We’re stopped at another unique jungle tree and Juan’s saying the same word over and over while pointing loosely to a spot on his body where the groin meets the hip.  “Dolores.”  Ok, that’s Spanish for “pain,” a realization that immediately made me feel for anyone with that unfortunate name, having already been permanently marred by an episode of Seinfeld.  Attempting to guess, we talk over one another despite his comprehension of our words about on par with ours of his.

“Kidney pain!”

“Stomach!  Stomach!  Ehhhhstomago!!  Here…” now pointing to the stomach, not at all where Juan is indicating.  Juan shakes his head, no.

“Kidney.. uh, intestines maybe?  It could be intestines.  Lots of intestines in there…”

Juan makes an exiting motion from the front of his groin.  Release.

“PEEING!  It’s for peeing.  He nods that we are on the right track and then makes the shape of a small ball with one of his hands.

It’s like a game of charades that might just save your life.

“KIDNEY STONES!”

“Si,” Juan nods emphatically.  “Stone!  Si.”

It’s not exactly clear what this tree — bark, leaves, pulp, sap or other by-product — might do in the event of a kidney stone, but were I attempting to pass a large, oblong marble through my urethra, I wouldn’t be opposed to further research.

Another plant cures spleen issues.  Probably.  Spleen?  Is it “spleen” he’s signaling?  Isn’t that where the appendix is?  Wait, no.  Why cure the appendix?

Whatever.  Indians here get sick sometimes and this tree does something therapeutic.  Sweet.

Scientists and tree-huggers have purported for decades that the jungles of South America hold the cures for countless maladies we’re afflicted with and our guide and leader, Peter Gorman, tells a good anecdote to illuminate this.  Some years ago, a pair of botanists were sent into the jungle here to categorize and list every plant in a square hectare to capture the general make-up of the jungle.  Two thousand (or was it twenty) species later and the gig’s a huge success.  Except upon reviewing neighboring hectares of the plot of land that they’d just reviewed, it was determined that hundreds of species could be found on either side not available in the first.  And more importantly, a few from the first plot weren’t found at all on any side of it.

In short, there’s a near infinite amount of life down here, each with strange and unique chemical compounds and enzymes potentially appearing nowhere else in nature.  The walking tour covers a wide assortment of barks, berries, leaves, vines or flowers, each mixed, mashed, chewed, snorted or swallowed to deal with headaches, cancer, infertility, nausea or hemophilia.  It’s fascinating, but not what we came here to experience.  No, we’re looking for something a bit more self-exploratory, spiritual and profound.  Yes, we’re here to get experiences that can only come from having powdered tree bark blown forcefully up our nasal passages, drinking a murky jungle vine reduction or applying the secretions of a freshly terrified tree frog to our even more freshly burnt skin.

It’s what I came here for!

Experiences like these can’t be had in Iquitos, however, and so it’s back to my favorite new mode of transportation — the lancha.  It’s not as bad this time.  Peter’s gone all out and rented us a section of the deck with small private rooms, keeping us gated off from the riff-raff that just days before I’d been a full-fledged member of.  For the rest of the people on the trip, fresh off the planes from the States, this is a significant drop in comfortable travel levels they might be used to, but after my last lancha trip, I feel like George Jefferson walking into that penthouse suite for the first time.

“This is something, huh?”  Peter rhetorically asks the group in an accent that’s still far more New York than Texas, despite making the latter his home for most of the past decade.  “I mean, this is how people travel — well, it’s not as interesting to Yancy probably since he just came down on one of these…”  He’s got plenty of “this is how people really live down here” anecdotes and I feel bad that he has to keep adding on a Yancy-specific caveat to how interesting it should be, but I can’t help it that my journey into the bizarre has got a nineteen week start on everyone else.

Travelin’ Riverside ’shrooms

To make the twelve-hour trip more entertaining, he pulls out a large bag of fresh psilocybin mushrooms — also ostensibly legal down here — and offers them out to the group to group in large quantities.  The group is older than I’d anticipated; I’m surprisingly the youngest, with several in their fifties or sixties.  For various reasons, I won’t use any names, but we’re water treatment technicians and computer programmers, psychotherapists and owners of construction companies.  In short, it’s a diverse group.

Despite a few of us never having tried the fungi before, all but one give try a hearty handful of the stuff.  We’re here — besides any other curiosities or spiritual solace we might seek — because of a shared understanding that the world is a bigger, stranger place than any of us will ever truly comprehend, but any organic tool capable of acting as a lens to expand or complement our existing views is worth peering through.

Personally, I’ve tried the fungus before with mixed results.  The second-to-last time I had experimented  with the stuff involved me foolishly dislocating my right shoulder — a mistake I’ve had repercussions from for years.  Not to mention the experience itself involved two hours of “Three Stooges”-like confusion and idiocy includng a re-enactment of Mel Gibson’s shoulder relocation scene in Lethal Weapon II [Ed: It involves slamming the arm violently into a wall.  It should be noted that this does not work.]  Given our current calm settings and double digit hours to kill, I grab a handful and chow down.  They’re fresh and moist, and the taste isn’t unpleasant as it’s been in the past, but still not something one would purposefully request on a pizza either, unless of course they were looking for pizza that made wood grains “look fucking awesome!”

Clouds take on a thickness and presence in a sky far bluer than it’d been just moments before I noticed a difference in my perception and senses.  It’s not dissimilar from the rich, vivid blur that occurs while staring at Magic Eye pictures right before the brain snaps the “magic” three dimensional imagine into view.  The massive boat creates a wake that pulses violently against the coast, sucking shoreside plants down into the water before they hypnotically ride back along the wave, crashing against the muddy riverside.  But other than a mild dizziness, there’s little more to it than that… no visions of gods or demons or talking burritos here.  Just a dense, brownish-blue river that currently looks more like a high-resolution video-game approximation of river water than the actual thing.

It’s mildly fascinating, and does tend to kick up the entertainment value of nearly everything in sight by two or three notches — which I can’t deny is great when stuck on a lancha for more than five minutes — but on the whole, I don’t care for the ’shrooms.  For one, thoughts begin to race by jarringly, riding on top of one another to the point where concepts and ideas get jumbled and any epiphanies the psychedelic might bring about are soon lost in the rush of oncoming thoughts, unprocessable.  Similarly, I find sentences I’m in the process of uttering collapse in upon themselves in the rush of new thoughts and ideas, leading to choppy, broken conversation.  A storm descends alongside nightfall, the lightning becoming a visual toy for our amusement, but I’ve had enough by this point and excuse myself in the name of getting a few hours sleep before we reach Jenaro Herrera.  Unconsciousness comes only in spurts, bringing with it no solace or rej

Jenaro’s a major port city along the Ucayali River, meaning it’s got a full three tiendas servicing the townspeople and visitors alike.  There’s a bustling market as well that’s surprisingly large, though only seems to be open during the early morning hours, giving off a nearly abandoned appearance by eleven in the morning each day from the mass exodus of the meat and produce vendors.  It should be noted that, much like in Pantoja, Peru, being up by eleven should be no problem at all.  This is because once again, a loudspeaker blaring grating music (apparently the locals find it quite happenin’) and a speaker sharing the daily propaganda begin their daily city-wide proclamation each day prior to six in the morning, continuing for at least an hour or so until it’s assured that anyone with aspirations of unconsciousness has tossed them aside entirely.

We arrive at port in Jenaro Herrera at three in the morning, dropping things off quickly in a large open room with six hammocks set up for us in advance by Peter’s crew.  We’re told there’s soup on the way and collapse around a long wooden table as the local dogs come to investigate.  We’re in a great deal of luck as none of the dogs are nauseatingly hideous, as is the canine custom in Peru.  Peruvian street dogs are the most disgusting dogs I’ve ever witnessed.

There’s debate over whether a horrible disease is running rampant through the dog population or if a strain of Peruvian Hairless Dog DNA has made its way thoroughly throughout the local gene pool, but a good percentage of the dogs passed on the street are stomach-churningly disgusting.  The unpleasantly noteworthy feature is a series of large pink, hairless splotches covering the dogs’ bodies.  Sometimes it strikes in small patches, while other times it’s an all-encompassing nightmare of pink, furless-ness.  Where hair meets the barren regions, it tends to be coarse and jut outwards at unreasonable angles, leading to an even more disastrous overall effect.  I regret not taking pictures.

Conversation around the table is muted, and bubbles up sporadically at best, with the rooftop pelting of the rain that’s been pouring for the past six hours filling up the dark, quiet early morning air.  I don’t need powdered coffee.  I don’t need soup, either.  I need a long, prolonged, mosquito-free unconsciousness.  The hammocks are finally ready and I stumble through the dark down the one paved road in town to our “hotel,” which is basically a large, dirt-floored open room with six hammocks set up inside.

Until now, the forcefully curled-up position imposed by hammocks on all slumberers has been an insomnia-inducing feature of the hanging body-slings, but it’s not a problem now.  At 5, I’m resting as comfortably as is possible with my body outstretched like a wide, bony “U,” and by 5:06, I’m as soundly asleep as I’ve been all evening, wrapped in dense, cottony unconsciousness.

At 5:27 it’s all jarringly ripped away, without grace or dignity.

That’s right, it’s time for morning announcements and some uplifting, static-y music to start your day, people of Jenaro Herrera.  Before, morning propaganda had only been impossible to ignore.  Now it is all-encompassing, enveloping me far more effectively than sleep ever has.  It’s far beyond cruel and unusual punishment.  The loudspeaker is on a pole directly outside our sleeping space, the brunt of its power raining down directly upon us, with enough volume to reach the entire village.

This isn’t what I came here for.

The Compound

Peter’s relationship with the late resident shaman of the area began (and much of this is from memory, so should anyone else from the trip read and find my recollections wrong, feel free to comment!) in the early 80s.  I’m not sure what brought the man to Iquitos in the first place, but he clearly developed a love affair with the city that stretched on through the next few decades, leading him to acquire both an Iquitenan bar/restaurant and an Iquitenan family (the wife was a package deal, complete with two sons at the time of the marriage, both of whom he’s now adopted).  The wife and the bar aren’t his anymore, but whatever personal pain their loss might’ve caused him at the time, it’s become great fodder for quality storytelling now.

Like most great bar owners/storytellers, his tales evoke both an immediate sense of disbelief due to their improbability and a compelling veracity that builds with every small, believable detail added to the novel-like mosaic of the teller’s life.  Did he really cavort with at least two US presidents as well as the members of Led Zeppelin?  I suppose the places and dates match up.  Could he really have been responsible for internationally blowing the lid off a botched DEA operation, leading to calls for his assassination by covert US operatives (whose dark association of government assassins he also maintains near intimate knowledge of)?  Well, the Internet does kind of back him on that one a little.  Sure, why not?

The important part (for this story at least) is that through all his regular misadventures in Iquitos, he began building a strong relationship with a local shaman named Julio, eventually becoming part of Julio’s vast extended family (many of whom cared for our basic needs during the course of this trip).  Just how learned in the ways of these medicine men Peter had become invested in himself is uncertain, though it was clear from his running of ceremonies and intricate knowledge of the songs and traditions of the local Indians that it was more than just a quick study.

Time passed and with it, Peter began bringing more and more gringos in for ayahuasca ceremonies, requiring an actual location for the events to take place.  The land was Julio’s, but Peter funded the building of all of the structures himself, putting up three main covered structures — no walls, or frills for that matter — including a kitchen area with a large, if lopsided, stove.  Deeper inland lay four private shacks, though the majority of us stayed on the ground of a single, large building overlooking the river, deeply covered in the vitally necessary mosquito netting that made nights in jungle tolerable.  Two wooden outhouses serve our excretory needs.

“No toilet seats!” we exclaim.

“Toilet seats are the last thing you ever want to see in a jungle bathroom,” Peter explains.  “Spiders, roaches and everything else you don’t want down there love the shadowed sanctuary of the underside of a toilet seat.”  There are no more complaints.

The Iquitenan family structure seems to follow an “every man for himself” style of behavior, seemingly to their detriment.  Many times Peter has suggested that the siblings (grandchildren of Julio) pool together the money he pays for the ten days they spend catering to us, in order to purchase a taxi.

“But which of us would own it?” they ask, immediately dismissing the idea.

Sharing simply isn’t a concept understood down here.  Juan, one of the older members of the family, desperately needs a boat which could easily be purchased by our group for less than fifteen dollars each.  Privately, we decide upon going through with it only to be stopped by Peter.

“Wouldn’t it be better to tip everyone?”

“Well,” we say, “the others would use the boat too, right?”

“Sure, if they paid him.  These people don’t share things.”

“But those are his kids.  He’d make his kids pay to take the boat out?!”

Peter just smiles.  We give him the cash at the end instead, to divvy up fairly.

Meals here are barely adequate, from a North American perspective.  From a Peruvian perspective, they’re about as haute cuisine as you can expect to get 12 hours out in any direction from Iquitos.  Starch, meat, vegetable.  Mix and match.  Stir.  Etc.  It’s no frills, but we all signed the frill exemption waiver long before we left Iquitos.

My Heart-of-Darkness-esque voyage down the Amazon is long over, but its memory still more than lingers throughout my digestive system, rendering my normal need for sustenance moot anyway; any more than a thousand calories seems to fill me.  Never once do I rush to a meal with anything resembling hunger.  My gut was getting too big anyway…

Collecting the Medicines

I’ve been in a daze all day now, leaving me quiet and reclusive as I seek the refuge of my covered mattress to escape dusk’s onslaught of mosquitoes.  I can’t tell if I’m sick, nervous or simply have too much on my mind, but despite the lack of sleep during the prior evening’s lancha ride, I find myself laying forcibly awake throughout the night, succumbing at best to only two hours of sleep.  This isn’t a state I function well in, nor is it one I want to commence some strange Indian vision-inducing ceremony with.

A hunting party leaves early to seek out a sapo frog and I decline; the frog and I will be getting well acquainted with one another soon enough anyway.  By late morning, I’m ready to join the waking world, still in a haze from sickness and lack of sleep but too unwilling to pass up the unique experiences the jungle has to offer to allow a little mild delirium to stand in my way.  Walking down from our sleeping quarters — the largest of the huts, with two semi-private rooms followed by a large open area for mattress pads and hammocks — I pass a large plastic container with a new inhabitant.

“That’s our guy!” one of the others, a water treatment engineer from Illinois, tells me.  He’d gone out earlier with the hunting party.  Fear induces the impossibly green tree frog to secrete a viscous white substance from its body that is either extremely poisonous or extremely medicinal, depending on your perspective and shamanic background.  Repeated attempts to frighten the creature into releasing additional pharmaceutical payloads weaken the dosage, so we’ve been warned not to kill time by listlessly trying to spook the thing.

For its vivid beauty alone, the frog would make a good pet, but not for its psychoactive properties; attempts have been made to breed the things in the States, though the physical effect of its secretion is diminished or removed entirely.  Apparently, it takes the entire jungle environment to create the conditions necessary for the sapo to be effective.  As the frogs only exist in this small subsection of Peru, the experience is about as rare of one as I’m likely to find, though whether it’s actually enjoyable in any way is still up in the air.

The ayahuasca hunt takes place later in the afternoon, involving a prolonged boat ride deeper into the

jungle.  The iPod’s privately blasting Creedence Clearwater Revival, since if movies have taught me anything, it’s that you can’t take a boat into the jungle without CCR providing at least part of the soundtrack.  The trail’s unmarked if it’s a trail at all, though Julio’s grandchildren are one with this land, darting through just slow enough for our less than jungle-ready group to keep up.

Snaking its way across and around multiple trees (each surely with their own specialized medicinal purpose) lies the object of our quest.  Wrapping its way upwards around the other jungle denizens, the vine appears neither sinister nor beneficial, indistinguishable to our untrained eyes from any of the other wiry plants densely making up this subset of jungle.  But Peter and his people have a long, interesting history with the ayahuasca and hone in on it with the single-mindedness of lifelong hunters.

A foot-long piece is chopped off and passed around, displaying the telltale orange, clover-like pattern of ayahuasca’s cross-section.  Slivers of the vine are made into necklaces and tend to be best-sellers back in Iquitos, even amongst those unacquainted with the plant’s more interesting uses.  But certainly with those that are.  The Indians scramble up through the trees cutting a series of two-foot samples that are then gathered up by Peter who blesses each in turn.  It feels like less of a ceremony than many other things we’ve witnessed thus far, but still involves a bit of chanting followed by engulfing the vines in a thick cloud of exhaled smoke from a local tobacco variant.  Said tobacco seems to be involved in blessing nearly everything around these parts.

The Jungle: It’s more than just frog sweat and vision vines!

As a vegetarian (and surely for other reasons as well) the computer-programmer-turned-yoga-instructor immediately regrets calling our attention to the orange eyes fixated on us from across the slow moving stream.  Unfazed by our flashlights, the eyes stay locked in our general direction as Juan deftly crosses the thin body of water and, in a single motion, snaps the butt of his rifle over the alligator’s head.  As quickly as he darted across, Juan returns with the animal — all two feet of it.  The baby never stood a chance, though Juan’s still imminently pleased with his catch.  Peter warned me they’ll catch and eat anything they come across, no matter how small.  Monkeys are included in their menu, as the locals have no problem with the odd tasting meat.  I don’t think I can include the primates on my list however, regardless of how commonly they’re used for Indian chow.

“Is it dead?” I ask, studying the dangling reptile, its eyes open, unmoving.

“Si.”  I poke it and its mouth slowly opens.

“Um.  I think it’s still alive…”

Dazed, the animal doesn’t seem to mind being tied to a small string Juan has handy.  The hunting ground is still an hour ahead and it won’t help to be carrying a frisky, saw-toothed alligator along for the journey.  Some of us want the animal let go, but I’m not among them; “killing and eating an animal” is on my trip’s to-do list, and baby or not, that tail’s got some meat in it.  Sure, maybe that’s a morbid thing for me to list as a possible interest, but I devour meat that’s been killed for me without a second thought on a daily basis, and it seems only right that as a non-vegetarian, I should take in every part of the process.  Or something.

We’ve been hiking in the dark for close to an hour already, after having set up hammocks along the riverside not far from the compound.  It’s a high mosquito area, so much time was spent hanging elaborate cloth hammock enclosures around each dangling bed to keep the things out, giving time for the sun to set.  The place we seek is a watering hole deep without the jungle where nearly every type of local creature is known to congregate nocturnally.  As if on some sort of set schedule, the animals treat the place like a time share.  Majas, a large rodent-like creature, swarm in generally around midnight; monkeys own it closer to dawn.  And so on.

In our case, however, humans seem to be the only occupants tonight, as we sit there for little over an hour unmoving and alone, save for each other.

It turns out that hunting is incredibly boring.

Speeding through a dark jungle, crossing streams over freshly machete-cut tree bridges, the late night trip is more than interesting enough to make up for how fruitless it is from a hunting perspective.  Back at the base camp, we’ve got a fully recovered baby alligator darting around the tree it’s now leashed to; the rope could easily be handled by his choppers but luckily the little fella isn’t sharp enough himself to understand what’s keeping him locked in place and turn around.

Sleep only lasts a couple hours.  My regularly uninvited guest of inconveniently explosive diarrhea has returned again, and dangling from a transformed cotton sheet while a swarm of mosquitoes wait patiently over my netting for any quick exit from me is no place to be dealing with such a messy situation.  Compounding the problem is an unfortunate lack of toilet paper, combined with a neurotic fear of using any strange jungle plant (or “medicine”) as a replacement.  My initial plan to “just ignore it” seems less and less feasible with every sphincter-clenching minute I lay there, my ass frozen in a tight, rectal rictus from a force that just won’t relent.

Ten minutes in and I make my plan for an exit, grabbing one of my socks and ripping open the zipper on the netting encasement in a single motion, dashing only a few steps into the jungle, despite the effect such proximity to my hammock might later have on my sleeping situation.  I feel the mosquitoes on me, taking special interest in bared sections not generally available to their kind.  Making as good use with the sock as I can under the circumstances, I toss it as deeply into the jungle as I can and artfully hop through the netting onto my hammock, zipping it even more quickly than I’d initially unzipped it.

It’d be a perfect plan had I sat in the hammock as opposed to on it.

However, as my ass isn’t perfectly contained in its cottony contour, I slide back over the opposite side of it entirely, my legs still crooked over it at the knees.  The result is an awkward crash of the entirety of my weight over the back of the hammock and down onto the ground, bringing down the netting entirely.

“FUCK.”

I’m inelegant at my most awkward.  Someone calls out in the night as a response, but I’m in a weird knot of hammock, netting and legs, with no clear guess as to the correct orientation of any of them.  In a cacophony of grunts and whining, I maneuver my way back into the hammock, but the netting is completely collapsed over it at this point, smothering me in the hot, dense jungle and not nearly providing enough distance from the mosquitoes that reach through with little effort.

There’s movement outside and Juan says hello.  While I lay there motionless, unsure of what I’d even say about the embarrassing situation even if he spoke English, I opt to say nothing at all.  He rewraps the netting smoothly around me, undoing my damage almost entirely.

“OK” he says.

“Thanks,” I respond, quietly.

The other non-medicinal element of our week at the compound go more smoothly.  A large nearby lake is home to the pink river dolphins, the largest freshwater dolphins on the planet.  Peter explains that local folklore hold the animals to be seductresses with the power to cause any man caught by their spell to sleep with them.  In reality, this story is told in cases where wives suspect their men of cheating.  “It wasn’t me — it was the dolphins!  I don’t remember what happened!” they would say.

“Does that actually work?”

“It has to,” he says.  “When girls are born five to one over boys, these dalliances are gonna happen.”

The birthrate is one of the more bizarre traits of Iquitos, and apparently was once as high as seven to one.  Scientists have studied the phenomenon but never to much success.  It does help to explain why Iquitos seems to be such a popular destination for male tourists, though.

Another trip takes us out about thirty feet from the compound to fish for piranhas.

“There are piranhas here?”

“Si.”

“But… this is where I’ve been swimming.”

“Si.”

As unfortunate that day as it has been fortunate every other day, none of them bite.

The diversions are rich and interesting, and take up much of our days here between the other activities.  But the latter are what this trip is about.  Jungle medicine.

To be continued…