southeast Africa: when trips go very very badly

[netllama]

You've been leading rather a charmed life, in all your world travels. Problems arise, you cope. Well done. This was clearly a bigger "problem" than most. It sounds like a totally epic hike out from the stuck truck, across a bunch of wild country. I guess you were retracing your steps so it wasn't totally strange, but how did you feel on that hike out? Were you ever worried for your survival?

I wasn't retracing my steps. That was one of my other mistakes. I decided to walk north rather than back south, the way I came. I knew that I was already a long way from civilization (around 40 miles), and my maps suggested that there might be a town much closer if I continued going north.

In reality, there was basically nothing for 30 miles. About 2 hours walking north, I heard voices not far from the "road", and there was a trail heading east. I followed it for it for barely a few minutes, and stumbled upon a village of maybe a dozen mud structures, and a few women. Two of them were pounding grain, and the third was working over an open fire. I tried to communicate with them in Portuguese, but they only spoke their tribal language. Not that it mattered, as this was basically a stone age era community, with absolutely nothing that would aid me. I can only assume that they very rarely interacted with the outside world.

A few hours later, I spotted two men walking far off in the distance. I tried calling to get their attention, but they either never heard me or ignored me. In hindsight, it didn't matter. I'm guessing they lived in yet another isolated village with no means of assisting me. Plus I was a solid 4+ hours walking away from the truck at this point, and I can't imagine any random people would understand and be willing to walk all the way back in some futile effort to assist me with raw man power. I never saw another person again that day. On the second day of walking, it was at least 2-3 hours before I ran into a random guy who was seemingly fishing in the swamp. He actually did understand Portuguese, but he had no way of helping me, beyond confirming that I was walking the correct direction to the nearest "real" town (which I already knew from the maps on my phone).

My biggest worries while walking were running out of water (I was hauling about 2.5 liters), encountering some predatory animal (I think I saw lion paw prints while walking, but I'm not 100% sure), and my body giving out from the exhaustion of the walk. As I waded through the swamp, I briefly considered collecting water as emergency backup, but then decided against it, because I really feared how sick it might make me.

After the first night sleeping on the ground, I resolved that I would not spend another night in the wilderness. Even if it meant walking through the night, I absolutely had to get out of there before running out of water. Plus I was growing increasingly concerned about my wife not hearing from me for multiple days.