It is like the calm before the storm, the lull before the action, the deep breath before diving into the unknown. The adventure starts only hours from now, a quest that will take me thousands of miles and plunge me into the deadly heart of the Amazon rainforest. With strangers from all corners of the earth, I will travel to a lost world, a place forgotten by history, consumed by nature, wiped from the very memory of humanity. I will encounter perils, and hardships, possibly even face death, all to unravel an ancient mystery and bring light to a forgotten civilisation.
But even the most epic of journeys start from the smallest beginnings.
Terminal 3, Heathrow Airport
London
Midnight(ish)
There used to be a bridge at the end of the lane where I grew up.
Nothing exciting, just a standard ye olde English stone bridge, cutting through a narrow country lane. It spanned a small river, its hump masking what lay on the other side, and was so rarely used that clumps of grass grew in the middle of the single-track road.
As a child, I would often play around the foot of this bridge, on our side of the river, of course.
The far side was forbidden.
My friend, Tommy Leyland, told me as much. The dark woodland that spanned the river banks to either side of the bridge, and through which the rarely-used road cut, was owned by a murderer. He stalked through the trees at night, keeping a dark vigil on the bridge and, sure enough, of the few vehicles that ventured past our house, over the bridge and through the forest, none returned.
Come to think of it, Tommy Leyland was a bit of a knob.
The landowner, while slightly eccentric, turned out to be Mister Reynolds, who ran the little Spar shop in the village. He had erected fencing around the woodland to protect the saplings he planted. The few vehicles that never returned did so because the track joined an A-road on the other side of Mister Reynolds’ forest. They had no reason to turn around and head back our way.
So why am I boring you, in the opening of my first blog post about embarking on an exciting expedition into the untamed heart of the Amazon rainforest, by telling you about the quaint little oh-so-English bridge at the end of our lane?
I am an archaeologist, after all. Shouldn’t I be regaling you with my daring escape from a giant rolling ball? Or hordes of Indians shooting poisoned arrows at me? Or my run-in with grave robbers and tomb raiders?
Well, that might be much more exciting, but it’s also been done. And things like that don’t actually happen to real-life archaeologists, just those glamorised in movies and computer games.
While trekking around the world with my dad certainly threw some challenges our way, nothing quite so over the top has happened to me. I very much doubt it will happen any time soon.
That’s not to say, of course, that this blog will be boring! I am talking about spending six months venturing into the largest rainforest on earth, after all. And not just your ‘bog-standard, run of the mill, every eco-tourist with a bucket-list is doing it these days’ sort of rainforest.
I’m talking about a rainforest perched on sheer, vertical cliffs, eight thousand feet above sea level, hundreds of miles from the nearest road.
I’m talking about one of the most extensive multi-disciplinary expeditions mounted by UNESCO in its more than 70-year long history.
I’m talking about dozens of archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, botanists, zoologists and entomologists dissecting one of Venezuela’s table mountains to lay bare the secrets of an ancient civilisation, utterly unknown to modern science, who once made it their home.
It’s going to be hard. Exhausting. Emotional.
I have no idea what challenges we’ll face. But, while I’ll leave tomb raiders, booby traps and shadowy conspiracies to the realms of cheesy adventure novel writers, I’m sure we’ll encounter hardships that I can’t yet even imagine.
Indeed, I have no idea what lies before me, which brings me back to my bridge.
I was planning to start this blog with a profound statement. Something along the lines of ‘coming to a crossroads, a point of decision making, where I can continue on the track I am on – reversing my V.W. Polo into the university car park and holding the safety rails while climbing the stairs because that’s what the health and safety signs tell me to do. Or I could take the fork in the road, trek off towards the unknown worlds that lie at the end of the road, over the rainbow, beyond the status quo.’
You get the idea.
Yet here I sit, at the beginning of my journey, unable to think of anything but that damned bridge.
Sid, my girlfriend and travelling companion, lies on the metal bench beside me, restlessly trying to catch some shut-eye amongst the muted hush of the midnight terminal building. She has been lured to sleep by the lullaby of floor tile polishers and the squeaking suitcase wheel of a presumably caffeine-riddled man in a suit. He paces endlessly from one end of the hall to the other.
And that’s when it hits me.
The bridge, I mean.
Only it is my father’s warning, not Tommy Leyland’s, that I hear. It is not a warning about forests full of rotting corpses hanging from trees (wow, Tommy really was a knob).
My father’s warning was far more prosaic, a slight scolding for playing in the middle of the road, at the foot of the bridge.
“But nothing’s coming, Dad,” I whined back at him.
“How do you know?” he had demanded. “You cannot see the road beyond.”
Funny how memory works, isn’t it? I mean, it was such a generic, obvious thing to say, and so long ago. Yet now, years later, my dad, my best friend, is gone. I don’t know where – I had no body to bury, no closure beyond that which I force upon myself every day.
But I still hear his voice in my head. That ever-present guide, perhaps even more so than he had been in life, his presumed death imbuing such mundane, everyday words and phrases with hidden meaning.
“You cannot see the road beyond.”
It’s corny, I know – a complete cheese-fest. And yet, it is true. It is significant. It is profound.
Was my road supposed to lead me to have a ‘normal life’? A reasonable job, good money, a wife, a couple of kids, a house in the suburbs?
My early years certainly weren’t standard – an African warlord murdered my mum and sister. I spent much of my time traipsing with my dad across the globe as he struggled to put the pieces of an ancient puzzle together.
Yet, that became my norm.
Then I grew to adulthood and followed his path into archaeology, getting bogged down in that normality. The idea of adventure was overtaken by the concerns of the real world – paying rent, securing research funding, battling with my peers to have my voice heard. Months turned into years, and dreams turned into distant memories.
And, in that morass of the mundane, I lost myself.
Then I lost my father.
Now, I stand at the foot of that bridge once more, unable to see over it, to see the road beyond.
You see, roads do not begin. Nor do they end. They simply change and mutate, sometimes merging into another and becoming known by a different name.
“A-hah – I see the flaw in your thinking,” I hear you say. “What about roads that terminate in a dead-end?”
Like my road, you mean? Research funding gone? Check. Academic reputation in pieces? Check. Father and best (only) friend dead? Check.
Checkmate.
Dead-end.
End of the road.
But then another traveller joined me on that road.
Sid.
Beautiful, fun, clever and witty. Her olive skin highlights her Indian heritage. Midnight-black hair hangs in ringlets about an angelic face, framing dark eyes which hold such warmth they could melt the coldest of hearts.
She is the type of woman to awaken your dreams, to help you realise that they don’t have to stay dreams. If you want something and work for something enough, you can make it a reality.
She is another voice, another guide. She is a reminder that, even when things are at their darkest, when that dead-end seems to fill your vision, and you can see no way out, there is always light.
There is always hope.
The road always continues.
Just, sometimes, you have to go off-road for a while to find it again.
My journey has led me to this hub, where the four corners of the world collide. Since my career collapsed and my father vanished, Sid has taken me off-road. And it’s been pretty rough – for her too. Pretty bumpy. Pretty scary.
But she has led me back to the foot of that bridge, to a place on the most extraordinary archaeological expedition perhaps ever mounted. The comforts of home, the normality of life, are behind us now.
Everything my father and I worked for – the Moon Mask, the Progenitor Theory, the Black Death – are buried. They are nothing but discredited papers in academic journals and blog posts for any who might stumble across them and fancy a laugh at my expense.
All there is now is that little humpback bridge, and I still cannot see the road beyond it.
But finally, as I sit watching caffeine-man finish yet another lap, as the cleaners finish their administrations and pack away their equipment, as the airport begins to hum to life, our departure time fast approaching, I realise one thing.
I am ready to walk over the bridge and follow the road beyond.
Wherever it may lead.