Heart of Darkness
01:52 on Friday, January 30, 2004 • 1 response
I’m laying on a cot made of split bamboo, enshrouded by mosquito mesh draped from the ceiling to the mattress, listening to the sounds of bats, snakes, frogs, geckos, monitor lizards, falling coconuts, and other things which go bump in the night. All of this is somewhat compromised in some ways by the light of my Palm’s screen, but what’s a jungle without a keyboard?
I’m now more or less in the middle of nowhere. The day before yesterday I settled in at Nuts Huts, a backpacker’s hostel located about 10 km north of Loboc on the banks of the Loboc river valley on the island of Bohol. It’s a fantastic place run by two Belgians, Chris and Rita, an adventurous and extremely hospitable couple whose knowledge of the island has already proven invaluable. They’ve hooked me up with a local guy named Nerio, who will tomorrow pick me up on his motorcycle at the ripe hour of 4:30am so that I can get to a geological oddity called the Chocolate Hills in time for sunrise. Nerio will then take me wherever I want to go on the island. In effect I’ve hired a driver, as bourgeois as that sounds.
AJ, it turns out, stayed at Nuts Huts for a while, and just before I left Tagbilaran he really fucked with my head by telling me that the spiders here were as big as his hand. Anyone that knows me has probably heard at least one story involving my arachnophobia and consequently, anyone that knows me has probably heard at least one story involving my capacity to emit astoundingly girlish screams. AJ, not knowing me at all, regaled me with tales of walking between palm trees at night, facefirst into a spiderweb. Then there were his advance notices about how the spiders are so big you can hear them crawling on the floor and on the thatched roofs at night.
So naturally when I arrived, I asked Rita about the spiders and she said, “Well, we’re in the jungle, so we have them. But don’t worry. We’ve pained everything in the huts brown. The spiders are mostly brown so you won’t see them.”
In the event that you know someone whose fear of spiders is as great as mine, here’s some friendly advice: never utter the above sentence to them if you want them to sleep. Never ever.
So I’ve laid in this hut for at least a couple of hours, not being able to sleep because my eyes are scouring the walls not just for spiders, but for anything spider-esque. This is perhaps the first time since I was maybe three years old that I can’t bring myself to turn the light off. My mind endlessly plays the opening scene from the film Arachnophobia, in which a man suffering from some kind of fever is laying on a cot, feels something on his leg, and lifts up the sheet just in time to see the biggest fucking set of spider fangs on the planet sink into his leg. I’m not suffering from a fever, and I’m definitely not in a movie, but I’m on a cot, and that’s enough to make me worry. Coincidentally, that film came out when I was in high school. Some friends forced me to go see it and I left the theater with bruises on my legs from jumping in my seat. So I’m having a great time. In this hut. Surrounded by spiders.
[This entry was written on December 22nd. Its date will be corrected after all entries and photos from my trip to the Philippines are online.]