Day 3 - Shack in the jungle? Home Sweet Home.

Day 3

The incessant rooster awoke us today. Rudely.
Blue skies played host to a hot, breezy driving adventure. To find a hike to the island’s only cold sulphur spring, we traveled a road that bisects the width of the island. The Escudo ascended the steepest, tightest turns that I have ever seen a car climb. I can’t believe these paved strips up jungly mountain steeps can be called roads. The locals do not mess around. You can climb hundreds of vertical metres in a matter of a couple of switchbacks, and the roads are not wide enough for two in many places. We have been lucky not to resort to reversing in the tight places so far. We are becoming quite comfortable with our conversations with the locals, as they are becoming a common occurrence. After some searching we found the head of our first jungle trail. A local working at the trail head walked us in, dressed in tight, old cut off at the knee jeans shorts. His protruding collar bones draped in an old ripped polo shirt, open at the chest – dark skin and bleach blonde dreadlocks framing a wrinkly, scarce toothed face betraying his many years in the wilderness, along with his accompanying scent of campfire smoke. With his pack of cigarettes in one hand, an old island paper ordeal, and a bag of brown sugar small enough to carry in one hand resting on his head, he led us through the hot meadow preceding the deeper jungle sections that lined these mountainsides. At a fork in the trail he pointed at the path that led down to a ravine, and announced in his raspy island voice “Dat’s weah I leeve theh.” We looked down to see 3 skeletons of wood structures, shifting like drunk clowns on circus stilts, capped with a rusty corrugated roof held down by boulders. It was a heartbreakingly beautiful way to live. In the middle of a sun-soaked valley, between jungle steeped mountains, with nothing. After a stunning view off of the backside of the mountain into impossibly turquoise waters from 235m up, we took the car up through a mountain pass, where we visited the sulphur springs in the tolerable mountain air. Putrid sulphurous gases hissed through gravel fileds in the forest, and bubbling paradoxically cold pools surrounded us. We drove back through Portsmouth and arrived at Calibishi where we stay. After seeing several other groups arrive without luggage, Linda, the wife of Chris, informed us that it is completely normal to arrive before your luggage. We started to suspect as much. Chris told us stories over and after dinner for hours, and now we are exhausted.