‘A couple miles’ to the downed ship turned out to be more like ten miles, and there wasn’t a road, so we walked. Enough people had been this way that there was a sort of trail through the jungle. I say sort of, because the trail had evolved as each group of people figured out better ways to get there; avoid hills, find shallower places to cross streams, avoid mud and dense pockets of thorns. It would have been better if the trail had been marked, which is wasn’t. Whatever native animals lived in this jungle also had created trails, and there were lots of dead ends. As a substitute for markings, we tried to follow whichever trail appeared to have had more traffic, this turned out to be a bad idea, as the people who had gone before us were idiots. I sank up to my knees in muddy jungle streams more than once. It was hot, and humid, and there were large creepy insects in the jungle, creepy even though we knew, or were told, their venom couldn't affect us. I kept swatting and squishing insects that dropped from the trees and landed on the back of my neck, hoping for an easy meal. Insects clearly hadn't gotten the memo about humans not being edible to the native biology of Paradise. Or they were just hateful motherfuckers and wanted to bite or sting something.

That 'chance of afternoon showers', which in the tropics was the equivalent of 'chance the sun will rise in the morning' turned out to be a thumping walloper of a downpour. It only lasted less than five minutes, which seemed a lot longer when we were all soaked to the skin in the first minute. Some of us tried to huddle under the larger trees with broad leaves, until lightning started crashing down, then we all got as far away from trees as we could. When the rain stopped, the sun came out, and it was like walking through a steam room. Big fat, sun-warmed water droplets dripped off the trees onto our heads, the air was thick enough to cut with a knife, and whatever insects had been sleeping before the storm were awake and hungry now. It was, we all agreed, way better than listening to a speech in the DFAC.