I think the weirdest place I’ve ever slept was when I spent the night sleeping on a birthing table in a tiny one room medical clinic on the top of a mountain in the jungle. I was traveling with a friend of mine through the mountains on the island of Negros Occidental looking for someone I really needed to find. We traveled for about 10 hours on an ancient bus with no shock absorbers. The bus was a miserable thing but it was the only way we had to get to the village where this person lived.
Just a few miles shy of the village we discovered that the bridge leading to the village had been washed out by floods from rains earlier in the day. My friend and I, along with a few other people decided to brave the swollen river to finish the trip. We had to walk through the flooding river up to our chest to make it across. With the help of a rope and some locals, we managed to make it across without getting swept away in the flooding water. Looking back it all seems really stupid, but we were determined to get to the village and start our journey back before dark. When we finally arrived in the village, the person I was looking for was not there. She was visiting family members in a town only 40 minutes away from the village I had originally started my journey.
The mountain village we stayed in was so small that there were no rooms for my friend and I to rent. No one in this village ever needed to have rooms to rent because no one ever came to visit. The leader of the village allowed us to sleep in the village’s one room medical clinic. My companion slept on a bench and I slept on a birthing table. Since neither of us had our mosquito nets with us, it was a long and unpleasant night. Our biggest concern was to make sure that we stay off the ground so the rats and scorpions wouldn’t bother us. The birthing table was so hard and the mosquitoes so plentiful that I slept very little that night.
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