by Steve Hely
From the window of the plane coming in to Iquitos was a blanket of trees, dotted in rough proportion by some natural algorithm. Between them was deep thick green. Once in a while, there was some weird aberration like a carved-out airstrip, but you could see pretty far and this was the most biomass I’d ever seen in one look.
“Do you speak English?”
So asked an American woman sitting next to me. From what I’d listened to of her conversation (all of it), she and her husband and another few retired couples from Pennsylvania were flying to Iquitos to start a six-day Amazon River cruise.
“Yes.”
“You American? Where are you from?”
“I’m from Boston but I live in California.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Mmm, Lima last,” I said. In Lima I’d taken a private tour of the markets led by a Wellesley-educated tour guide I found on the Internet. We mostly discussed optimal practices for getting house cats to drink water while I chewed fistfuls of coca leaves. In Lima, there were department stores where I bought a great shirt and a belt I still wear almost every day. A confused shopboy told me I was too big for the rest of the clothes and asked me where I was from. In Lima you can visit sixteenth-century churches and underground monastery crypts lined with bones and skulls and see the changing of the guard in front of the presidential palace. The food is fantastic, ceviche and flavorful seafood stews. Peruvian Chinese and Japanese food are their own whole cuisines. I’d eaten an enormous fried pork sandwich at the red-and-white-tiled eighty-year-old diner El Chinito (The Chinaman).
Now I was here.
“I’ve been traveling for a while,” I said. “I’m going to the bottom of South America.”
“’Cause me and my husband are sitting here thinkin’, What the hell are we getting ourselves into?”
I hope somebody picked her up at the airport. Iquitos is a fucking wet crazy jungle mess. What streets there are are packed with motorcycle taxis that either whiz by or sit jammed together in tangled traffic. At the fringes the town is non-streets of wooden docks and alleys and stilt houses and floating markets where you can buy enormous fish that sat out in the humidity all day under attack from flies and chopped-up turtles.
Having to stay somewhere for the night, I picked Casa Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 German movie directed by genius/lunatic Werner Herzog. It tells the story of a manic German, played by Klaus Kinski, determined to drag a riverboat over a jungle mountain dividing the Amazon from a tributary so he can build an opera house in Iquitos. The movie is amazing and crazy but maybe even better is the documentary Burden of Dreams, which reveals that the making of the movie was an even crazier project, with natives offering for example to kill Kinski with their blowguns and Herzog rambling on about how “the jungle is an obscenity.” Before Kinski, Jason Robards was gonna play the part, but he got dysentery. Mick Jagger was gonna be in it, too, but also gave up. All of them stayed at an old mansion from the days of the rubber boom, bought by one of the movie’s executive producers, Walter Saxer, after he couldn’t find a reliable hotel. That house is now the Casa Fitzcarraldo, where Mr. Saxer nodded to me from an old wicker chair in the courtyard as I ate river fish stuffed with vegetables and grilled.
The jungle is an obscenity! I agree with you, Werner Herzog. The jungle eats everything. Expose any part of yourself to its air or mud or water and something will bite you, usually an insect. You will not spend five minutes in the Amazon without a bug on yourself. If you don’t see the insect on you, then guess where the insects are, because I promise you they are somewhere.
You can prevent this for a few minutes by spraying DEET-based repellent on yourself. DEET is so potent that civilized countries like the United Kingdom and the nations of Europe have limits on how much DEET can be in a repellent. Canada only allows 35 percent. In the USA (fuck, yeah!), where we invented this shit to protect our boys in the Pacific in WW2, you can buy 99.9 percent DEET repellent, but then you have to ask, Is covering my skin in pesticide better than letting my blood get a little sucked and my flesh a little nibbled on? It’s a balance.
The Amazon is miles of one interconnected, squirming, living biocarpet, with strips hacked or poisoned out here or there, but turn your back for a minute and it will swallow everything into its greenery.
Downriver
That is snake.” He pointed to a big snake.
Up in the rafters a toucan was hanging around, opening and closing his beak but deciding each time apparently not to say anything. There was a parrot, too.
“Come,” my guide said, waving me over to a tree. An anteater walked along one of the branches.
“Sloth,” said my guide. Hanging there dimly, soaking wet—it’d just rained—was a sloth. The energized anteater climbed back and forth along the same limb the sloth hung from, as if taunting him. The sloth dropped one clawed arm and let it hang, like he was winding up to smack the anteater one. But he didn’t. He blinked his eyes once or twice, which took about a minute. He turned his head and gave up. With sad effort he hugged his three sharp toes back into the branch.
“Do you want to hold the sloth?”
“No, thanks.” The sloth seemed like he had enough problems. Nevertheless my guide grabbed him up and held him out to me like a basketball. The sloth looked at me pitifully, his wet fur hung over his white face like a monk’s haircut. Then he drooped his head, downtrodden and resigned.
To the truly adventurous the Amazon itself is tame stuff by now. It’s been mapped, after all, though geographers and intense kayakers are still exploring where its true source may be, somewhere up in the Andes.
When he left the White House and craved new stimulation, Teddy Roosevelt headed to a mysterious tributary of a tributary to the Amazon, the Rio da Dúvida, a story excellently told by Candice Millard in her book The River of Doubt. The British naturalist and travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon worked his way from the Orinoco to the Amazon. By page two of his book In Trouble Again, he is describing the toothpick fish that follows the trail of uric acid from unlucky pissers and swims into their urethras. “You must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis,” says O’Hanlon.
This tempered my enthusiasm for exploring too deeply into the Amazon.
The brave and insane have rafted and walked and swum all the thousands of miles of this river, thought for years to be unnavigable. An Englishman only a few years older than me named Ed Stafford walked the entire thing, which is the craziest way I’ve ever heard of to see a river. The Canadian botanist and writer and all-around badass Wade Davis hacked his way around the Amazon, sampling and identifying hallucinogenic plants at an age when I was trying to figure out how to get beer.
I say this as almost an apology. Assume this for all parts of the book: I don’t claim to be an expert. I’ll just tell you what I saw or heard or found out for myself. I’m no explorer, just a curious dope on a wide-eyed stumble.
What I lacked in adventurousness, I also lacked in preparation. “See the Amazon” was a goal, but that’s like saying “check out the Internet” or “try sex”—you’re not gonna do much more than experience a tiny sample of the vastness that’s out there.
My guide, Alberto, had brought me to this place down the river from Iquitos that was a kind of shack/zoo. A tiny monkey ate some fruits and stared at me, then chittered and shinnied up into the rafters.
I’d picked a guide from a company called Maniti Camp Expeditions that had a usable website but still seemed wild enough and with an anything-goes attitude. The Maniti lodge was flooded, it turned out, so my guide took me to a place called Toucan Lodge, which was something like an Ewok village or a cluster of ramshackle tree houses with thatched roofs. Alberto spoke Spanish better than I did, but I don’t think by that much. He and the other guide, Pu, spoke to each other in a language that I believe was Yagua. They were the only guys around at Toucan Lodge, although they did not seem to be in charge.
In charge, as best I could tell, was an intriguing woman from Spain who wore big black rubber boots like everyone else but also silver sunglasses that looked expensive.
“She got sent out here because the place’s accounts are a shambles, apparently, and she told her friend she’d go for six months, straighten it out, but I don’t think she knew what she was getting in for.”
This told to me by Maddie, an Englishwoman, who seemed to have heard it from a guest before her, passed down like a local jungle legend. Maddie and her Australian fiancé, Mick, whose beard hung down in two tails, were the only other people staying here. They’d been traveling the opposite way from me, south to north up South America, starting with a cruise to Antarctica, on a six-month sojourn that would end for them in Las Vegas, Nevada, where they’d get married. They were about my age and they seemed very happy to have me arrive. Far as I could tell, they loved each other, but they’d spent an awful lot of weeks together in sweaty and exhausting travel, too. They snapped at and teased each other like kid siblings. Maddie, for instance, hinting darkly about Mick’s manhood when he failed to catch as many piranha as her, when the guides motored us out to a swampy off-river channel and armed us with wooden sticks and fishing line and hooks and raw chicken. I didn’t catch as many piranha as her either and, believe me, she let me know it.
Still. They were fun to be around and go with as our two guides took us on expeditions: to see pink dolphins diving and poking their heads out of the middle of the river, or to climb a rope ladder to a lookout platform high in the trees, where you could see the jungle flooded into a surreal tree-spotted lake as far as the horizon.
One night, eating grilled piranhas and rice, we got to talking about ayahuasca.
Banisteriopsis caapi and Her Amazing Friends
Ayahuasca is a name for a brewed liquid made from boiling down the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with other plants like Psychotria viridis. The resulting concoction contains dimethyltryptamine, DMT, a psychedelic compound, and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which were used in some of the first antidepressants.
You can smoke DMT, and what’ll happen is you’ll more or less black out and have a rocket-ship ride of fifteen minutes or so of wild visual hallucinations and the feeling of being disassociated from your body, and then it’s over. But with ayahuasca, you drink it. The inhibitors allow your bloodstream to take in the DMT, with the result that drinking ayahuasca causes people to hallucinate and also sometimes to vomit all over the place for hours.
About half of this I knew when I got to the Amazon. The other half I’d learn in lots of reading, long after, as I tried to sort out what ayahuasca had done to me.
The Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes studied ayahuasca and its traditional uses as a “plant teacher” among Amazonian peoples, starting in the 1940s. He’d studied hallucinogenic plants from Oklahoma to Mexico before he came to the Amazon. On his trail came pilgrims and seekers and lost souls and the curious and writers and people seeking relief from opiate addiction or psychological trauma or spiritual boredom or confusion. In a famous tale, William S. Burroughs once rambled on about his wild visions while on ayahuasca, to which Schultes replied, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”
There are ayahuasca retreats in Ecuador and Peru and Brazil, some of them unsurprisingly sketchy. I’d heard of people importing Peruvian ayahuasca shamans for healing ceremonies and New Age retreats up in Malibu, not twenty miles from my house, but those never seemed like people I wanted to take hallucinogens with. Ayahuasca in Malibu felt off. Here in the Amazon, at least it seemed organic.
“When I drink ayahuasca, I am like I am drunk.” Alberto laughed when we asked him about it. “Many visions.” Pu smiled grimly. The Spanish woman teased us with a feline voice: “Will you try this?”
Well, hell, why not? Here was a trip for sure. I’d tried a few different brain-chemistry-affecting substances in the past and always had a pretty fun time. Surely this Amazonian plant couldn’t do me much harm. And besides, I couldn’t let the Spanish woman get away with teasing me.
Alberto and Pu told us if we wanted to try it, they’d take us to the shaman’s house. Down the river, and then a long walk. A two-hour trip.
Maddie wasn’t game. Mick was, but he judged that maybe his future wife wouldn’t appreciate his leaving her alone at a rickety lodge while he went off into the jungle to do home-brewed hallucinogens that can last ten hours. He wondered if the shaman could be convinced to come to us.
Alberto and Pu looked at each other. “Is better to go to his house.”
“Well, that’s not gonna happen,” said Mick.
Pu shrugged and suggested this problem could be solved for fifty dollars.
The shaman came to us.
Late after dinner, Pu and Alberto and Mick and I sat in the dark by the hammocks in the netted-in dining area of the lodge. Pu and Alberto were going to drink, too.
The shaman, a raisin of an old man, sat in front of a single candle. The black brew he’d brought burbled inside a glass Coke bottle.
In preparation for the drinking, the shaman began a chant. A low singing whisper. There were snatches of phrases from the Catholic Mass in Spanish and words from some language unknown to me, and he blew sometimes on a little whistle or paused to smoke in a ceremonial style from a fat loose cigarette of leafy tobacco he’d rolled himself. He fingered along on something like rosary beads.
We sat in the dark, ignoring mosquitoes and other unseen biting insects, for twenty minutes, half an hour.
When the shaman was ready, he poured for each of us a serving of his brew into a wooden ladle. The taste was foul, like liquid dirt. My stomach contorted, just enough to send a message like Hey, this drink is terrible, buddy. A bucket for vomiting sat in the middle of our circle, but I rode out the wave. We all lay back in the darkness.
Time passed. Mick vomited a bit. Pu went halfway between vomiting and just a good, thorough spit.
The shaman kept up a low chanting or incantation, very quiet, undisturbing. From peeks around, I could see the guides and Mick sitting or lying, eyes closed. Here and there, Pu and Alberto whispered in Yagua.
Maybe this is a joke for the gringos, I wondered. If so, I saluted its elaborateness and detail. But it didn’t feel like a joke.
Ah—and now when I closed my eyes, I could see parades of animated creatures. Their forms kept changing. Now they looked like penguins, now like tiny bears with enormous bright circles for eyes. Keeping my eyes closed was like watching some deranged plotless misedited Pixar movie. But it wasn’t unpleasant.
Maybe two hours passed of this. All right, I thought in my brain, what do I do with this? I knew where I was. It wasn’t like I’d zonked out completely. The mosquitoes were still nipping at me, so that was a link to a steady physical reality.
Mick moved to a hammock at some point, and so did I. The bizarro Pixar movie seemed to have ended. The guides were gone, off to their rooms. The shaman still chanted, softly, and then he just stopped and sat. Groggy, sleepy, I went back to my room.
Just about the second I opened the door, my stomach reversed itself and I disgorged, half on the floor and half into the toilet hole, the churned-up remnants of the rice and fruit I’d had for dinner. Purists of ayahuasca insist on a special diet, nothing spicy, maybe no meat. I saw now why.
Interesting plant, I thought, as I flopped myself on the damp mattress.
The Shaman’s House
The next morning, Mick and Maddie and I had breakfast. Maddie teased Mick about throwing up, which I guess he’d done in force when he got back to their room.
“Did you see all kinds of jaguars and snakes and faces in plants and so on?” Maddie was smiling. She was a teaser for sure.
“Yeah, it was all right,” said Mick. In Australia, this is an appropriate emotional reaction to anything from a rugby match to a wedding to a twenty-year relationship to a funeral.
“That didn’t seem all that powerful to me,” he said.
“No, not to me either, really.”
“I felt something. It wasn’t nothing. But it wasn’t . . .”
“No.” I didn’t mention the Pixar movie.
“Well, not sure what I expected. Glad I tried it, anyway.”
Mick and Maddie left that afternoon. I was sorry to see them go, and we made plans to meet up two nights later for beers in Iquitos.
With me alone at the lodge, the guides weren’t sure what to do. Alberto suggested perhaps I’d like to see the farm of a guy who, it was communicated, had all kinds of fucked-up fish in ponds.
Yes, I said, I’d like to see that. As a kid, I worked at the New England Aquarium. Aquatic life, fucked-up or otherwise, has always held my interest. But:
“Hey,” I asked, “did you guys say it’s better to drink ayahuasca at the shaman’s house?”
Yes, they both agreed. Much better way.
“Stronger visions,” said Alberto.
“Take me there.”
To get to the shaman’s house, we motored downriver in the boat maybe an hour. We docked and passed through the trees to a village that was more just some concrete shells, some occupied, some not, around a long-unused soccer field.
From there it was another two or three miles up a mud trail. We waded at first through sinks of water up to our waists. But then the trail rose, steadily, uphill, a tough walk in mud that sucked at our black rubber boots. If you stopped for a close look around the trail, you might discover, say, several thousand ants in some relentless campaign of conquest or civic improvement project.
