Island Living
Life on Gili Gede was something I don’t think I’m ever going to forget, not to mention running around shoe less and shirt less for a week had a great effect on my mental outlook. I feel like I’ve returned home with a more relaxed and stress-free mindset. Recently I’ve been spending more of my life outdoors, and I’m actually noticing some positive effects as a result. I find myself living in the moment more and even what little worries I had have been set aside. I’ve been thinking about incorporating more survival trips into my life, maybe making it biannual. Just to perpetuate those positive effects. Another upside is that I would keep getting better and better at it. It’s possible that eventually I really would be catching all my own food, and living off the land entirely.
That brings up another point, was it really survival, or even sustainable living? I think on the shelter aspect we were mostly up to par. Sleeping in hammocks outdoors is aligned with the survival lifestyle and is totally sustainable for a long period of time. I actually felt more comfortable in the hammock than a bed, which is pretty surprising. Although we did have one casualty to the hammock, one LEAP member set his hammock up wrong and ended up hurting his spine for the rest of the trip. When stringing up hammocks the trick is to make sure they aren’t too tight or too loose. In the end our setup worked really well for the most part. The reason why we couldn’t sleep on the ground in shelters like we had hoped, was that there were just too many coconut crabs roaming around with their giant pincers. Though we did put a dent in the problem by eating a few. (They were delicious by the way.) The food situation was pretty well planned and organised, so we didn’t ever need to live off the land, but we did get to experience some pretty significant hunger for portions of the trip.
A significant thing to question is whether the way I was operating was actually sustainable, in the sense that by the four day mark my legs were covered in scratches, my foot had a large wound on it, my elbows ached from climbing trees all day, and I was generally feeling a little run down. My friends had a similar situation, Bronson had several sea urchin spines in his feet, and Jetsun was incapacitated by back pain. Our general condition makes me wonder what we would have looked like after a year on the island. We definitely would have had to be more careful and not run around so much. It’s just so damn hard not to get cut up and injured traversing the terrain. But obviously it doesn’t matter for a one week stay.
In terms of the infection and sickness department, we got away with a lot. I definitely feel like people should have gotten sicker than they did for the way we were living. We weren’t cleaning or treating our wounds, they just got caked up with dirt but somehow turned out fine. Bronson and myself were even eating crabs we found on the ground, and ate random oysters from the swamp. Although the only person to fall ill was Jetsun, and Noan suspects that the oyster was what made Jetsun sick. Never mind the fact that we didn’t even shower once, throughout the whole trip. My theory is the thing that made the Skorpion tribe so resilient was that we’ve been exposed to Indonesian bacteria our entire lives, and our bodies already have good resistances.
Looking back I realise if we really wanted to focus on the sustainability aspect, we should have treated our wounds better, and maintained our bodies for longevity. Instead of destroying ourselves knowing we would be leaving at the end of the week.
