After the initial terror of realising you're hopelessly lost passes, the experience settles into a fairly steady rhythm. You trudge on, trying to problem solve through the fog of hunger. Your body hurts. You daydream about food and people you'll possibly never see again. You constantly imagine you're seeing a road up ahead or a break in the trees, but you never do. Sometimes you feel weirdly peaceful, and other times you're on edge of panic. But you trudge on, and on, until you either die or find a way out.
I was woken up by a sharp bite, somewhere on my foot. Trying to find my torch, I felt around the ground to find ants everywhere. "Leave me alone," I muttered, trying to brush them off. I only wanted sleep. And even if I wanted to switch the torch on, I knew it would only flicker for a second before turning off—the battery was almost gone.My fingers closed around a small stone: self-defence. I started to crush the ants before they could get close enough to bite. My torch flicked on and off, illuminating flashes of violence, like in an action film. When the last of the dozen or so had been dealt with, I tucked away the torch above my head and tried to find a comfortable position to sleep. The grazes up my legs made comfort virtually impossible, but they were nothing compared to my throbbing feet. After sloshing up several rocky streams (it's faster to follow the streams than navigate through forest), my boots had rubbed the skin off the sides of my feet. Then the flesh had become infected, so it now throbbed and stunk. The only solution was to drift back into sleep. Back into my subconscious.I found a way out, but looking back at it now, the days all seem fairly similar. Here's just one of those days, as best as I can remember it, while I was lost in Borneo's Mulu National Park.