Will you scratch my back? (Shown: the author's; photo: Bill Hatcher/Outside)

First law of adventure-travel survival: Heed not the blasé reassurances of locals when you raise issues of life and flesh.

Case in point:

I was headed to the Amazon rainforest of northern Peru to do a survival trip with a local guide. We’d live off the land, forage for food, build our own shelter. I’d report for a feature article for Outside magazine.

What would I need to bring?

Nothing but a machete, per the cheery owner of the jungle lodge who set up the trip for me.

Uh, but what about bugs? Jungle = mosquitoes, no?

“There’s a marvelous natural repellent that indigenous people use,” said the lodge owner. “Moises (the guide) will show you.”

So I didn’t include more than a dram of bug juice in my cheat bag, which also included a toothbrush and iodine tablets. If the locals have survived for eons without DEET, I could last a week.

By the second day of the trip, I found myself constantly waving off an ether of flying bugs. I’d sweated away my tiny bit of 100-proof repellent in short order. “You drink too much water,” Moises informed me. But I wasn’t sure that dehydration was the best prophylactic for biting insects.

“Hey Moises, what about that natural insect repellent Paul told me about? Think we could scare some up?”

Moises nodded. And not soon enough, he paused and pointed to a giant carbuncle growing on the limb of a tree. A termite nest. Here’s the drill: You stick your fist inside it and wait for a steady queue of termites to scuttle down your arm, shoulder, and neck. Then you rub the critters into your flesh. That’s right—simply squash them into your pores.

The result is a pleasant-smelling, woodsy cologne. Termites, after all, eat nothing but wood. I smelled like freshly gnawed tree. Nice.

Next logical question: “Hey Moises—how long does this stuff last?”

“Oh, about 10 minutes.”

And he was right. The truth is, indigenous people only use termite juice to disguise their scent while hunting. Insect repellency is a short-lasting side effect.

I spent the rest of the week at the mercy (none) of the bugs. Or in the river. (Piranhas were preferable to mosquitoes.) Or covered inside long sleeves and trousers while surrounded by the desperate din of airborne cannibals. I.e., rainforest-sauna hot.

I stopped itching after two weeks. —Robert Earle Howells

Robert Earle Howells’s website is Surefire Writing: http://www.surefirewriting.com. You can read the full account of his rainforest experience at http://www.bobhowells.com. The film he made about it can be viewed at http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/the_rainforest_wisdom_of_moises_chavez.

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Are we there yet?

I was at the Aga Khan
University in Karachi, organizing a writing workshop, when the call came in.

“Oh no,” whispered my colleague. 
”That’s bad. That’s terrible.”

She turned to me. “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. We want you to go home
 right now.”

She called for Zabair, the toughest and most experienced driver in the pool. He led me outside to a reinforced pickup truck, made sure I was belted in, and pulled out into the worst traffic in the world.

Nobody knew what to expect. Riots? Invasion by the Taliban, by India, by the U.S.? Everyone in Karachi, a city of nearly 20 million, had a single thought: get home.

Outside the university walls, the traffic wasn’t just bumper-to-bumper—it was
 door-to-door and elbow-to-elbow. A three-lane road had five lanes of 
traffic, a four-lane road had seven: small family cars, vast 
trucks painted with bright designs and verses from the Koran, taxis (some so battered they were literally shapeless, held 
together by fiberglass patching), scores of motorbikes and mopeds swarming the sidewalks and threading the gaps between car bumpers.

Traffic in Pakistan tends to be an open-faced sandwich anyway, with very 
little hidden or enclosed, and tonight this was even more true. 

Hand-carts, donkey-carts, a boy on a bicycle carrying two large wooden
 crates, two boys on a moped carrying an extension ladder and metal 
piping, a family of five squeezed into the bed of a tiny pickup along with what looked like a giant refrigerator. Another family of five on a 
motorbike. The brightly-painted buses had twenty or more people on the 
roof. Everyone looked like a refugee.



People swarmed the sidewalks, flooded into the roads. Scores of mopeds and small motorbikes raced up the sidewalks or picked their way between the larger vehicles, sometime perpendicular to the stream, sometimes in the opposite direction. It’s a wonder we didn’t see crushed pelvises on every corner.

Twice our pickup flipped the wing-mirror of a bus. Once we crunched a woman’s car as she crowded in front of our bumper. “Well, go on then!” Zabair shouted in Urdu, and she pulled into the tiny space that had opened ahead.

Night fell. The whole scene was becoming surreal. The shops had closed early, in self-protection. Tail lights and brake lights shone dimly through dust and exhaust. The traffic got steadily worse. Gas was running out: motorbikes were being pushed, cars abandoned. Eventually we reached a two-lane on-ramp to an overpass and it became clear that nothing would go any farther. People swarmed out of their cars or climbed on their roofs.

Nobody was in charge. When I’d arrived in Karachi, just five hours previously, 
every road had a soldier lounging at the corner or on a bridge. Now
 there was no sign of them, nor of police to help sort out the 
traffic.

Yet, astonishingly, there was no sense of threat. It was only later in the evening that a feeling of 
grievance would emerge here and there, tires would be burned, shots will be fired (mostly into the air), campaign billboards would be pulled down and torched, the belief in Pakistan being that everything comes down to politics, and all politics is corrupt. For now, people were standing around watching, talking, even joking. One boy of maybe nine grinned as he helped his father push their car.

In the end, Zabair backed up, bumped across a construction site under the overpass and found a detour, then another, and finally we got to my host’s home, the 25-minute journey taking more than three hours. Indoors, we stared at the TV. Still, nobody knew what would happen, but I felt I’d been granted a vision of how the world will end: not with a bang but with a final apocalypse of traffic.—Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes’ latest book is Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment.

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