When we left the beaten trail on Monday

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When we left the beaten trail on Monday, just three days ago, our spirits were high and even the weather seemed to be smiling upon us. We bade farewell to our most kind and generous hosts in the village of Ariquemes, near the river Jiparana, and laden with full rucksacks and with only one local guide to accompany us, we set off in search of the terrorist's camp in Itaituba, which is buried deep in the jungles of Brazil. We had made steady progress for at least an hour after we had left Ariquemes, and we thought that by the end of the day we would at least be near the river Aripuanã. We had only gone a little further when we came towards a very strange looking hut with an old man sitting outside it. My father turned to James and said, " I think we should steer clear of that odd looking fellow, because I think he looks evil." I then turned to our guide Gambit and asked him who the odd looking man was. He looked at me for quite some time, and it began to make me uneasy. Then he said " Dat man iss da Village shaman. He is de same as a medicine man. Some say he iss crazy, but others say he iss magical." We were almost adjacent to the shaman when he stopped doing whatever he was doing and began screeching something at us. It was the most horrifying noise that I had ever heard. Gambit told us that the shaman was cursing our expedition, and that he wasn't going to stick around to make sure that we made our destination in one piece. He then turned on his heels and fled leaving us without a sense of direction or native skills. My father didn't know what to do, but he said he sure as hell was not going to leave his brother in the mess that he was in. So after a heated conversation between myself, my father, and James, we decided to carry on with our expedition and save my uncle. It was hard to carry on our way, because we didn't have any local knowledge, and all my father had in means of navigation was an old map, and a compass. We tried our best to succeed with our expedition, but after an hour or two it was plainly obvious that we were indeed lost. In the end my father and James were bickering so much that I had to shout at them to stop it or I was going to leave them. This seemed to worry them a lot, and they didn't argue again for a long time after this. The wilderness of the jungle was really starting to thicken up, and we could not walk very far before we had to machete our way through the leaves that blocked our paths. It was very very eerie in the dense undergrowth, and we could here distant tribal drums beating in the wind, and once I thought I saw a tribal warrior following us along our path, but it was probably the heat playing tricks on my mind.
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We then began to approach a fork in our track, and to our left we could see lots of weird and wonderful plants that we had never before seen in our life and James and I desperately wanted to explore that path. To our right was a dense, eerie, and very creepy path that looked as though ferocious creatures that would devour us as soon as we set foot upon the track inhabited it. To our surprise, my father wanted to go down the path on our right, and James and I argued the fact that if we ...

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