If you stuck an umbrella by the Amazon River, it would bloom after two months or another one would grow next to it. The jungle is the thickest and most fertile forest in the world. On a football field sized area you can find more kinds of plants than there are in Poland.

The tropical wilderness beats every fertility record, but at the same time you can starve to death or die of thirst as easy as in the desert.

It’s very hard to find drinkable water in the jungle, unless there is a helpful Indian guide who can recognize a vine full of water.

A lot of vines burst with water after cutting them. But only a couple of them contain drinkable water. Plus you have to know in where to cut it, so that the water won’t spill on the ground.

What about the creeks, rivers and springs? They’re there. But that’s not enough to survive. Only an Indian, an inhabitant of the jungle knows which creek carries potable (drinkable) water and which one navable (for bathing) water. Of course it doesn’t matter to a thirsty whitey what he drinks – it can be for bathing. The problem is that after drinking navable water, the one in which Indians bathe and take care of their physiological needs, you instantly get diarrhea. Very often it’s one of the types of cholera. The most dangerous one kills in three hours.

It’s also easy to die of hunger, because most of the fruits in a jungle grow high up in the trees. In order to get them you have to be a monkey and be born in the treetops.

And what about wild animals? What about peccari (miniatures of our hogs), capybaras (gigantic versions of coypus), tapirs (a delicious animal… something between a pig and a calf), and all the jumping and flying birds and mammals which are everywhere?

Yes, they’re everywhere and they pass a couple steps from you, but in the thicket of the jungle you won’t be able to see them nor hunt them with any kind of gun, because it’s like you’d want to hunt inside a field of ripening corn.

If you don’t want to starve to death in the jungle, you have to ask an Indian, who is a part of the surrounding nature, for help.

He’ll surely tell you to leave your gun, take off your clothes, rub your body with the tallow from a gland of a tapir and follow him closely. You can’t look around or at anything. You can’t stop, ponder, day-dream. You always have to be focused on survival, because the jungle kills careless people in thousands of different ways.

For instance the bark of the trees that grow in the rainforest secretes white, caustic resin after being hurt by a machete. It stings lightly when a drop gets on your skin, you rub that place and then carelessly rub your eye and you’ll be blind for the rest of your life.

You see a bush that is covered with weird, green flowers, you want to go up there to take a photo. It isn’t a good idea. First you’ll be dizzy, than you’ll throw up in a sudden attack of seasickness because of the smell – the pollen of this plant attack the labyrinth.

Look carefully how your Indian guide walks over logs – he never steps on them. Seemingly, an unimportant detail… until your leg gets caught up to the knee in wood dust and you’ll be bitten by venomous centipede or two-centimeter long ants!

The pain is as if a white-hot iron was put on your skin. Your leg swells from the ankle to the groin; if you were wearing pants they would have to be cut.

You’re sick for a couple of weeks after centipede venom, the wound suppurates and rots. After the bite of an ant you’re struck by fever, fortunately only for 2-3 days. Unless you were bit by 2… and if you were bit by 5 your health problems would end the very same day. For ever. And you won’t have time to write down a testament – you’ll quickly doze off to the land of maundering, mumbling, foam from your mouth and slumber.

You have to get through waist-deep water. There’s a short stop on the other side for tearing off 20 centimeter leaches. Unless you stepped on a stingray with a venomous thorn. The ray doesn’t kill. But the sting hurts so much that you want to die. People howl with pain for 24 hours. Men cry... and there’s no way to help them – it has to hurt itself off.

After a whole day of walking, when you’re sticky because of the sweat you want to swim in the river. Don’t jump into the water! You better look at your guide – he only goes in to his ankles, because there are piranhas, venomous stings, electric eels and the most terrifying fish in the world, canero, just a step further.

Canero is a tiny, gold catfish which usually ravens on the bronchia of most fish. It hooks on with a special thorn and slowly eats raw meat.

Unfortunately, caneros don’t live only inside fish. Mammals can do. For example a tapir making his way through river. Although tapirs don’t have bronchia, you can find a couple of tight holes through which it is possible for a canero to get inside their bodies.

The instinct and sense of smell of the caneros tell them to swim into every hole of any body – including the human body. The only way to remove a canero is by doing an operation, under the circumstances that there’s a hospital and surgeon specialized in intimate organs nearby. But even after a successful operation not many men have a chance to become a father.

Is that how it is in the jungle? Then why do you go there? – you’ll ask.

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