-inspired insanity kept my pace and spirits up, Kevin had been lagging behind. It was hazardous and difficult track for so many kilometres and Kevin had his large video camera slung over his shoulder hampering him even more than his heavy load.
Suddenly my epic soundtrack cut as my right foot slipped left under my body off a muddy rock into a deep mud puddle. As I fell on my right side my arm shot out to catch myself on a waist height rock, but my palm slipped off and I raked a good twenty centimetres down my inside wrist and arm on the sharp edge of the rock.
For a moment I was stuck, but once I rolled over (getting myself really muddy) I was up again with a double helping of adrenaline and a little less blood. While I should have slowed down and considered more the frustration and pain pushed me on faster and I reasoned using my natural power-up while it lasted was wise.
After five minutes at break-neck speed over downed logs and deep streams my knee twinged with eye-watering force and I stopped, hoping Kev wasn't too far behind. Kevin caught up after a while and he'd had his own issues which I found out as he rolled up his muddy jeans to show a nasty cut down his leg.
We had, at least, traversed most of the lake by now, so we took our time with the last couple of kilometres which brought us to the river feeding the lake at it's north end. I studied the map carefully and it clearly showed we needed to stay on the west side of the river, and that our trail at no point crossed it.
The trail led straight to a ford though, so after a few minutes careful back-tracking I found an alternative which kept west, but was oddly shrouded by an out of place bush. We carried on and confusingly the trail was intermittently fading out and becoming overgrown.
It shouldn't have mattered - we could see on the map the trail would bend west when the contours of the valley allowed. As long as we stayed snug along the cliffs to our left the proper trail would cross our path to take us up to the lakes. After a few kilometres it became thickly forested and then turned dank and mouldy where a huge section was littered with hundreds of dead rotten trees crashed on the floor and each other.
It was hell to navigate through - some trunks were two metres wide, all were covered in slippery moss and they crumbled to varying degrees as we scrambled over them. It was exhausting, creepy and confusing. After a tiring half hour not getting very far I reasoned that if we tracked east we'd have to cross the trail before the river and would make better progress.
We got all the way to the river without a sign of the trail. We followed the river edge back, to before the mouldy dead forest as there was clearly no trail past this point. We put our bags down and took turns scouting up the hillside in different directions while the other would try and understand each contour on the map as intimately as possible.
The afternoon was wearing on, we were muddy, injured and tired. Kevin said that of we did find the trail he couldn't climb it today. We headed back for the ford which was at the north end of Lago Vidal Gomaz where we'd seen a beautiful clearing. We agreed to an early finish to clean ourselves and our things in order to attack the problem fresher tomorrow.
We got back to the river and crossed over into the clearing, which soon revealed a sizable farmhouse and whole menagerie of farm animals. There were at least thirty horses, a goat herd around fifty strong, and incalculable gaggle of geese, a handful of cows, a few pigs and a faithful, if slightly retarded-looking dog.
While Kevin went to the lakes edge to start cleaning his clothes and make a cup of soul-inspiring tea, I headed for the farmhouse and knocked on every door and window going. To no avail.
I washed my clothes while Kev lit a fire and just couldn't stand not understanding where we needed to go - I took off back to the west side of the river, convinced a fresh look without luggage would reveal the obvious. I ran at top speed, convinced the most straightforward and simple route would be the right one. Soon enough I was scaling the same mouldy, crumbling giant trunks but was scratching, bashing and thwacking myself more as I became frustrated and careless. Until my knee twinged again and the futility set in.
I made a bamboo walking pole and headed back for camp, totally confused. My knee recovered and by the time I got back to Kevin I could see he'd made a friend - he was standing next to a small woman in a pink tracksuit. By the time I crossed the river and reached him she was gone, but Kev explained she lived in the farmhouse and said we had to go north through her farm to reach our trail - on the east side of the river, contradicting our map.
At last it was explained - the map was wrong. The fact the trail began clearly told me that the map had once been correct, but my best guess was that when the mouldy forest first collapsed a new trail was blazed from the east side and climbed the valley on it's northern slope instead.
Inexplicably I couldn't yet rest and desperately needed to see the correct route which we were to follow the next day, so jogged through the farm plain, then tracked the rivers edge to find a ford which would be the missing link. On the way, roughly parallel to the mouldy forest was a clue to the whole situation - on this side the trees weren't mossed over or as rotten and it was clear that a fire had killed hundreds of trees in the recent past.
I walked back to camp, content and finally at ease. Just in time for a skinnydip before sundown too. We had a blazing fire that night, and the shape of the valley framed the Milky Way perfectly. A surreal and formidable chorus of bullfrogs kicked in as it got darker and as the days theme tune returned to my head I imagined we were laid in the depths of a giant dinosaur footprint.
I was confident about getting some good distance that day, after traversing the ten kilometres length of the lake we had a fierce uphill stretch to two more lakes at the end of the Cochamo Valley - and we didn't have enough food with us to mess around.
The trail was demanding though. I'd seen a couple of big horseflies the previous day, but by 10 a.m. there was a permanent presence of them, and I-shit-you-not they were three centimetres long. It became apparent they enjoy biting humans, but the real surprise was that these monster-sized ones could bite you through your clothes. And it hurt.
Now mosquitoes can be annoying. But to be fair they have an audible approach, you have a good chance of feeling them land as they need bare skin to bite, and then show the courtesy of anaesthetising you for their visit. After all that they're slow and dozy enough to murder without any ninja reflexes.
These horseflies trump them on all points.
Roots, ruts and rocks made the trail slow going, but the pace helped me appreciate the bizarrities that lived in the valley. Where the previous days' trail-side bushes contained small, brown lizards around ten centimetres long, today's had double-sized ones which were bright orange and green.
Every now and then a giant, demented spider web stretched across the track - I never hung around to see their creators, but judging by their appearance they were surely fevered minds. Then what really sparked my imagination was the two metre wide leaves sprouting from the trails edge.
If yesterday was The Lord of the Rings, then today was Jurassic Park. I started a loud rendition of John Williams' score to the film, and must have kept it up for two hours solid.
While Crichton-inspired insanity kept my pace and spirits up, Kevin had been lagging behind. It was hazardous and difficult track for so many kilometres and Kevin had his large video camera slung over his shoulder hampering him even more than his heavy load.
Suddenly my epic soundtrack cut as my right foot slipped left under my body off a muddy rock into a deep mud puddle. As I fell on my right side my arm shot out to catch myself on a waist height rock, but my palm slipped off and I raked a good twenty centimetres down my inside wrist and arm on the sharp edge of the rock.
For a moment I was stuck, but once I rolled over (getting myself really muddy) I was up again with a double helping of adrenaline and a little less blood. While I should have slowed down and considered more the frustration and pain pushed me on faster and I reasoned using my natural power-up while it lasted was wise.
After five minutes at break-neck speed over downed logs and deep streams my knee twinged with eye-watering force and I stopped, hoping Kev wasn't too far behind. Kevin caught up after a while and he'd had his own issues which I found out as he rolled up his muddy jeans to show a nasty cut down his leg.
We had, at least, traversed most of the lake by now, so we took our time with the last couple of kilometres which brought us to the river feeding the lake at it's north end. I studied the map carefully and it clearly showed we needed to stay on the west side of the river, and that our trail at no point crossed it.
The trail led straight to a ford though, so after a few minutes careful back-tracking I found an alternative which kept west, but was oddly shrouded by an out of place bush. We carried on and confusingly the trail was intermittently fading out and becoming overgrown.
It shouldn't have mattered - we could see on the map the trail would bend west when the contours of the valley allowed. As long as we stayed snug along the cliffs to our left the proper trail would cross our path to take us up to the lakes. After a few kilometres it became thickly forested and then turned dank and mouldy where a huge section was littered with hundreds of dead rotten trees crashed on the floor and each other.
It was hell to navigate through - some trunks were two metres wide, all were covered in slippery moss and they crumbled to varying degrees as we scrambled over them. It was exhausting, creepy and confusing. After a tiring half hour not getting very far I reasoned that if we tracked east we'd have to cross the trail before the river and would make better progress.
We got all the way to the river without a sign of the trail. We followed the river edge back, to before the mouldy dead forest as there was clearly no trail past this point. We put our bags down and took turns scouting up the hillside in different directions while the other would try and understand each contour on the map as intimately as possible.
The afternoon was wearing on, we were muddy, injured and tired. Kevin said that of we did find the trail he couldn't climb it today. We headed back for the ford which was at the north end of Lago Vidal Gomaz where we'd seen a beautiful clearing. We agreed to an early finish to clean ourselves and our things in order to attack the problem fresher tomorrow.
We got back to the river and crossed over into the clearing, which soon revealed a sizable farmhouse and whole menagerie of farm animals. There were at least thirty horses, a goat herd around fifty strong, and incalculable gaggle of geese, a handful of cows, a few pigs and a faithful, if slightly retarded-looking dog.
While Kevin went to the lakes edge to start cleaning his clothes and make a cup of soul-inspiring tea, I headed for the farmhouse and knocked on every door and window going. To no avail.
I washed my clothes while Kev lit a fire and just couldn't stand not understanding where we needed to go - I took off back to the west side of the river, convinced a fresh look without luggage would reveal the obvious. I ran at top speed, convinced the most straightforward and simple route would be the right one. Soon enough I was scaling the same mouldy, crumbling giant trunks but was scratching, bashing and thwacking myself more as I became frustrated and careless. Until my knee twinged again and the futility set in.
I made a bamboo walking pole and headed back for camp, totally confused. My knee recovered and by the time I got back to Kevin I could see he'd made a friend - he was standing next to a small woman in a pink tracksuit. By the time I crossed the river and reached him she was gone, but Kev explained she lived in the farmhouse and said we had to go north through her farm to reach our trail - on the east side of the river, contradicting our map.
At last it was explained - the map was wrong. The fact the trail began clearly told me that the map had once been correct, but my best guess was that when the mouldy forest first collapsed a new trail was blazed from the east side and climbed the valley on it's northern slope instead.
Inexplicably I couldn't yet rest and desperately needed to see the correct route which we were to follow the next day, so jogged through the farm plain, then tracked the rivers edge to find a ford which would be the missing link. On the way, roughly parallel to the mouldy forest was a clue to the whole situation - on this side the trees weren't mossed over or as rotten and it was clear that a fire had killed hundreds of trees in the recent past.
I walked back to camp, content and finally at ease. Just in time for a skinnydip before sundown too. We had a blazing fire that night, and the shape of the valley framed the Milky Way perfectly. A surreal and formidable chorus of bullfrogs kicked in as it got darker and as the days theme tune returned to my head I imagined we were laid in the depths of a giant dinosaur footprint.
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