Corrected by Pamela Parra

Composition & Rhetoric

Paul Barragán

Cod 19783

Surviving

I am a very active and flexible person, so I’m always trying to escape from my routine to find new options to enjoy my life, and for every chance I have. I definitely choose to travel, and it can turn to perfect if it can turn onto a natural experience like going to the jungle, a river or a mountain. This is how I got myself on a very interesting trip. 2 Two years ago during the spring break, I plan a trip to the rain forest, and we knew that this trip was going to be different than any other. Two friends and I had considered the idea that it could be cool if we could spend at least two weeks in the deep forest, living like natives; so we did, but as we learned from our experience, if anyone wants to survive on the forest, he needs to adopt the techniques of the hunters, that’s how we did, by focusing on what they do was how we managed to survive.

Living in a place where no one is even remotely close, it's like living as a survivor of a plane crash. Thinking about the food that you know, you have not reached by the time you'll be there; in other words your food is obviously not waiting for you, you'll have to work for it. Is as if you had expected a disaster, and that's all that comes to your mind when you're alone in a place like that. But that is was the purpose of going there; if you just think about it, the objective of the trip is to find how able you are when you have to face those problems.

In my case it was easy; my strategy was to stop thinking about it as a test in which you couldn’t let yourself fail. So the way to do it was focus on the good things of the trip, if everyone looks for a work or labor to “kill time” it becomes easy to fit on a new environment; that if you always remind things, such as using or at least try to apply the same techniques from the native people; this is the beast best way to survive in a place different place to yours. Like the natives, we lived in a wooden house with no comfort, we had the sleeping bags, a few basins with food and about three knives, so that was all we had to spend two long weeks.

Perhaps the most difficult issue to deal with is was food; I always listened to my grandfather when he said that the forest is like a big larder, but I never believed him until I discovered that large pantry; a pantry actually “clean”, so simple, so natural and equally so complex; this is not like finding food by going to eat a burger at a fast food place, because you have to work for it. But the most interesting thing is that the food is varied, in fact we eat the same things that natives commonly eat, from a palm tree to small animals such as termites or beetles larvae.

Since it is very difficult to hunt in the jungle, and we don’t have the same tools used by the natives, our way of hunting animals was a more improvised; for example when we managed to catch a fish, it fed us the first few days. I take a net, a stick and a flashlight and made a net to catch small shrimp leaving river attracted by light at night, but I still think we where were lucky. One of the common biggest problems in the jungle is that, as you tend to be sedentary, but in a small place the available resources tend to decrease, and each time you had to go farther and farther to find food.

It is true that the rain forest takes away the strength of your body. Every day it becomes became more difficult to face because is a hard environment, you even reach the point of not having enough energy to boil water; the most common tasks you endless, such as long hours spent watching the stars on a clear by the treetops of the forest, but you know this is something that very few dare to try, and learn to value their knowledge (natives) and his resistance to live in these places.

When the travel is ending and you are sitting on a window of the bus back to town; all you can feel is a sense of sincere peace, and you realize that there are environments where is extremely difficult for any living thing to survive, and the most important thing for us as humans is to appreciate, respect and see the importance of the people who have been able to adapt to live and nevertheless coexist in these fantastic places.