Nick Meets the Stinking Giant
Alrighty Trekkie dudes and dudettes! You got it, it's C. Nick Point back at the keyboard after a short break due to extreme exhaustion. You see, writing three episodes of my true life adventures nearly destroyed my pointer finger, the one and only one I know how to type with. True enough! So now that I'm back.... let me tell you about the time last year that I met the legendary Stinking Giant .
Our trek into the tangled and twisted realm of the rainforest to sleep overnight was just the beginning of the fun. I told you already about the ups and downs, mostly ups. We made camp along the mighty Bohorok River at a place called Batu Gajah. I think it means "little muddy hacked-from-the-jungle place that crazy foreigners like to camp at." We pitched our leaky Boy Scout tents in a freshly slashed area about the size of our four-square area at school. The guides had already cut the bamboo frame for their dry and comfy, open-air, black plastic tarp tent, and were busy preparing dinner over a fireplace in a pile of river rocks. So we decided to check out the rainforest upriver with our guide Jungle Jim, as we called him. We had heard the native Batak porters talking in solemn, hushed tones about the Stinking Giant but we didn't speak the language well enough to get the story and all we could get out of Jungle Jim was that no one had seen the Giant in these parts for some time. Anyway, we were sure it was just some hocus-pocus and went out for our evening trek without any fear of meeting this big, smelly guy.
The going was really tough along the river so we cut a path with our trusty machetes straight up the mountain side. We knew there were tigers deep in the forest, along with rhinos and elephants, but in the dark shadows of every tree we just imagined the Stinking Giant watching us. Sometimes it's what you don't know or see that is the scariest. It was starting to get late or the trees were getting bigger (we didn't wear a watch because time stands still in the jungle) and we were thinking of turning back, when we smelled it. Just a whiff. We looked at each other, but no... this was different. Worse than the gym locker room after p.e., much worse than dog breath for that matter. It was like something had died up ahead and the slight breeze that carried the scent to us was warning us. But, being intrepid explorer types, and way too curious, we decided to press on forward, toward the noxious odor.
It went from bad to badder, dudes. All sorts of wild, confused thoughts raced through our brains. Could it be that this was the Stinking Giant himself, or was it just a dead carcass of some jungle road kill?! It got SO BAD, the smell, that we thought we might pass out, and we looked up and around and behind us, when we should have been looking down. We were walking along a spine of the ridge of the Bukit Barisan and the ground dropped off like a bottomless green pit on both sides. One misstep and we would be goners. The guy walking in front of me, a little kid named Reggie, was shivering with fear and feeling sick to his stomach from the stench. He was looking from side to side and muttering to himself. The next second he was gone! He dropped like a coconut straight down the side of the path through a tangle of jagged rattan brush and screamed in pain as he thudded to an abrupt halt at the base of what appeared, in the dim light, to be a huge boulder. Then he stopped making any sounds.
Jungle Jim took his machete and hacked off a giant liana vine and threw it over the cliff and we carefully lowered ourselves over the side. We were fearful for Reggie and afraid for us too because now the smell was stronger than ever. The Stinking Giant must be down below where Reggie had fallen! It smelled like the worst city sewer you can imagine with a few hundred dead and bloated rats inside. When we got to the bottom we saw it! The Stinking Giant, a reddish or dull liver-brown in color with pale wart-like spots all over. Flies swarmed around the fleshy skin that smelled like rotten meat. It wasn't sleeping, but wasn't dead either. It was in the last stages of life, a lonely being, but strangely beautiful in its final glory. It wasn't at all what we had imagined, not man nor beast. It was the flower of a giant parasitic fungus, the Rafflesia arnoldi, over one meter in width, that blooms in the remotest parts of the rainforest for just one week, and then dies. Its awful odor is just a ploy to attract pollinators, like flies, and rodents, and unwary hikers, which may be attracted for some sick reason to the odor and either fall into the sticky soup of digestive enzymes or merely brush against the fleshy lobes and carry away the pollen to fall and become the next generation of Giants.
Poor Reggie never knew what hit him. He was knocked senseless in the fall, and he must have gotten up and stumbled over the boulder-like flower before falling into the soupy brew. By the time we got to him, he was drenched in digestive juices and covered in the dusty, smelly pollen. The bad news is that none of us dared to touch him and for all we knew he might have already been partially digested by the Stinking Giant! We, of course, totally freaked out at the sight and took the cue of Jungle Jim and scrambled back up the vine to safety. We knew that no one back at camp would believe our story and we didn't know what Reggie's parents would think. The good news is that these rotten fungi don't digest people, but only feed upon the climbing vine of the Tetrastigma plant. So when Reggie staggered back into camp an hour later, looking sopping wet and smelling like last week's garbage, we all fell off our logs and rolled on the riverbank laughing at the sight while holding our noses as tightly as possible.
And that's another C. Nick Point tale of suspense from the rainforest. Later.