The Jungle Trip Part III

As we continued down the trail, the jungle opened up to reveal a small village. The tiny huts were wood with rusty tin roofs. Curious heads peeked through doors and windows as we walked down the main path. Chickens pecked and scurried freely. Women and children approached us and welcomed us to their village with happy gestures and native tongues. The men watched us sideways as they continued doing what they were doing.
A few of the women coaxed us down the street to a small hut with a window and a counter facing the street. A smiley young lady quickly placed a small cutting board with a tiny loaf of bread and an icy cold bottle of Coke on the counter. I handed her a dollar and she opened the coke and handed me the bread wrapped in a paper napkin. She gave me back 3 quarters. When I pushed the change back towards her and told her to keep it, she was ecstatic. She turned around clapping, and shared a moment of celebration with someone else in the hut.
An old woman approached me. She looked me in the eyes, and talked and talked, not so much to me, but to the other women. She felt my hair, and patted my shoulders. A few other women followed her lead and studied my hair politely until Tanya walked up. Her long blonde hair took the village by storm, and they fawned over her foreign radiance. Some stood there transfixed, while others ran to tell the others to come and look.
Me and a few guys broke from the group and wandered around the little village to see the sights. The whole village consisted of a few dozen whitewashed huts crammed side to side down the main path. The village was sitting on the banks of a wide brown river. We dodged kids playing ball and chickens pecking the ground. A group of girls about our age huddled together and giggled as we walked by. We found Rambo relaxing under a rusty old pavilion by the river and talking with a few older men from the village. He told us that we were waiting on a boat to take us across the river. I put my pack down and layed down on the cool concrete slab under the pavilion. Eventually, a man with cutoff pants and no shirt came down the river in a long canoe. He stood at the back of the canoe with a long pole that he used to push against the river bottom and steer the boat. The canoe was made from a giant hollowed out log. It was very narrow and about twenty feet long. As he neared the riverbank, he turned off the tiny motor and maneuvered the boat onshore with his pole. Rambo instructed us to put our packs back on, climb in and sit up straight as an arrow. He said that there were things in that river we wouldn’t want to swim with so we better be careful. We piled in and held on tight. When the boat was full, the boatman maneuvered the canoe into the river and cranked up the motor. The river was about 100 yards wide, and it was a short trip. As we crossed, I imagined Piranhas, snakes and leeches lurking below the swirling brown eddies on the surface of the deep brown river.