The past two weeks we have been navigating in the North and the South, in order to familiarize ourselves with the varying landscapes.
Personally, I found navigating in the North to be more interesting. In the North you are just as likely to find yourself on the outskirts of any number of Bedouin villages as you are to come across wildlife, traverse various fences, or devise some way to cross a running river. It is not that the south is harder, in fact, in most cases just the opposite is true. However, due to the desert terrain found in the south, hour long navigations at night (where every hill or mountain begins to look the same) can become rather boring.
In my first navigation my worries were realized early on. My partner was in charge of bringing us to our first two points. We found the first point relatively quickly and problem free. From there, however, things began to quickly deteriorate. For some reason nothing that we saw in front of us seemed to be in the right place according to my partner's recollection. I wanted desperately to be of some help, but we had been under strict orders not to learn our partner's section of the navigation. As the minutes quickly turned to hours we realized that we would not be able to find his next point. It is at this point that the snow ball effect begins to take place. The problem with our navigations is that we are not using maps. Therefore, everyone must remember every aspect of where they are going to be. If, for instance, someone does not find there second point they will not be able to reach the third, and from there the fourth, and so on and so forth.
In our case our situation was somewhat exacerbated by the fact that our radio was not working. After walking around rather aimlessly for about two hours we concluded that it would be justified to skip ahead to our next point. Unfortunately, since we had not made it to my partner's last point I could not help us get to any of my points, seeing as my navigation started at his last point. Accordingly, we decided to make our way straight to the ending point.
What we hadn't counted on was the giant quarry that happened to be blocking our way to the end point. So we started what proved to be a rather adventurous circumnavigation of the quarry. We started out by walking through what I can only assume is a place where the quarry workers live. When we got within maybe 50 yards of the houses we started to hear what sounded like a pack of dogs going crazy. Fortunately for us, the dogs were chained, but my partner thought it best that we walk with rocks "in hand" just in case there were a few that weren't chained. It actually had a very "junkyard" feel to it. After making our way through the houses we came upon a road. We knew that our boundary was the roads that we might encounter in each direction. The road we had stumbled upon did not actually appear to be a major road, but we figured crossing it would be a bad idea. We decided that we would just walk along the road in the right direction (because inevitably the end point would be on a road where the buses would be meeting us). Maybe ten minutes into our walk down the road, we saw a truck coming down the road. At this point it was about 2 AM, so I am sure it was a little weird to see to soldiers walking along the side of a road - in full gear.
The truck continued down the road, and then stopped a few feet in front of us and let someone out. It seemed a little strange at the time, but we were pretty desperate...we decided we'd ask for some directions. My friend called out to the guy who had exited the truck and he stopped and walked over to us. I happened to remember the names of nearby villages, as well as the name of the point we were trying to get to, so we started with that. I don't know what we were expecting, but I can tell you that the next words out of his mouth was not it. He turns to us, scratches his head and says, "Give me a second to think...we've been smoking a bong!" At this point I preemptively dismiss whatever directions he decides to give us. After he rambled on for about ten minutes we decided to carry on with our previous plan of walking along the road. Looking back on it now, it kind of reminds me of Alice in Wonderland stumbling upon the caterpillar smoking the hookah pipe!
We ended up walking for about another 30 minutes when we saw a flash light in the distance. When we reached the point it was coming from we ran into two of the other guys from our team. Not surprisingly, they had been trying to reach us on the radio for several hours. When the commanders heard that the second group had stumbled upon us they told us to stay with them (a safety measure because we didn't have a radio).
Last weeks navigation in the South was also fairly eventful (including a run in with a giant porcupine), but almost more so for what took place after the navigations...
(On our last navigation in the South my partner and I ran into two other groups on one of the mountain tops, so we decided it would be a good photo-op)
