Driving into Chaguaramas, one has certain maritime opportunities, but if you're not interested in expensive dinner at the side of a polluted yacht-club, there's always the jungle, where one can drive into the blackest depths of nothingness, while listening to hellish music like Nine Inch Nails or Meshuggah, scripting an imaginary horror fantasy that can be quite entertaining.
After turning into the jungle, we came across an unfortunate sight. What initially appeared to be a curled up constrictor turned out to be a young caiman slaughtered by some automotive asshole.
Horrendously, despite having it's skull crushed, it seemed to be alive but unconscious. A light prod resulted in a weak bulging of the tail. Perhaps it was paralyzed. Without a cutlass onboard there was no way to humanely put an end to the animal's suffering. Indeed, its armoured skin would have blunted the impact, prolonging death into a series of painful strikes, defeating the purpose of any attempt. This same protective skin could be to blame for the animal's lingering survival through the ordeal. Sometimes A gift is a curse.
Regretfully, we pressed on.
~ ~ ~
At night, the coloured lights of buildings and vehicles are highlighted. Anything that falls into their immediate vicinity is bathed in a saturated but limited light. The ground transforms into an unnatural, almost glassy material when illuminated by the car's eyes.
Like any uninhabited, forested, 3rd world area, it is said that Chaguaramas is at risk of harboring criminal activity in the form of drug dealers, murderers, rapists etc... however due to the lack of potential prey (as there are no people living in the jungle), the darkest, scariest, most secluded places may ironically be safest. In the 5 or so years that my friends and I have made these potentially disastrous journeys into Chaguaramas' mouth of hell, we've never encountered any criminals.
We'd also never encountered any police... until last Friday night.
This young photographer explains to the polite lady officer why he and his friends are parked in the middle of the nowhere on a Friday night... and also why he was taking a jog alone in the abysmal dark of the jungle.
Fun times.
p.s. - Don't go driving into Chaguaramas jungle at night.
And if you do, don't tell anyone I told you to.
Meshuggah- a good way to roll. Safe trails.
ReplyDeletehaha it's not often that people know about them.
ReplyDeletethanks.
if you do script that horror story, would you post it here?
ReplyDeleteI don't think so because they're not really full stories. They're more like spontaneous imaginary reactions to sights and sounds, generally based on the music we're listening to at the time. For example there's a certain song in which one of the guitars produces a tone that my friend and I affectionately call "snail tone", because it just conjured up the image of these horrible limbless creeping slime-trailing creatures. There's a whole sort of inside-joke-mythology that we've built around the music that we listen to; I guess what I'm getting at is that it's not so much horror narratives as just letting your imagination run wild in the darkness. If it were substantial or interesting enough I would post it, but I don't know that it is. (I know that was a long and unrequested explanation but it's the best answer I could give.)
ReplyDelete