Stories from the Amazon - Exploring the creeks of Rancho Ranan

One weekend that we spent on our ranch, my brother John and I decided it would be a whole lot of fun to explore the creek from the first bridge to the second. Now our ranch was 300 acres and it was a half kilometer wide by two and a half kilometers deep. About halfway through was a creek that wound around the virgin jungle. There were two bridges and two rainy season bridges. The bridges were only for the brave as they were only a sort of narrow tree laying over the water with another skinny branch that was stuck a little like a handrail. If you didn't have good balance you would slip off and fall into the water. The first bridge was high and had a slant so if it was rainy it got super slippery. Since we mostly ran around in flip flops or barefoot, we never had problems getting over the log. The trail wound around through the virgin jungle and ended up at the back of the property with another skinny log bridge over the same creek. We had a neighbor who lived on the property behind ours and he used the creek on our ranch at the second bridge as his swimming/bathing/clothes washing creek. We sometimes tried out that swimming hole too after a hike down the trail, but mostly we just swam in out swimming hole at the first bridge. The rainy season bridges were short and shallow and only had water under the logs during rainy season. My brother and I thought it would be fun to see the jungle down the length of the creek. We had no idea how far it wound around or how long it was. We decided to hike and swim down the creek. We got into our jeans and boots and grabbed out machetes and started off one morning.If you've ever seen pictures of jungle or tried to hike in jungle you might understand why we decided to hike in the creek instead of next to the creek. The jungle is extremely thick and is mostly made up of thorn trees. And I'm not talking about little thorns. I'm talking about thorns that are 3 or 4 inches long that if you bump into them there is some sort of poison or something on them that instantly gives you an infected puncture wound or cut. The first bit of our hike through the creek went fine. We were crawling over and under fallen trees and swimming through the deep spots but mostly it was fairly shallow, knee or waist deep. We enjoyed seeing how the creek twisted and curved and the terrain along the creek bank. I'm sure we probably startled an anaconda or two, especially since in a previous year the neighbor had killed a very extremely large anaconda in that same creek in our main swimming hole. But we weren't thinking too much about the snakes. After an hour or more of hiking we got to a curve in the creek where it widened out quite a bit, almost to river size. and the water got deeper than we could stand up in and we were swimming. The water had carved out a cave in the side of the bank. I went over to get a closer look because it seemed very interesting. All of a sudden hundreds of bats swarmed out of the cave and were flying over my head. The terror was instant. I plunged myself under the water, holding my breath and trying to look up and see if they were still flying over the water. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the cute little bats that eat insects. However, in the Amazon, they have vampire bats. These bats bite a hole in the necks of livestock such as cattle and horses and other animals and hang on the animals' neck and drink the blood that bleeds out of the hole and that is their food. Having horses, I had many a morning that I would go out to the horse pasture and find a horse with a blood streak down it's neck from the vampire bats. They also carried rabies and other diseases and there didn't seem to be a way to prevent the bats from getting my horses or to protect the animals from the bats. So to this day I'm scared of bats. But that day in the creek with hundreds of bats flying out of their cave towards me my heart nearly stopped. Even John ducked under the water to avoid coliding with the bats. After we finally made it past the bat cave we both decided maybe braving the thorn trees might be safer than braving the vampire bats and anaconda snakes. So we climbed up the bank and slashed and pushed our way along the side of the creek and finally after several hours of hiking and swimming we made it to the second bridge. Needless to say I was greatly relieved to see that bridge and be able to hike on a normal trail back to home!