u/Cold_Dare_8638

For over a year, there hadn't two consecutive days without rain but last week, we got three days without a single drop.

Since the road to my land is pure clay, you can’t get a vehicle in there when it’s wet. I knew this was my chance. I strapped my brush wacker onto the back of the motorcycle and took off—45 miles down the highway, then 8 miles deep into the jungle.

Everything went smooth at first. I reached my hut and cleared out a lone termite nest that was trying to claim the place but when I went down to the stream for drinking water, it was completely dry. Desperate, I slammed my bucket into the mud, letting whatever filthy, murky water there was seep into it. I took it inside, boiled it, and dumped in some Kool-Aid to mask the taste. Then I got to work, clearing a 20-by-40-meter wall of overgrowth around my plantains.

By the time I went to sleep, my head was splitting and my stomach was turning inside out from all the clay I'd ingested.

I woke up the next morning feeling fine, but the rain was already back. My neighbor to the east was gone, and my neighbor to the west walked past my hut. He looked at me, asked if I had arrived yesterday, and told me he was walking all the way out to the highway to get to the city.

It poured for most of the day. By evening, I decided to push through and clear another 20-by-40-meter patch. The last time my wife used the brush wacker, she had taken the back safety protector off because it makes the machine lighter and easier to maneuver.

Suddenly, I felt a violent shock slam through my wrists—the exact feeling of accidentally hitting a tree trunk with a baseball bat. I dropped the machine instantly, only to feel that exact same shock in my foot. I looked down. There was a clean four-inch gash ripped open in my boot.

When I pulled my foot back, most of the meat from my big toe literally fell out.

Completely alone in the middle of nowhere, panic set in. I ran into the house, grabbed a pair of pants, sliced them up, and bound the wound tightly using bailing twine. I knew I had to ride out on the motorcycle or bleed out. I jammed my left boot back on to stabilize my ride, left the right foot bare with a cloth wrap and throttled it.

Two miles down the muddy track, I spotted my most trusted neighbors. I slammed on the horn and started screaming. They ran over.

"I cut my toe off!" I yelled, the panic raw in my voice. "I'm losing tons of blood and I can't climb the hills alone. Come with me, I’ll pay you!"

The guy just looked at me. "I'm too busy. Agucho is up ahead, ask him." And he walked away.

I kept riding. Suddenly, a massive unfamiliar snake maybe a cribo was stretched completely across the road. I didn't know if it was venomous, so I stayed on the bike, honking the horn and screaming at it to move. It didn't care. I sat there wasting three minutes until I finally had to hop off the moto and scare it into the brush.

Right where the snake came from, the bridge over the stream had been entirely washed away by the rain. There was about a two-foot gap of missing road. I hit the throttle, used a little bump to jump the gap, but the clay was so slick I instantly crashed on the landing. I hoisted the bike back up, blood soaking through the twine, and made it to the first steep, 30-degree hill.

The bike spun out. I couldn't make it up, and every time I tried to push, I kept stubbing the mangled toe against the ground. I started hollering and hammering the horn, hoping someone, anyone, could hear me. I was starting to feel faint. I could see the blood literally running down the muddy incline.

Turns out, the neighbor who refused me earlier had a change of heart. He showed up on the trail and helped me push through the remaining four miles of mud.

When we hit the final 100 yards before the highway, I was running on empty. I got off the bike and let the shock completely take over. I started hyperventilating, groaning incredibly loud, being embarrasingly dramatic. "Please," I gasped to the neighbor, "just push the moto the last 100 yards to the asphalt."

He ran out and flagged down a passing trucker. The trucker hopped on my moto and gunned it, smoke pouring out of the clutch and tires as he forced it onto the road. I didn't know him, what if this guy just steals my bike?—so I hobbled as fast as I could and grabbed the handlebars. I thanked the neighbor and handed him 60 soles.

The trucker looked at my bike and warned me, "Be careful. Go slow. The clay is packed up to the wheel wells and the tires aren't turning."

I rode for about a mile until the asphalt scraped the worst of the mud away. I pulled over to do a quick inspection and realized two out of the four sprocket nuts had sheared off, leaving the back wheel waddling with a terrifying wiggle.

I finally got a cell signal and called my wife. My daughter answered.

"Get your mom," I said, trying to hold it together. "Daddy, I'm busy cooking," she replied. "Now!" "Daddy, be patient, I'm busy." "It's a medical emergency! RUN!"

She walked over to her aunt's house. Through the speaker, I could hear loud Cumbia music blasting. I knew right then they were all drinking. My wife got on the phone, I explained the bloody mess I was in, and told her to meet me at the crossroads by the house.

"No, I’m coming to get you," she insisted.

I started driving toward them, but within minutes, my headlight and taillight completely died. I was driving blind in the pitch black, navigating solely by watching the headlights of oncoming cars reflect off the wet asphalt. I kept calling them every few minutes like a tracker: "I'm at mile 30... mile 20..."

But they didn't have their lights on either, meaning we were barreling toward each other completely invisible. I called again, "Make sure you out gasoline in the motokar!"

Eventually, I realized I must have passed them. I turned around and drove back to search. Sure enough, there they were in the dark: a crew of four drunks—my wife, her sister, the boyfriend, and a neighbor—physically pushing the motokar because, of course, they forgot the gasoline. My sister-in-law was hysterically crying. The boyfriend stumbled up to me and said, "Don't worry, man I've got a lighter." Then struck the lighter super close my face I guess to show me it works.

"Great," I muttered. I told my wife to get on the back of my motorcycle. Before we left, I threw 20 soles at my sister-in-law and told them to go knock on doors until they found gas, get the motokar back to the house, and lock it up.

We kept on the road toward the clinic, but because I had no lights, we kept slamming directly into massive potholes, sending cold, filthy street water splashing right into the open wound. To make things weirder, my wife kept mindlessly unzipping the side pocket of my backpack where I keep my Nintendo Switch for company. I had to keep pulling over onto the shoulder just to zip it back up so it wouldn't bounce out into the dark.

By the time we got into town, all the standard emergency clinics were locked up for the night. I finally pulled up to one that was open, swung my bad leg off the bike, and stepped directly into an open puddle of raw sewage.

They called the doctor, who arrived about 30 minutes later. I looked him dead in the eye and begged, "Please, put extra anesthesia in. My body does not accept it well."

I covered my eyes with my hands for the entire procedure, screaming like a kid the second the needle hit the wound. But the doctor was a professional; he sewed it up beautifully. When he finished, I reached out to shake his hand out of gratitude. He put up a fist for a fist bump. Because I was completely loopy and out of it, my brain didn't register the gesture, so I just reached out, grabbed his wrist, and gave it a solid shake.

Outside the clinic, I walked over to the moto, yanked hard on a cluster of loose wires under the console, and the headlights flickered back to life.

Out of the 50 closest people I know in this area, at least 7 of them have been violently assaulted and robbed on the road at night. We didn't waste a second. We high-tailed it home, swerving aggressively in and out of the nighttime traffic.

When I finally hobbled through my front door, my son—who had just stepped on a rusty screw the other day that went maybe 5mm deep into his foot—peeked his head out of his room. He took one look at me shuffling inside and just started laughing that his old man was limping too. My two daughters looked at the bandage, completely unimpressed, and called me a wimp because they genuinely thought my entire toe had flown off in the jungle.

Honestly, though? It was a great day. The sheer physical trauma and the absolute madness of the journey gave me exactly one day of total, blissful relief from the massive, crushing stress I’ve been carrying around every single day.

35 acre Amazon nature preserve in Peru.

I wanted to ask this community if people ever trek thru the jungle?

This is cool but what do I do with it?

Looks happy