Three months after packing up my life and moving to the Peruvian city of Cusco, my childhood friend Pete came to visit. We were in the mood for a serious jungle adventure and had loaded up on typhoid vaccinations and malaria pills. We were ready for the Amazon.
By way of a Lonely Planet guidebook, Pete* and I decided to pony up for a four day, three night group excursion to Manu National Park, a biosphere reserve in the Amazon River basin. There we would drive up winding mountains past dozens of waterfalls spilling over dirt roads, boat to a private lodge with catered food, and trek through paths slick with mud on the hunt for tarantulas and tapirs.
The morning we left Cusco and headed into the wild, we stumbled into our tour van and found ourselves sitting near a nebbish man and his nearly mute college-bound son, along with four twenty-something University of Florida alums who were on a fraternity reunion trip. Said crew was made Chris, Jared, Brad, and Myles, each bearing their own distinct marks of bro. Jared sported a backwards hat like the rest of his brethren, though he had a thick beard and talked about squirrel hunting and his job transporting yachts for millionaires in the Florida Keys. Myles, whose manner of speaking was particularly lifeless, was like a low-budget doppelgänger of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. Chris, the most outwardly friendly of them all, brandished a piano-toothed grin and a personal trademark of saying “hashtag” about every possible mundane activity. Eating a plate of chicken and rice? “Hashtag delicious.” Spotting wildlife with a pair of binoculars? “Hashtag monkeys.”
And then there was Brad. He fooled me the most with his quiet demeanor. He had come down with altitude sickness and spent most of the first day sleeping in the van as it slowly ascended the winding hills, taking us deeper into thick wooded brambles with fanned leaves the size of our arms. Butterflies made of incandescent colors flapped past us, and the air hung thick with humidity as we pushed onward. After several hours of navigating our way up dirt roads and stopping for the occasional monkey or macaw sighting, we finally made it to our first stop: a small set of cabins not too far from a coca leaf farm, constructed from rainforest wood and outlined by wildflower sculpted paths. Although the cabins themselves didn’t have plumbing or overhead lighting, the surrounding area had fairly new bathrooms, an open-air hut stocked with lazy hammocks, and a communal dining area for the whole group.
We spent the first night listening to the fraternity brothers regale us with their tales of parties past as they offered cups of Sprite spiked with home-brewed chicha. Pete and I both did our best to join in, though there was only so much we could add to their conversation about the bar scene in Jupiter. But whatever. I was cool, I could hang.
The group woke up early the next morning to hike through a trail spotted with jaguar tracks; we used machetes to bushwhack through overgrown vegetation and showered ourselves in Deet. Our knee-high rain boots suctioned out of deep puddles of mud and we waded through murky streams. We caught sight of toucans and a couple wild boars on the move, though we never saw any of the wildcats whose footprints were fresh in front of us. After a sweaty foray back to the cabin area, some of us decided to laze around the hammock hut. Pete went to take a shower and the father-son duo went off to their cabin. As I settled in and swung back and forth, Brad and Chris began to talk about their ideal girlfriends.
“I don’t know, I think it’d be pretty nice to have someone clean my clothes and do my dishes. Just be a wifey, you know?” said Brad, assuming we’d totally understand what he meant.
I laughed loudly, certain that Brad was joking. Except he wasn’t. He was being totally sincere.
“That would be nice,” Chris agreed. “But you can always just get a mail-order bride or something. They’ll do whatever you want. Hashtag fuck yeah!”
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