Horrible night. Spent yesterday salting the fish -- three pacos and the giant wacawa -- which took forever and was endless work. Jose had a bag of salt and we each had a knife. We cut strips of fish, built makeshift fish racks, salted the meat, and then let it dry in the sun. Soon, the strips were covered with sweat bees, attracted to the salt. We spent all day doing this, occasionally plunging into the river to cool off.

Early in the morning, Jose found a grove of wild banana trees, and returned with a long raceme of tiny delicious bananas. We were ravenous for them and stuffed ourselves, then made a banana "gruel" and seemed to drink a few gallons of that.

That night, I crawled into my tent and the weather changed. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of giant cracks of nearby lightning that illuminated everything for a few seconds, and then the rain started coming down hard. My stomach felt strangely distended (from the banana gruel, possibly from bad water), so I opened up the tent's zipper, then stepped out onto the beach as the rain came down incredibly hard and thunder blasted overhead. As I stepped out onto the beach in my bare feet, I could feel that the ground was covered with something crunchy that quickly began climbing its way up my leg and biting me. Looking down, with the lightning suddenly illuminating the beach, I saw that the ground was entirely covered with a thick carpet of black ants, millions of them! Not being able to retreat because of my stomach, I dashed over the ants, each foot crunching several hundred of them, and ran into the river; where I relieved myself so violently that it seemed I could match the storm's thunder. Then I ran back to the tent and, hopping in front of it, unzipped the zipper and leapt inside, pulling along quantities of ants with me before I was able to zip the tent fly up again.

This continued all night long -- the torrential rain, the thunder, my lousy stomach, the massive carpet of ants, every twenty minutes or so my insides forcing me to make another mad dash to the river.

When morning finally arrived, I woke up, unzipped the tent, and looked out. There was not an ant to be seen. Why they had come or where they had gone was a mystery. I looked over at Jose, who had slept like a baby. He told me that he hadn't heard a thing all night long.