By A few weeks ago I promised that I would finish off my story about being lost in the jungle. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do!
You can read my previous emails about it here, here and here.
So here’s what happened…
I made it through the night!
That’s probably kinda obvious considering that I’m writing these emails, but I thought it worth mentioning.
The morning came, and I’d never seen anything more beautiful. The jungle mist clung to the lake, giving the entire scene an ethereal quality.
Walking in the jungle can’t be done until the day is fully alive, so breakfast was the first order. At least, it was for everyone else. I wasn’t really feeling up to eating, and I had a choice to make.
Do we…
A) Sit here, twiddle our thumbs, and wait for the response from the emergency tracker.
B) Get up and start walking out.
Well, I’ve never been a great thumb twiddler, so I opted to get the heck up and start walking out.
Although getting the heck up required a lot more effort than normal.
So that’s exactly what we did.
The walk out was the best thing I ever did.
How long it took I can’t really remember. All I know is that it seemed to go on forever, and I lost my dictaphone.
You see, I’d been recording the history of the Lacandones on the dictaphone, and the fact that I lost it still grates on me today.
Anyhoo… eventually we emerged from the trees, and walked down a river to get back to the village.
We spent an hour taking stock and deciding what to do next.
Again, we had two options.
- Wait for a car to come by and give us a lift to the nearest town with a hospital
- Start walking again
The problem with option number one, was that a car could come by in a few hours or a few days. The only road here went to the village, and the village wasn’t exactly a hot spot for tourism. I think they said they got around twelve visitors per year.
So, once again, we made the decision to walk.
But just as we were getting ready to leave, a vehicle came up the road and turned out to be the police watching the perimeter of where we went into the jungle in case the people walking in to find us had missed us (which they had).
We got loaded into the vehicle and… I passed out.
When I woke up, we were at a military outpost which consisted of a few tents.
Could they help?
Nope.
They could only help if I’d been shot. Which, I was very pleased to report, I hadn’t been. But since they thought I’d been bitten by a scorpion, there was nothing they could do except send us on to the next village which had a doctor.
A village that was a twenty minute drive down the road (plus fifteen or so minutes to drop off the military folk who decided to grab a lift with us!).
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, walking out of the jungle was the best thing I could have done, because it taught me something about myself that I would never have otherwise learnt.
When it came down to it, I had the mental ability to get up and walk out on my own two feet.
I had the motivation to push myself forwards.
Which is exactly what you need if you’re going to run your own business. It doesn’t matter whether you have a niggle in the back of your mind questioning whether you can do it.
It doesn’t matter if you have other people telling you that you can’t.
What matters is that you fight for what you want to do and believe in. Because if you do that, you simply cannot fail.
Michael
What do you think?