Saturday, June 23, 2012

Omshanty lodge in Leticia, Colombia is dangerous

Enrique of Omshanty Jungle Lodge is recommended in the current Lonely Planet book for Colombia in the Section on Leticia. Not only is he incompetent but he is really dangerous and is going to get someone killed one day. I made it to Leticia, Brazil to where Kike (Enrique) has his jungle lodge called Omshanty. First thing he did was get me to eat some really bad food that gave me food poisoning. But not until we were a days hike out in the jungle did I suffer the symptoms from the uncooked eggs in the dish. I was up all night vomiting. I became completely dehydrated and needed purified water badly. I went to wake him up but couldn't. At first I thought he must be ignoring me. But later I found out he is one of those guys that you literally need to kick in order to wake up. He is very depressed and smokes a ton of marijuana which is why I think he goes unconscious like this. I didn't want to puke and crap all over my bedding so I climbed out of my hammock and mosquito netting and laid in the mud as I vomited and crapped my insides out. Have I mentioned yet that it rained non-stop the entire 10 days we were out there? That night it rained so hard that trees were falling over. And they were huge trees!!! Any one of these trees could have taken us out. I lay crawling in the mud all night long being sick. I opened my mouth to catch the rain in order to quench my thirst. I had done an Amazon trip like this the year previously and learned a lot. I have also been on some other pretty severe survival trips so I now know what I am doing. For one thing, everyone has to get up early in the morning to get going. Kike could never get his butt in gear until after 10 or 11 am. When he got up he would smoke two joints then fall back asleep. Then he would smoke two joints in order to poo. Then he would smoke another 2 joints to get going. He hired a local native guide named Sergio to help out. Kike treated Sergio very badly. He wanted the native guy to wait on us hand and foot. He expected him to do everything including washing the dishes, cooking our food and carrying most of the weight. Not to mention he was the only one who was really an expert at hunting for food. The reason why I hired Kike in the first place was that he promised to show me the jaguar in the wild so that I could photograph it. Kike decided that it was better if we slipped over the border into Brazil. This was a really bad idea since I did not have a visa for Brazil and Kike was carrying about a lot of marijuana. (He didn’t tell me that he was carrying drugs with him) He has to smoke constantly. After day one the entire trip was in the country of Brazil and not Colombia. One day there was an Amazonian frog that Kike was trying to catch. He was going to grab it and hand it to me to hold. From my previous trip I had learned that frog was poisonous. I told him "Isn't that frog poisonous?" He said "no" luckily he could not catch it. Later when I returned I checked again and indeed that frog was highly poisonous. If either of us had touched it we would have died or had become deathly ill. Kike would get kind of paranoid. At one point Kike said that some other native men had taken a poison jungle root from a tree and put it in all the streams to kill the fish. This way they could easily harvest tons of fish. I was told this poison root removes the oxygen from the water and the fish suffocate. He claimed that a group of native hunters had done this. He was really mad at them and was going to burn an encampment that they lived in and all their stuff for revenge. In the group he was speaking of there were around 10 hunters all with guns and they would kill us for setting fire to their possessions and huts. I also asked him how he could be certain that these were the ones who poisoned the streams. This may have been an excuse of Kike's as to why we were seeing no animals and why we would never see the jaguar that we were supposed to be tracking. Kike didn’t tell me until we were way out into the jungle but he can’t hike all day with a pack. At one point he broke his neck and could not walk. Any one that goes out into the wild with him should be told in advance that he can only hike for a few hours. Kike is a chain smoker. He smokes constantly. He had to bring several cartons of cigarettes to get him through the trip. When he is not smoking a cigarette or marijuana he is chewing mambo (coca leaf powder) or chewing tobacco. Sometimes he does more than one at a time. It was aggravating because he told me to stop using mosquito repellant because the jaguar would smell it. I follow his instructions but not only was he still using mosquito repellant but he was chain smoking. We weren’t supposed to be making camp fires either. His plan for me to see the jaguar was to kill a small animal as bait for the jaguar. I would wait out all night in a hammock tied only 5 feet off the ground waiting for it. The native guide Sergio was to stay with me. (Not Kike, he would stay sleeping as usual) They claimed that the Jaguar would never look upwards to see me. I was thinking that it could easily get me. Sergio had the gun, but I had already figured out that it only rarely fired. Sergio would have to take out the bad round with a stick and then try another one, and another. At this point if the jaguar was attacking me I would certainly be mauled. I had brought a bunch of extra food, power bars just in case. At the lodge Kike told me to split it in three and we would each carry a third. I didn’t realize until the trek was over that Kike did not want to carry his third. We were out in the jungle starving and I asked for a power bar. Kike said that Sergio at them all. I said to Kike that I told Sergio that he could help himself so it was alright. We weren’t able to catch any food for many days as we had planned because the gun did not work. Kike told me that we purposely weren’t brining much food because we were going to hunt for all of it in the jungle. I now see that he was trying to turn me against Sergio and that Sergio was trying to turn me against Kike. Sergio even wanted us to ditch Kike in the jungle but I told him that Kike would not be able to find his way back and would probably get really hurt or die.

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