The last ten days

Haven't had much time to write since Megan came down, as we bussed through the desert, mountains, and pampas of the rocky south. We left Lima for Arequipa, an ancient Incan city built on the lands of the Collagua natives, constructed of white volcanic rock that formed from the tempermental eruptions of the Misti, Pichu Pichu, and Chachani volcanoes that ring the city like an unkept Andean mouth.
After the Incans came the conquistadors, followed by the missionaries, who planted a cross in the dirt and built the modern city around it. The Inca left mummies on the peaks around the city as offerings to their mountain gods. Juanita, the ice maiden, was one such offering: a thirteen year old girl who walked from Cusco with priests and load-bearers, climbed Mount Ampano, was given intoxicants and was killed by a blow to the head while kneeling in prayer. It is thought she knew of her fate long before she left for the journey to the mountain. The museum housing her body holds relics from her tomb, woven shawls and cloaks, quippus, ceramic and cloth implements for the afterlife, and gold and silver offerings. Her body itself is like a monument to a civilization, their ideals and beliefs, frozen in supplication and in rigor mortis before her blood and skin could begin to decompose. She is a window into this other world, offering such a richness of understanding that a good long look at her, with the knowledge of her accepted fate and the forces of the society that brought it on, allows one to transport oneself far away from the morality of our western world and into a relationship with natural divinity and the forces of human existence. It is a brief and powerful experience. Looking at her face from straight on is arresting, hollow eyes and parchment skin, framed in hair frozen solid, with teeth made large by withering lips, one can still imagine her devotion.

We left from Arequipa to go to Colca Canyon, driving through desert up through the Pampas, peppered with llamas and alpacas, with condors circling overhead so large that they seem much closer than they are. We stayed in Chivay that night, and saw a folk music and dance show with beautiful Andean pan pipes, flutes, and small guitars accompanied by hauntingly hollow voices echoing through the cavernous room. I ate alpaca steak as the man and woman danced traditional dances of the Collagua, sometimes getting the audience involved. In one fertility dance the man put the woman on the floor and whipped her briskly with a riding crop, after which the woman did the same to the man, punctuating each series of whippings by straddling his face and shaking her skirt over his head suggestively. When an old gringo was led into the center of the room for his turn at the dance, he uncertainly began to whip the woman lightly, then, encouraged by the audience and the woman herself, he quickly became enthusiastic and raised and lowered his arm with repressed urgency. After awhile he was forced to stop, though only after a hilarious chase around the woman on the ground, during which he didn't stop whipping her for an instant.

The next day Megan and I took a bus with a group of Peruvians out into Colca Canyon, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and one of the world's deepest canyons. Riding with us were two Peruvian boys of about eight who were products of such spoiling that they had to be spoon fed when we stopped to eat, and whined like infants. It was ridiculous, and I tried not to listen to them as they acted half their age, focusing instead on the terraced fields of a thousand shades of green climbing the walls of the mountains on either side of the river that, farther on, had cut the canyon for thousands of years.

It is hard to describe the beauty of Colca Canyon. Suffice it to say you can see the largeness of the world from a perch atop its steep walls, you can understand the magnificence of earth by feeling the presence of that space between those walls of rock. I would say more but I'm running out of time.

After Colca we bussed to nazca and took in a few of the lines. The were interesting, smaller than I expected, and in the middle of a giant desert that slopes slightly towards the sea under a sky of fantastic blues. A german woman named Maria Reiche spent forty years studying them only to conclude that her best guess was that they were some kind of astrological crop calendar. I intend to study her life in-depth. The hostel we stayed at had the funny people that I'm by now used to meeting traveling in this country. The owners of the place seemd content to share a Peruvian woman who wore short skirts and went off in the middle of the day with first one then another of them. They also liked to complain about the locals, Nazca, tourist traps in general, and offer friendly advice. Taken as a whole, they were eccentric, lost old Dutchmen. Also in the hostel were another Irish couple who were a blast: we watched episodes of family guy late into the night and were invited to Dublin at least ten times.

Following Nazca we traveled through the desert, not the rocky kind of the interior but the pure white sand desert of the coast, with almost no vegetation and strange little shacks of palm fronds with unguessable purpose. We arrived in Huacachina, an oasis of resorts and green outside of Ica, surrounded by massive dunes on all sides, and walked to the top of the biggest one and watched the sunset. It was an amazing experience, one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life, watching the shadows of the contours of the desert morph with the changing angle of the light as the sky overhead went through a spectrum of reds and oranges and blues. The wind covered us in sand as we watched the red fade from the sky.

I wish I had more time to write, but I've got stuff to do and places to go...and i'm coming home day after tomorrow. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Love you guys.

The hostel and some history

The people of this hostel are fascinating. It's amazing how, turned introspective by illness and un vieja largo I've become a sort of mirror for these fellow travelers to cast their images upon. There is the Japanese man who's been to 86 countries over the last two years, who sets out to ‘get’ countries, a former copyright lawyer who is silent by day and a party animal by night. He told me happily one night, in between calling people d%&kface and asking woman if they want to make F&*% with him, that nothing impresses him anymore, and he only cares about chicks and drinking. He studies Portuguese during the day, we converse in my limited Japanese, I make a mistake, and he calls me Chimpugao! But he feels an affinity for me, perhaps because I lived in Kyoto and one of the first things I said to him was 'nihon ryoori wa totemo oishi desu nee?' He's done ayahuasca twenty times while living in Columbia, and he told me the times he did it without a shaman, like once in a nightclub playing noise music, he really wanted to kill himself; I suppose some of the other times with a shaman were far better, as he kept coming back. His electronic ensemble gives him instant access to any gathering - he's got fourteen thousand songs on a beat-up ipod that's seen its fair share of the world. He is hilarious.
Then there's the Irish couple, also quiet in the day, the bloke thumbing through a biography of some footballer, the lass a worn novella of some sort. At night, she disappears immediately and he becomes belligerent with drink - though again, never towards me. One unsteady night he struggled to play jinga with the last vestiges of the guests and myself, as the birdsong was just beginning over the tile-topped walls of the courtyard. Failing, he turned to me suddenly and whispered 'you're quite cool, mate.' I struggled not to laugh, failed, and somehow got him to laugh with me.
There are these four Australians, three men and a woman, who have been playing out a kind of drunken soap opera for the past few days, each confiding in me as I sit silently, nodding, inwardly grimacing, that love is a this and who-needs-desperate-housewives-that. The convolutions of the tale would be too high a word count for this entry, but suffice to say it's been going on for months and they seem to derive some kind of pleasure from it - because they still travel together. The men resemble large children, leprechaun-like and history-less, while the woman is an ex horse-trainer turned bar tender with a friendly nature that seems to get her in trouble.
Then there are the ones who seem to take their situation a bit too seriously, like the dangers of the hostel in Peru are unfathomable yet ever-present, and they must remain vigilant, trusting no one. These are the ones who don't leave often but prefer to stay on their bunk beds eyeing their things and checking their pockets for their wallets: they tie their food up inside the plastic bags they buy it in, and then struggle to write their names legibly across the obstinate plastic, proceeding to secure a place at the back of the lowest shelve in the refrigerator where they hope the food-thieves won't think to look.
There are also the new arrivals who enter the room in the middle of the night, earn a few groggy hellos, and are gone before anyone wakes up - the only proof of their existence being a slept-in bed and half-remembered, dream-like shadow-images.
There were two Polish girls who had been traveling awhile, and had come to Lima to meet a kind of modern pen-pal one of them had been fostering for two years. He was a very interesting biologist who'd studied capybara dispersal and mapped macaw salt-licks, spending up to three months in the jungle alone, with tales of a Puma tracking him for three days and encounters with natives. Five hours and many drinks after they met I heard from my bed a passionate conversation in which the poor guy, obviously too drunk and a bit inexperienced, exclaimed 'So what do you think about me? Yes or no?!'
He left without saying goodbye to anyone - and I'm going to write his story.
Along with the many interesting people I've met, the cycle of the hostel itself has been interesting to experience, the rotation of people from different countries, each coming to try out things that were tried the day before by others, all of their reactions different but collected, like a field full of a single species of flower, all of them different upon closer examination because of the ground they grew from.
The extinction of the mega fauna of South America occurred with the last glaciations that saw the rise of the Central American isthmus, after which cross-migration brought human predators south and we commenced to hunt everything to the tip of Patagonia and extinction. The Megatherium, or giant sloth, was one of these beasts, an herbivore that stood twenty feet tall on its hind legs and weighed five tons. Saber tooth tigers could not hunt it for its size and the toughness of its hide. Reports from the end of the 19th century claimed to have spotted lumbering hulks of fur resembling the Megatherium, an animal that was impervious to the bullets the explorers fired on it, in southern Patagonia…

The end of Burnt Norton by T.S.Eliot

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement, As in the figure of the ten stairs. Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always—Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

Miraflores

Miraflores is the affluent section of Lima, framed on three sides by less wealthy neighborhoods crumbling under the salty sweep of the wind, and to the west the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I have to remind myself that as I walk down Jose Pardo Avenue, one of the main drags of Miraflores, I'm walking down Peru's answer to Fifth Avenue. I pass a young, wealthy couple pushing a designer stroller with wheels more appropriate for the Inca Trail, with a baby inside making the flat-lipped, bubbly face of a born gurgler. To my left is the Brazilian Embassy, a forbidding affair of well-manicured but empty palm gardens behind an insurmountable fence, the building itself more a bomb shelter than anything else. To my left, the offices of Taca Airlines, of 'Alive' fame, seemingly trying to glitz the passerby out of any recollection of the past. People walk across intersections fast here, as there isn't much time. To cross busy streets without stoplights, one must simply plunge ahead and hope in the reflexes of the drivers coming at you.
All of the major airlines have their offices on Pardo. There is a grocery store that's alot like some of the high-end organic grocers in America, Vivanda, with inviting open spaces, fresh and clean produce, and a delicious selection of prepared foods - though the resmblance is only skin deep, with nothing organic available on the shelves. Here at any given time of day one can find what I would estimate to be twenty percent of the gringos in the city, avidly scanning the aisles for brands they recognize. I myself can be seen there at least once a day, trying to find things-lowfat.
Other than these embellishments, the avenue is not unlike many avenues throughout the rest of the sub-city, with apartment buildings, hair salons, restaurants, and inestimable numbers of travel agencies and copy stores. There are still armed guards with bullet-proof vests at the entrances to all the banks, hard mouths begging for toothpicks to break with practiced tension. Old men with battered bean cans still scrape popsickle sticks along them tunelessly, mumbling misfortunes, the rattle gaining effect with each coin tossed in. The air is just as dirty, smog suddenly enveloping the walker and making it truly difficult to breath. The difference is not in what is not here, so much as it is about what is here; the location of the primary facets of affluence make this part of town the wealthy part, draw the joggers and four-wheel-drive strollers and glamorous women in darkly tinted cars, but it doesn't edge out what the rest of Lima is like, the crumble and grit of the wider city of eight million souls. There is stark contrast on the streets of Miraflores, like a medieval morality tale playing itself out with accidental actors, observed piecemeal by people glancing out of planes for moments as they enter and leave the distant airport. The richness of the city is here, but it hasn't managed to overshadow the poverty of the city itself.

[As once the winged energy of delight]

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the greathollow half-treetrunk, which for generationshas been a trough, renewing in itselfan inch or two of rain, I satisfymy thirst: taking the water's pristine coolnessinto my whole body through my wrists.Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;but this unhurried gesture of restraintfills my whole consciousness with shining water.Thus, if you came, I could be satisfiedto let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast

a trip to the hospital

I just returned from a stop at one of the local hospitals. After struggling to get over all of the small illnesses that plagued me from the boat, I spent much of last night with intense pain in my abdomen and back. I rose and coughed up a bunch of stuff, and then spent alot of the day hunched in the same kind of pain. I remembered having similar pain once in Tibet, which was the last time I went more than a few days without a shower - though I'm not sure that has anything to do with it.
So instead of boarding the sixteen hour bus ride I had booked for Arequipa, I went to the doctor, with not a little prodding from some of the women in my life - thanks mom and Megan! That would have been rough.
The doctor himself was a nice man, unlike the ultrasound guy or the needle dude. He made light conversation about the origins of the word gringo, saying that green was meant to signify the opposite of Russian red, and go was where the Mexicans under Pancho Villa wanted the Americans to Vamos.
In the hospital I was treated to a chest x-ray that showed healthy lungs, followed by an ultrasound, jelly and all. I learned I've got a gallstone blocking my gallbladder and that it was causing the throbbing ache in my torso, knowledge disseminated by a doctor who relished scaring me with exclamations of surprise in me having one so young, and descriptions of how the surgery would go should it have to be removed. He made graphic drawings and laughed at my facial expressions. I thought about hitting him a couple of times.
At least it wasn't legionairre's disease. So I got a needle full of something to ease the pain, applied none too gently by a man who did not seem to like me, and then some pills to take for the next few days. And now I'm on a low fat diet - which has me a bit confounded in this country of animal products.

Some Rumi from Zenda:


Listen to your essential self, the Friend.
"When you feel longing, be patient,
and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.
Be like a mountain in the wind.
Do you notice how little it moves?
There are sweet illusions that arrive
to lure you away. Make some excuse to them...
I have indigestion, or I need to meet my cousin.
You fish, the baited hook may be fifty
or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really worth
your freedom in the ocean?
When traveling, stay close to your bag.
I am the bag that holds what you love.
You can be separated from me.
Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.
Don't think, 'But those others love me so.'
Some invitations sound like the fowler's whistle
to the quail, friendly,
but not quite how you remember
the call of your soul's Friend."
--Rumi

‘All memory is present.’ -Novalis

‘We are, all of us, pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.’
-Anthony de Saint-Exupery

“To tune the spirit when someone is trampling it is called control.” -Don Juan

‘…but to traverse the world for years on end of his own free will, in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

The rest of the voyage was harrowing, to be pithy. Let me set the scene. A river boat with three hundred Peruvians of the jungle and myself, the amorphous gringo. Three decks, the first for cargo, including fresh-cut hardwoods from the Amazon, livestock, a motocarro destined for a circuitous route in a town with no roads leading out. The second two decks for passengers, long, open-air spaces where each person hangs a hammock, like rows of eyelash specimens in every combination of color. Eyes that never stopped looking, observing, checking. Voices that whispered and shouted and laughed and cried. The sinks and showers pumped brown river water which cooled after it was allowed to run for a few minutes. Showers and toilets in the same rooms, four of them per deck, about three feet by four feet each, with poor drainage so that at any given time in the day four inches of brown water, mixed with unimaginable substances and dead and dying insects, stood stagnant on the bottom of each stall. The metal housing of the boat made it boil in the daytime sun and freeze at night. I befriended everyone I could, which amounted to about twenty people, mostly men my age and elderly folk. Thieves walked around regularly, as the boat stopped at small river towns and villages where a few thatched roofs hovered over the wall of foliage on the banks of the Ucayali, snaking things from unwary passengers and disembarking in the night. Stops were frequent, at all hours. When the boat stopped in a larger town, scores of indigenous women and children would board the boat vending tapioca, manioc, yucca, gelatino, water, soda, pre-made meals, cigarettes, chiclets, lollipops, fruits, and fried fish. The few men who were in the groups of vendors where the only ones who sold cigarettes, something I assigned to the ever-present machismo. It was better not to look at the toenails - though sometimes I did, drawn by a terrible fascination. Every ten minutes of continuous propulsion the boat, which roared when it was at ease, would pick up volume, the engine chattering the metal casings of the entire ship into a rising crescendo that sounded as if a jet was hovering overhead. This happened throughout the night, framed by the continuous and incredibly loud music the night captain played each night, emphasizing his favorite points with wild shouts at the Southern Cross. The boat woke at five, and it was impossible to stay asleep afterwards. The food - cooked by a gay man who seemed incredibly unhappy and who only left his cabin to make the food, returning immediately after he’d served it - was at times not so bad, but other days it was truly inedible. I blamed those days on the whistles and catcalls the poor man got from some of the younger men when he would walk to the shower in the evenings - his only other venture outside. The problem with those days is that the inedible food would be served for all three meals. I sweated buckets. The Paiche I was served on the boat, with more salt than it seems possible for a creature to have in its body, belonged to the inedible variety of food, though with my sweat flowing freely I was glad for the electrolytes and ate what I could swallow.
I ran out of water a couple of times, and then the boat ran out of water, and everyone was drinking soda. For most of the day people lined the sides of the boat or hung in their hammocks and simply stared, when they were not collected in an appraisal of me and my things, my behaviors and my concern for hygiene, which was uniquely comical to them. Often one would be sent towards me like a projectile from a group to ask why I tip-toed into the bathrooms.
On the second day, we ran aground in the middle of the river. Another boat passed us and the captain, fresh on the scene and feeling cocksure and invincible, did the same thing a bit further in. Eventually we pulled our boat out of it and found the narrow channel of flow on the far side, leaving the ready captain of the other boat still churning the waters browner. A father with his child next to my hammock played throughout the day, and the child was struck by my presence, my book, my skin, the uniformity of early consciousness holding the world within, beholding a new piece to add to itself. A woman boarded on the third day with a monkey on a leash, dressed up like a hairy little girl in shades of pink, replete with the mannerisms of an effete, timid senorita. The eyes were constant, always on the banks and myself. I tried to imagine it all through their eyes, the great trip upriver, the lone gringo reading and writing in his hammock, always wet with sweat. An ancient woman who looked like a shaman, with vestiges of red dye rosing her face, boarded on the fourth day and simply looked at me the rest of the trip, expressionless.
Some of the friends I’d made played a card game they called casino, much like the game tunk in America. One young man simply sat at the back of the boat all day reading the bible in the sun, sweating like me though I believe from a different ailment. Amidst laughter over my forced use of the toilet, I was told “Peruvians have the kitchen in the bathroom!” Along the banks the slivers of shadows between all that green tangle invited my mind to fill them with its own shadow-beings.
I remembered the split, and saw it between the innocent world-ego of children and the enculturation that gradually follows with age: how the complexity of culture incrementally distances us from the original oneness, the rejoicing and acceptance of newness-as-beauty. The culture driven complication regards the new and other as dangerous and, forced to operate over the love of the new-as-beautiful slowly edges this original perspective out; thus leading those revelations and recognitions of new-as-beautiful to make themselves increasingly less possible with their own mechanism. Without interruption or informed effort, culture takes over the complexification of humans from our inherent love of newness, co-opting the drive to seek newness and replacing its targets-abroad with a homely placebo - the paleness of cultural advancement. Culture can be seen, in this way, as fear of other that grows over love of other, through the subversion of our tendency towards awe for some mysterious ulterior motive - though perhaps that is a very limited view.
The journey.
Every day the rain, every night the lightening on the horizon. Once the rain came so quickly it sent us all scurrying for cover. Reaching in my pocket I found the stinger of a bee. He had been searching for cover as well, and did not seem keen on sharing my pocket with my hand. The variations of light on the water of the river and the vapor of the clouds kept me fascinated for hours at the beginnings and ends of the days. Clouds opened upwards at night like a hand’s fingers uncurling in offering. Then the stars erupted, the lights of the boat fired up, and thousands of insects were called to them, dancing tethered by their love of the brilliance. We floated south.
The pirates came late in the night on the fifth day, armed with shotguns and intent on plunder. They motored up in a tiny dinghy and fired twice. When the men of the river boat fired back with shotguns of their own, a brief exchange occurred, clamorous, frightening. The dinghy sped away, someone in it screaming.
Other nights, between the roar of the engines and before the night captain put on his soundtrack, the cries of birds sounded like a squeegee being raked on wet glass. I saw that butterflies live at constant right angles, and felt the approach of the other in everything my senses perceived. Sounds, objects, tastes, smells, textures all had their own being. By dividing all of it into a progressive infinity of levels of being, I was able to see that it all has to come together as well. I was at the boundary of my awareness, and I was learning from what was ahead. It was an incredible trip.
Disembarking from the four day turned seven day voyage, I evaded a group of men who were planning on robbing me by feinting and striking out in a different direction, using a crowd to block me and jumping in a motocarro.
My infirmities included a cold, congestion, a mangled toe, multiple bites, a sore ear from something unknown, diarrhea, jock itch, dehydration sickness, chafed nose, and general hunger and fatigue. But the journey inspired me, and let me look into a different world, and seeing made me live it.
I took a flight to Lima for eighty dollars, reducing the past five weeks journey to an hour in the air for the price of a day’s labor in my country, and it was a revelation of difference. There was even coffee on the plane.
And now, I’m recovering.

The first days of the river

Went down the Port Musasa to catch a boat to Pucallpa. Found one that was departing at five thirty in the evening, bought my ticket, and strung my hammock. I was swinging comfortably as the day gave way to darkness, the shadows overlapping and finally consuming the last vestiges of light over the port, the rich reds of the sunset fading first to purple, then to grey. The laborers of the harbor where loading large trucks full of wood into the hold of the boat as I ate the sandwiches I’d bought earlier, listening to the hectic, flamboyant music of Peru. These men loaded all the boards before moving on to the saw dust, stored in seventy pound bags which they carried two at a time on their backs, arms splayed behind them. They wrapped their shirts around their heads, the torso part draped down their backs, to avoid the inevitable detritus each trip left on their bodies.
The largest man on the boat, Moses, with the word ‘boxer’ tattooed on his right arm, decided to befriend me. He, like a famous boxer from America, had an incredibly high-pitched voice. As I passed him on the lower deck at one point he quickly pulled a chair up next to him and motioned for me to sit. Sitting, I was suddenly engaged in an exploration of the very music I’d been listening to minutes before. With each song the large man exclaimed something incomprehensible in slurred Spanish, the high notes of his words causing me to smile, though their meaning was quite inscrutable to me. It was a test of that particular ability one gains when traveling, an obtuse, uncertain agreement. It could be called the head-nodding skill, though there is often much more to it. I nodded and laughed on cue, hoping I was responding in an appropriate fashion, not wanting to disregard his words though it was impossible for me to understand them.
We began a conversation about love, and somehow made ourselves understood to each other. Both of us missed someone far away, and since this was the theme of every song on the D.V.D. of music videos he was sitting inches away from, we came to a kind of brotherly camaraderie. After the music ended I returned to the upper deck where my hammock was calling, followed by his enthusiastic squeaks.
Over the course of the next seven days I learned that he was a rather simple man, the butt of all the other boatmen’s jokes, ever assigned the dirtiest jobs the lancha had to offer; he performed these with an constant joy that was inspiring. I’ll write his story.
After a few minutes in my hammock I began to wonder why we hadn’t left yet. It had been dark for a few hours, I knew, and despite the usual vagaries of tiempo peruana, I figured I should ask before getting comfortable again. It was at this point that I was informed that due to some kind of paperwork jamb, we would be leaving the following day. I began to get irritated, wondering what I was doing on a boat that would sit in the harbor all night. Before the feeling overwhelmed me I realized that this was exactly why I was here.
The rain came again, with thunder and lightening, and I sat in my hammock enjoying the chance that always brings us what we really want, whether we have the wisdom to realize it our not.

From ‘Travels with Herodotus’:
‘..Was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? And yet, does not that monumentality owe its existence to some conviction that what is negative and weak in man can be vanquished only by beauty, only through the effort and will of his creation? And that the only thing that never changes is beauty itself, and the need for it that dwells within us?’ 153

‘…one knew one’s fellow not only as one who would help them gather food and defend against the enemy, but also as someone unique and irreplaceable, one who could interpret the world and guide his fellows through it.’ 179

‘…a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.’ Thomas Mann

‘…until that awakening I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the idea that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of the responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions…’ 225

On the river

So I´m about to embark on a six or seven day voyage down the Ucayali. I´ve got a cabin all to myself for this week on one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, at the front of the boat on the third floor. I´ve got five books to read, plenty of writing to do, even more thinking to do, and a decent case of Manco Capaq´s revenge working through my system.
Should be a blast.
Saying goodbye to the Northern jungle, Iquitos, and the Huasai, a restaurant here in town that I´ve been loving everyday. Today, for example, I had potato slices in peanut sauce, followed by rice and beans with a potato croquette of Paiche, the world´s biggest freshwater fish. It´s something like ten feet long. Washed down with fresh pineapple juice. All for about three dollars.
-Dank-
Now it´s tranquilo time. Catch you all on the flip side. Much love.

The storm

Two days ago the rain came, and kept coming, making the air seem composed mostly of water.
With the rain came a kind of bug that looks half reptilian - its head moves side to side like a lizard´s, and it has little hands, but also wings, almost like baby dragons.
These bugs were suddenly everywhere, all over the place, whizzing slowly through the air. One hit me in the neck and I stood up, with that look on my face like ´who threw that?!´
Another came out of my pocket when i was reaching in for money, making me drop my loose change in apprehension.
A third was hiding under one of the papas fritas I ate from my take-out dinner. Picked up the fry, popped it in my mouth, went for another, only to find it was a baby dragon body, sticking butts-up amidst the fried potatoes. Nice!
So my time here in Iquitos is almost at an end. Tomorrow I´ll board a boat heading up the Ucayali river, bound for Pucallpa. It will be a five or six day voyage...can´t wait to be in a hammock again!
I´ve found a contact for the Guato people of the Pantanal. He has lived amongst them, and his childhood hero was Sasha Siemel, a Latvian explorer who the Guato trained to hunt jaguar with a spear. His name is Terry, and he´s a retired airline pilot. He seems interested in possibly accompanying me on the trip, though he made it clear he hasn´t committed yet.
At the very least, he´s assured me that he will help me in any way he can with contacts and information. He told me of a system for evading the pervasive mosquitos of the Pantanal´s wet season, and, my interest piqued, I asked him to elaborate. The following is an excerpt from the email I got in response.

¨TR: No one hates mosquitos as much as I do! The only good thing that I can say about them is that they have kept the Pantanal from being developed. The system is: Permethrin treated clothes, Ultrathon insect repellent for the exposed skin, a specially modified Hennessee hammock that is absolutely mosquito proof, a can of Raid or equivalent to kill the mosquitos that get in the hammock when you do and an extra water bottle to piss in rather than get out of the bug-proof hammock before it is otherwise necessary. I have an extra hammock for you if I go on this trip. Obviously one can buy mosquito nets, but to me, if one mosquito bites me, that is too many. And after a month in the jungle, the bites really start to add up! FYI, when the locals say that there are "no mosquitos", that just means that you can see through them.¨

I like this guy already!

Strolling

I´m spending this weekend taking it easy, walking around the streets of this city, letting the fatigue of the traveling thus far wear off. It´s a great place to hang out - I can see why there are so many long-term gringos here.
I was writing an email to Craig a minute ago and I had to stop because a marching band was suddenly walking through the streets in front of the internet cafe, carrying a little miniature virgin Mary in a wedding gown on a platform, playing kind of somnolent, decorous music, with guards with guns and chewing gum looking bored, and a few business-looking guys...all moving in super slow motion, like those greek dances you see with baby steps and barely discernible arm movements. Fascinating.

Iquitos

The city pulsates to the sound of motocarros, like a motorcycle gang got caught on a cyclical road with no exits and only ever stops for gas and the occasional whistle. There aren´t any roads leading to other places on the continent, just a few that straggle out of town to end abruptly at rivers and jungles that deny any attempt to infiltrate them. The men and women here have brown bodies that they like to show with scanty clothing of bright yellows and greens and reds, and they aren´t afraid to let each other know they like what they see. Anytime a pretty woman walks down the street in impossibly tight pants she is followed by every possible variation of whistle, whistles that seem to echo off of each other from their sheer numbers, repeating whistles like a flock of birds searching for each other in the dark. I suppose that´s kind of what they are. Everyone seems to like it but the gringos, who rush around with harried expressions like they are being singled out particularly, which they certainly are. This attention seems to make some of them lose a considerable amount of weight. Not infrequently did I see a rail of a gringo walking around with a worried look on his face, ravaged by the sun, hair falling out or completely gone, looking, indeed, on their last legs. Some of the gringos here do well in this town though, adopting jungle man personas and careening around with much younger women in jeeps, with sunglasses, hats, vests, and an aura that they would rather be monkeys.
There is a market in this city the likes of which I´ve never seen before. Blocks and blocks and blocks of stalls full of every thing the jungle produces, from illegal skins of endangered animals to fruits and vegetables, lives turtles on their backs in bowls, feebly kicking in slow motion at an apathetic sky. Birds cawing pitifully from their too-small cages, sounding hoarse with cawing, yellow and green in the neon lights of the stalls. There is an alley in the market where indigenous medicines for every conceivable ailment are available, herbs, spices, plants resins and infusions and distillations, raw ayahuasca and san pedro cactus, ungents and salves for the skin and the nails and the hair and the eyes, pieces of animals for various potions some of the locals must know how to make, things to shred and things to powder and things to soak in water and discard, having drawn out the goodness from them. When gringos walk down that alley it seems like all the locals know what we want. Calls of `áyahuasca amigo?´ followed me as I strolled, avoiding the small animals on the ground, looking at the little babies swinging in little hammocks at the tops of the stalls, asleep.
And the meats! A gigantic warehouse full of meats. The smell was overpowering when I entered, that metallic smell of blood mixed with the ripeness of fresh flesh and minerals, leaving a taste in the mouth and along the nasal passages that seems to harden as one breathes. Rows and rows of men and women with cleavers busily chopping off chosen sections of legs and hocks and ribs for excited looking people, who never stop eyeing their meat. Not too much of a stretch to imagine human heads in there, in a secret backroom with red lights and elevator music, for visiting Jivaro executives.
Then the fish, everywhere there is fish in the market, medicinal fish to fish for simple eating, giant fish, tiny fish - it is the ubiquitous product for sale. I´ve never seen so many fish cut in half in my life. That smell, the briny, intestinal stench of it, is unique and unforgettable as well, like the river was emptied and after the water drained away the life of the river sat on tables, suddenly disembowled. Their eyes reflect the churning throng of people in their yellows and greens, their flipflops squelching through what I suppose is called mud but which is really something more intense and primal than the mud we know in America. Somehow richer, with more density and body than the mud I know, mud with soul.
There are stalls full of the exact same shirt, like some rich man accidentally ordered a thousand too many and is paying the shirtless native sitting lackadaisically in the stall to get rid of them. The fact that he isn´t wearing one of them made me wonder what was wrong with them.
Then there are shoe stalls, battery stalls, lines and lines of little restaurants offering set menus for almost no money. People sit on benches in the middle of the wide pedestrian thoroughfare and devour plate after plate of rice with egg, with beef, with fish, with chicken. You can tell the ones who stay longest from their girth. A spicy cheese sauce, that seems more watery than it should be for some reason, sits in little bowls along most of the tables. Flies, as often as not, are allowed to take their repast at their leisure.
The city seems to stretch out farther than it was ever intended to, like once it got started with the first internet stores and restaurants and clothing stores and electronics stores, it just kept replicating. Storefronts display beautiful banners and have a few simple items inside. One storefront had an advertisement declaring it would solve your concrete needs, and inside was a giant pile of concrete, bagless, a dune protected from the wind of the wizzing motocarros. Another had kids clothes: exactly four outfits. The furniture stores here seem to sell the pre-fabricated stuff and nothing else.
The city stretches so far that there is a part of it, Belem, that stretches into the floodplain, and floats during the rainy season. The residents call it little Venice. They definitely got the smell right.
This place is really alive with the energy of the jungle. You can feel it the moment you get off the boat, with the endless port making a noise you can hear a bend of the river away. I walked out of my hotel today and there were four people waiting for me, waiting to ask me for things. One woman wanted to sell me necklaces and bracelets and rattles, another had an incomprehensible note that she assured me explained everything, a third has a miserable looking foot that no amount of money could fix, and when I told them all I didn´t have much money it didn´t slow them at all. The fifth time I said it, nothing happened. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, and a fifth person asked me for a cigarette. He was a cab driver, and I told him he could buy a pack, which is twenty cigarettes, for the cost of a single ride in his cab, and that I knew he had the money. This seemed to make him really happy, and he high-fived another cab driver, celebrating, I suppose, my aplomb. The rattle seller stayed in front of the hotel for the entire day, waiting for others gringos to exit, but they stayed within for what seemed the entire day, eating at the restaurant there, using the incredibly slow internet there, trying to convince themselves, in ways I cannot imagine, that they were really in Peru.

Kipling´s Explorer

Something hidden.
Go and find it.
Go and look behind the ranges.
Something lost behind the ranges.
Lost and waiting for you.
Go!

Orlando described to me a time when he was giving a monkey medicine to fix a rare illness it had. The other monkey he had at the time, which lives with him permanently, watched this process with marked interest. Orlando woke the next day to find that the monkey had given every animal in his care exactly one pill each.

From Moyobamba to Iquitos, with a dying language along the way

We woke at six in the morning and took a motocarro to the bus station, music blasting all the way. Awake, we boarded the bus and road the hour and a half to Tarapoto, slipping back into half consciousness. The further we got, the higher the trees grew and the louder the birds called - like an explosion of life put on momentarily for our passing, only to fall silent again after we had gone. Much in this country seems that way, as if the passionate life we see is only an act for our presence, a temporary thing that couldn’t possibly be sustainable. This, of course, isn’t true, and only reveals the difference between this place and my own.
Arriving in Tarapoto we took another motocarro from a friendly man who explained that we would have to wait there for eight hours because the road to Yurimaguas was closed until five in the afternoon. He then proceeded to offer to take us around to the local sites, which made me wonder if perhaps he was bending the truth. But at the auto station we were assured that the road was closed for construction and we would be leaving in eight hours. So, plopping down after a vegetable tortilla and opening my book, I sat in the bus station reading for the majority of the day. I had some interesting conversations in my rapidly growing Spanish. One with a taxi driver about Obama and how ‘el mundo es diferente!’ Another with a farmer about what I did, where I was from, and how ‘Peru welcomes you, amigo!’ The third was with a younger man who wanted to know everything about me, and was amazed I hadn’t been robbed ‘yet.’ The fourth was with the owner of the hostel in Moyobamba, who had made a day trip to Tarapoto for business and was heading back that evening. He introduced his son, Carlos, a student in Lima who was home for a short vacation, and who seemed like a nice guy. The owner of the hostel was obviously trying to hook him up with the Dutch girl traveling with me. It was hilarious. The fifth conversation was with an indigenous man with red eyes who just wanted me to know he was indigenous. The sixth conversation was one of body language, in which I played face games with a itty bitty girl who kept returning to the water tank to get water, just to look and laugh at me and Emily. She would then get too much attention and walk away with shoulders slumped, arms unmoving, as five and six year olds do as they become conscious of attention and how it can be too much. I noticed after that that everyone was using the same water cup to drink from the water tank, simply placing it back on top of it when they were done. As the day wore on the sun became so hot that the locals walked up to me and wondered how I was doing. I was hot, but fine, and they seemed not to believe it. Then the metal roof absorbed enough of the suns rays to become less a shelter than a hazard of heat. I drank a drink that seemed like grape juice mixed with coffee, and tried not to watch Water World, which was on the T.V. in the station, locked in a giant iron cage. The voice over for Costner was so much more charismatic than the original that it almost made the movie better.
We eventually got into the car and took off for Yurimaguas, driving along curving mountain roads through rising jungle. We went for about forty-five minutes and were stopped by a long line of cars and trucks, with all of their passengers sitting along the side of the road. The construction would halt in another hour and a half, we were told, so we squatted with the rest of the people and chilled out in the heat. Children came buy selling the usual roadside goods, water, choclo (corn), bread, sandwiches, homemade cheese, chiclets, cigarettes, caramels, and fruits. I was fascinated at the way the people lolled in the afternoon heat, simply passing the time looking out and around. Some of the trucks were piled so high with things that the people sat atop bags like they were recliners, fifteen feet off of the ground. We finally got moving again, and it was like a rally race. Our driver seemed to win. We took turns in the opposite lane with only luck assuring that oncoming traffic wasn’t about to hit us as we rounded the bend. Once out of the mountains he really opened up, hitting about ninety as we pushed north towards the river port. The full moon was beautiful, my sister in the sky.
We stopped for a gas up at an isolated station, with a security guard standing out front in bullet proof and holding a military shotgun. It made me worried for the first time. My fears were erased when we arrived in Yurimaguas, a funky town with well lit streets and smiling people. The hotel, the El Naranjo, is great in every way, including actual hot water! Ate bistek con arroz and made a too-short phone call, then slept fourteen hours and woke up this morning to C.N.N. It’s a nice change. As I type this the rain is coming out of the sky in a way I didn’t believe was possible, a constant torrent. I keep expecting it to let up, but it doesn’t sound likely.
After the rain finally stopped around noon I stepped out of my hostel and walked around town until I found a place that planned expeditions. There I met a man with the unlikely name of Jimmy Evans. Unlikely from his looks, though he is the son of English immigrants, a two-decade veteran of the Peruvian forestry service (Much more on him later). He agreed to take me to the town of Munichas, and within the hour I was on the way through a vast jungle, speaking a mixture of English and Spanish as we first drive and then walked through the palms and bromeliads. Multi-flowered epillaria tumbled their chains of flowers down across our path, and young men with machetes smiled as we passed. When we arrived in the village, Jimmy introduced me Orlando, a man who for twelve years has been rescuing animals whose parents were killed for bush meat by the Indians of the village and raises them until they are capable of surviving in the wild on their own (Much more on him later, as well). This inspiring man spoke English and agreed to translate for me, as well as introducing me to the last speakers of the Muniche language. We walked through the thick mud streets of his village, coming first to the home of Demetrio, one of the last speakers of the language, who wasn’t home. His wife was there, and we set a meeting for the next morning. Then we proceeded to the home of Alejandrina, an ancient woman who was praying as we entered. She slowly and shakily rose from her kneeling, sitting on the bed, very shy. She was so shocked to see me in my whiteness that she couldn’t really concentrate too much on the language thing. She was very, very old. She spoke a bit, and agreed to meet tomorrow and give an interview. I wanted to shower her in affection. The things she has seen in her life, I can only guess at. She embodies a way of life that is almost gone, and as such is a living, priceless piece of humanity. The small dirt floored room in which she lives gives both credence and contrast to this fact. Tomorrow begins the real research. Woke early this morning and had a coffee with Jimmy. We are quickly becoming friends. When I put a single spoonful of the Nescafe in my cup he said no, please have more my friend. He speaks no English, so everyday we hang out is like a crash course in Spanish: I either understand, or I don’t. With him was a younger man who is a current member of the forestry service. We rolled out to Munichis and went by Orlando’s. He was fresh out of the shower, towel wrapped around him as he talked the animal languages he’s learned. Since he only gets running water for two hours each day he has to get everything he needs for the animals, himself, his cooking, and anything else he might need water for at six in the morning. We shared another cup of coffee and proceeded into the day I’ve already spoken of below. A story I left out of the previous blog was Orlando telling us of his experience in an Indian village deep in the jungle, many years ago. He was telling us how he had gone to be part of a biological research center at one time, and he had been out on research with a few animals in cages to be examined and recorded when he somehow became stranded in the village, eventually for two months. He said how when he arrived with the boxes of ammunition he had brought as a gift for the tribe’s people, they had quickly consumed large amounts of chichi, a fermented beverage that intoxicates, before loading up the ammunition in their guns and dancing around the fire, occasionally popping off a few rounds. Each time they shot into the air, he remembered how his ‘huevos’ had climbed up to his neck. His body language was hilarious as he described this. The man seems to have a spectrum of stories to relate about the jungle. Once the prosperous owner of Manguare Expeditions, which is still listed in most travel guides Yurimaguas entry, he know lives in Munichis and cares for orphaned animals. The place where Manguare was supposed to be, between the bank and Leo’s Palace on the Plaza Del Armas, is just a boarded up storefront. The new project he has going involves a lot of what he called rustic living alongside the animals he’s caring for. At any given time he has twenty to thirty young animals during their nascence. He spends far more money on food for them than he does on himself. The things he asked me for in return for his help where minimal, a few solares on his phone so he could text his sister in Miami, a couple of Duracell batteries for his camera to continue to document his project. I promised him I would write a story about him, once I received the answers to a series of questions, once I knew the story of his life. I will do the same for his good friend Jimmy, who quickly took over the Yurimaguas guide market by placing his ‘Jungle Tours/Expeditions’ on the other side of the Plaza some time after Orlando heard the call of the babies.
Today I ventured back to Munichis for a planned conversation amongst the last speakers of Muniche in their language. It was nine in the morning, and Jimmy accompanied me gratis because, he admitted, he had become interested. I think he also felt a kinship for me, the crazy gringo pursuing his mission in the South American jungle. When we arrived they informed us they would like to do it at three in the afternoon. So I journeyed all the way back here and am taking a bit of the time to sketch some quick notes on the experience of the village so far. For the entirety off the trip back I conversed in Spanish with an old drunk man who owned a bar along the road. He’d been to los Angeles, and wanted to go to Miami. He had relatives in America he said, but he didn’t know where. At the end of the ride the driver tried to give me a fake ten solares bill as change for my twenty, but I spotted it, somehow. ‘Es falso.” I said, to which he replied “No, este es diez!” Like the number on the fake bill would make it real. Finally, he told me to go get change, which I did, laughing. It felt great.
Had a sit down with four of the last speakers of the Muniche Language yesterday afternoon. I had to convince them that I wasn’t just some tourist come for the novelty of hearing a dying language, but that I cared about it in a way that was impossible to describe in my limited Spanish. Thank the spirits that Orlando was there to help me get my point across, leading to the ‘valor’ that the two old women and two old men needed to really get at it in Muniche. The language is dry sounding and full of vowels. They seem to repeat phrases to each other as an act of agreement. It was also often that they relished a chance to speak it amongst themselves, and that they enjoyed showing someone who was truly interested in it what it sounded like. All wore happy smiles by the end of the interview, and the headman of the village, Demetrio, gave a long speach at its terminus to insure I knew they were grateful for my interest. They asked me to come back, and I said that I would try my best.

There are pieces of it that are quite hard for me to pronounce, certain intonations that would take practice, but I assured them that I would get it eventually, only that I needed more time. They smiled and nodded after i tried to pick up a few words, seeing that my interest was pure. Once I bought a small bottle of whiskey at their request, they started talking amongst themselves in their native tongue. It was beautiful. I realized about halfway through that it was possible that I was making the only visual recording of the last speakers of the Muniche language in existence. Sweat poured off of my body in the small dirt floored room. From time to time I would wipe my free hand across my brow and fling the liquid onto the floor, accompanied by gales of laughter from the four elders suddenly watching me.
Engines roared outside, pigs squealed and chickens clucked inside. They passed the coke and cookies I’d brought amongst themselves, occasionally making comments about me, at which they all erupted in laughed. My hairiness was a particular point of hilarity. They wondered, does he have such hair all over his body? Surely he does! And more laughter. By the end of the session I was exhausted, having sweated all of the salt out of my body. To speak in front of me, Orlando assured me, they had taken me into their heart. They reiterated this over and over again, during the conversation, and thanked me from the bottom of their hearts when it was done…saying that the fact that I had traveled so far to hear this integral piece of their lives meant everything to them. They let me inside. They asked when I was coming back again. Orlando offered me a free place to live, when I returned. I told them I would do my best to be back as soon as possible. I will be back…but first I have a ton of work to do. I’ve heard the language of the Muniche, I’ve held the hands of it’s last speakers. For me this is more meaningful than anything I can describe.
On the way home I could barely stand, and I had to drink some salt-infused water to keep from passing out. It was a close one.

The village of Munichis (on an old map I found, Munichas), on the Paranapura (formerly Paranapuras) river just outside of Yurimaguas, is a small place crammed with priceless people. Dirt streets, a single place for the locals to buy beer, another for stock goods, a grass field were soccer games are played probably on Sundays, a number of half finished projects, a dying language, an animal savior, some dried fish, some boats, some livestock, some laughter in the afternoon. I'll be back for certain.

Woke this morning to find a boat to Iquitos, took a motocarro down to the peurta de la boca and bought my ticket, and a few hours later I was sitting on a hammock on the third deck of the Eduardo III, rocking softly in the breeze. Bats flitted in and out of the view between my hammock and the next one as night fell, and the reds of the sunset rippled on the river like the dress of a dancer in the wind. The meal was chicken and rice with vegetables, and instant coffee. The water in the sinks came straight from the river, was a watery brown, and the rooms with the toilets had showers in them as well, and standing water on the floors. Bugs covered everything. Cows in the front, with vegetables in crates. The churning brown waters behind, a hundred passengers all in hammocks, smiling brown men with their shirts off looking at me like I was crazy to have mine on. But the heat was bearable when mixed with the river wind, especially after Munichis.
After the sunset a lighting storm on the horizon, which I’m missing a bit of to scribble these hasty notes. Life is beautiful my friends…all the more so when you seek it out.
The rain came last night, and I sat it out in my hammock. It was wonderful to feel the rain on my face, holding the hammock closed with my hands, tilted ten degrees in the wind. There was a giant spider in the bathroom this morning.
The boat trip. We had a cabin on the top deck, and had the added opulence of renting a hammock each to rest in during the day, escaping the cauldron of the tiny cubes with metals roofs, which had two beds and which held heat like a good oven. We shared the top of the boat with other gringos and the obviously successful Peruvians who could countenance spending the extra solar son the benefit of extra space and a sit down meal three times a day. Their was a Dutch man who had been a tour guide in Iquitos for eight years - and since the girl I was traveling with was Dutch as well, he thought it would be helpful to offer advice to us for the majority of the voyage, though some of it was unnecessary, and some even dead wrong. There was a water-purification specialist we picked up in a tiny pueblo by the river, sent from Lima to try andd find a way to make the water of the Amazon’s villages drinkable. He told me it was hard to convince the natives that changing their traditional ways could actually improve their lives, and complained a bit about a noncommittal parliament. There was the English couple who hung their hammocks far from us, dressed shabbily on purpose, and tried to pretend the rest of us weren’t there for the entirety of the trip. There was the mother and daughter of ethnic Peruvian descent returning for a visit to the motherland from Australia. The mother had followed her father there in 1971 and hadn’t been back since. Her daughter had nothing of the shine of Peruvians, was covered in painful looking mosquito bites, and broke a hammock with a loud guffaw. Their guide and her befriended a handsome young Peruvian and then commenced to get into a kind of jealousy battle over him which involved intermittent slapping, spraying, and barring each other inside his cabin at regularly spaced intervals. There was a Peruvian engineer, and a mother and child who smiled all the time and played whistling games with me, and slid bottle caps back and forth across the deck until, inevitably, they fell over the sid eof the ship. Each time this happened the water purification specialist would notice and sigh expressively, giving the boys mother a disapproving look, which she failed to notice. Traditions held strong, in this case, though I wish the man luck and plan on writing about him further in the future. Jose was his name, and I have his email and believe he is doing something I understand…fighting an uphill battle against the odds of cultural heritage.
The constantly blaring Spanish language music made the trip seem jovial, denying the rotting lushness of the jungle in favor of the rolling motion of our passage, always upbeat, never downcast by the repressive, sweltering heat of the tropical sun. Every now and then the boat would stop at tiny villages and pick up loads of plantains, and at the smallest villages with only a few houses the man of the place would motor out with a clutch of them and trade them as swiftly as possible to the crew before motoring back to his family in their thatch hut amidst the green. The old metal floors of the boat would pop loudly when stepped on in certain places, making it sound as if a marching band was practicing below. Every time I sat at the table with the successful, wealthy Peruvians I felt uncomfortable. Not because of the immediate company, but because of the hundred or so other passengers on the lower deck where the table was placed. It almost felt like a moral indictment, like my youth had no place at what they all seemed to see as a spot reserved for those who had made it. Perhaps that is why they put the table there, to remind the rich who could afford it that they had come from the same place as the people whose eyes followed our their every move as they ate.
Darkness falls slowly on the Maranon. The reds and purples of the sunset are reflected doubly by gathering storm clouds holding the continent’s moisture and the brown waters of the river. The insects that come to the light whirl about as if attached to strings that terminate at the brightness.
The Dutch guide just taught me how to sight the Southern Cross. There is a triangle of stars that is almost a perfect isosceles triangle, and a fourth star a bit further out at an angle to the bottom left. It is about a foot away from the left side of Cassiopeia, and the Southern most tip of it points to cardinal south. It looks more like a broad-hilted sword than a cross, and is hard to discern amongst the thousands of stars on a November evening.

A rough sketch of the day

Ahora!
Today began with an early morning coffee with Jimmy the ex-Peruvian forestry man and his friend Ricardo, who I was told is a real 'man of the yungle!' Then a jarring motocarro out to Munichis, where I'd arranged an interview with a man named Demetrio Chancharri, an ethnic Muniche. We talked for hours, and despite the fact that he didn't speak the language very much I got some really important information about the story of his people, some pieces of the language, local history, and the changes the village has gone through in the last sixty years. I also got the contact information of a girl named Karina who spent two months in the village studying the language not a month ago, who I will contact when I'm back in Lima.
My camera eventually filled up with video and the battery became exhausted, but not before the intermisso in which they asked me to document an injustice the alcalde of the village was perpetrating on its inhabitants. They took me to a place where an agricultural project was languishing halfway done, and told me the mayor had kept the rest of the money for himself. They needed my camera to document this fact and they would take the photo to the police. This is a future story, I believe.
After that I had a meal at Orlando's place, which is full of baby monkeys, marsupials, boars, turtles and snakes he is raising from infancy for release in the wild. Que Rustica!¡ I'm planning on writing a story about this guy, who saves animals whose parents were killed for bush meat and raises them as his own, and does it all without any kind fo funding. Truly a good man. Then I returned to Yurimaguas to recharge and purge my camera of data. After this I returned to the village and met Melchor, who is an eighty-nine year old man who is truly one of the last speakers of the Muniche language. He was working in the fields when I arrived. I recorded much of our conversation, and arranged a meeting for tomorrow in which I'll be able to hang out with the last three speakers as they converse over coke and cookies.
Also asked about the possible trip to the Aucayacu River, where the Taushiro live. They told me it was very complex, and when I asked what they meant, they said that if I go, I might not return. So basically, I need to know someone who knows the Taushiro before I try to go out there...I'll try to find someone associated with Cypta in Iquitos. But I might have to wait for better preparation, and let this be my fact finding trip as far as they go. Either way, I hope they hold on until I or someone else can get to them!
This is just the short version of the day, because I can't get my laptop online. I'll be adding pictures and more words as soon as I can.

The town of Munichas

I just got back from an expedition to Munichas, where the last speakers of the Muniche language live. I´ll return tomorrow to interview them, hang out with them, record them, hear about their lives. I´m pulling it off. She was such an ancient woman, who brought me all the way to that remote village, praying as I entered her room. There will be much more later. Now I need to eat.

From Chachapoyas to Moyobamba

An Aussie, a German, a Portuguese, a Dutch and myself arrived in Chachapoyas early in the morning on Sunday.
They were Belinda, Falk, Gabriella, and Emily, respectively. The highlight of the bus journey was the desert stretching out into mountains, and the mountains becoming covered in cloud forest the closer we got to our destination. The sides of the road were piled high with tumbleweeds mixed with multicolored plastic. After passing through the silent expanse of the desert we came suddenly to a place of lush vegetation. The cloud forest is made up of many kinds of palms and bromeliads and orchids, all wreathed in eternal mist, woven through with the paths of hummingbirds and disturbed in its endless churning by the calls of night animals.
A two hour detour along the route from Trujillo to the capital of the Amazonas region along a dirt track overcrowded with vehicles led to the bus being filled with a fine dust that coated everything. Indigenous women with empty three liter containers, flipped upside-down, with their bottoms cut off and their mouthpieces attached to sticks, hoisted these contraptions up at the high windows of the bus, offering select items such as coca cola and snickers to the passenger needing a quick repast.
I wrapped an extra shirt around my head and read battlefield earth late into the night, before falling into a neck breaking sleep. When we arrived I instantly befriended a local guide who was kind enough to show us to the first hostel we checked out, which seemed like an old converted insane asylum. He left before we decided against staying there, and as we walked through the quite, Sunday morning streets of the city I was surprised at the calm and quiet of the place. The town is smaller than I expected it would be, with most of the streets a mixture of paved and unpaved abstraction, peopled by indigenous men and women selling a whole new spectrum of wares similar to each other but completely different from those of the coast. After some searching we found a place to leave our things and bed down later that night, a hotel just off the plaza de armas called Hotel El Dorado. The flinching attendant seemed unsure how much the rooms cost, whether there was an internet connection, what a towel was, and whether he wanted us to stay at all. It was difficult for him to pull his eyes off of the replaying highlights of the previous day’s soccer games, but eventually we were settling our things in, showering, and back out the door. We breakfasted at a funny kind of combination store that is fairly common here in Peru, but which I’m still getting used to. It is a juxtaposition of super market, call center, drug store, and restaurant. The milk we had with our coffee had a skein of white on the top that freaked Falk, the German man, though he eventually drank a straight cup of it just to get us to stop pestering him about his initial reaction. This along with fresh papaya juice, cold scrambled eggs, and bread with butter and jam, all for about a dollar.
Without enough time in the day to do any of the long distance trips to the well known sites situated throughout the area, we hopped in a taxi and took off for a small, unexcavated hilltop ruin called Yalape, near the village of Levanto. We lost each other there and wandered around the overgrown limestone walls, which follow the contours of the mountain. I found a moment of peace, and got bit by a spider. We gazed off into the Andean distance, where fields held the brightly colored spots of people and the sounds of saws jittering and livestock calling carried on the smoke filled breeze. The ground was littered with artifacts, and the extent of the ruin, from what I could make of it underneath the forest it now sported like a full head of unruly hair, was such that it made me want to get a grant on the spot and dig down to the earliest habitation levels. White stacks of rock, rounded like full bellies, gave way to tumbled piles of the same material, scattered amidst innumerable pottery shards. Cows grazed among the ruins, tethered to the odd tree that erupted from the walls in many places. Across the valley that held the pueblo of Levanto some farmers were burning a field, and the flames grew to such an extent that I was sure they would burn out of control. But they didn’t, of course. Foolish of me to think these people, practicing a way of life they had been preserving for centuries, would make such an error.
We walked down the mountain and into the village of Levanto, after much discussion over whether or not we would be able to get a ride back to Chachapoyas before nightfall. We decided it didn’t matter and headed into town. Levanto on Sunday is like many places all over the world, tranquil and at ease. We had the luck of arriving as most of the village gathered for their Sunday ritual: a series of football games in an open field just below the center of town. Three teams of men from the village and the surrounding countryside had gathered to compete against each other as the women and children watched, laughed, talked, and sold various homemade foodstuffs to each other. The first to approach us were two fourteen year old boys who wanted to know all about where we were from, where we were going, and what the world was like. The one named Anderson said he would like nothing better than to go to Lima one day, the city, where he could find a beautiful rich woman and be set for life. He wanted to study economics, and wasn’t into football that much. After we had talked for about an hour, our new Portuguese friend Gabriella walked over to a group of women and children on the sidelines and ended up holding a baby boy as he napped. I followed and the rest came as well, and we sat with the women and broke out some pieces of paper for all the little girls to make some drawings on. They drew delicate pictures of trees, birds, and themselves, laughing when I took pictures of them and showed them. I made a paper crane and flew it around to hails of laughter, then some paper planes after Falk’s failed to fly. We ate toasted corn out of little plastic bags and sweet bean mush on top of fresh rolls. The sun started shining strongly. It was a truly beautiful experience, and I laid down to nap, content. If I dreamed, I’m sure it was of the children’s face’s smudged with dirt that could not hope to hide the pure goodness and beauty within them. They smiled and laughed every time I looked a them, and I feel asleep to this sound.
We got a taxi back to town from one of the members of the winning team, who was also a cab driver. There were ten of us in the car, and it was a jubilant crew. After unwinding a bit we hit the town for dinner, finding a local joint with a set menu of chicken soup and a wonderful vegetable pancake. Having slept a few hours a night for the previous three nights, I hit the bed hard and had trouble getting up this morning.
Today we went to Kuelap. It is one of the most profound sites for human habitation I have ever seen. I’m dreaming now of building my own version somewhere in Western North Carolina. Situated on a very high mountain surrounded on all sides by deep valleys, the snake-like limestone structure stretches for hundreds of meters, undulating with the curvature of the hills, walls rising ten meters into the air. Walking through the place was incredible. It seemed to hold ancient spiritual energy in every space, from every angle. Small circular houses stood along the bottom of five or six terraces, getting larger and more ornate as I progressed upwards. I begin to imagine what it could have been like for these people, living in the clouds in a peaceful symbiosis with nature, when the Inca came and conquered them, and stole their wakas, and desecrated their pacariscas. I imagined that before that had happened it had been something like Chachapoyas is now, where a shopkeeper told my friend ‘everyone knows everyone, and we have everything we need. Sometimes a farmer from the country comes to town and tells me he is going to sell his land and move to Lima and I ask him why? In Lima you no have water, but here you have a river!” I imagined the children running between the circular houses with high peeked thatch roofs, the shamans performing ceremonies, the warriors going out to battle invaders. I thought of the long centuries of sunlight and air on the mountaintop. Small crevices held secrets I dreamed up. The guide was a fast talking young indigene from the area who had gone to university for English. He informed us about many geological and botanical facets of the experience I’m sure I would have either missed or glossed over in my awe. It was hard for me to imagine anyone ever getting used to the grandeur of the place, but he seemed to have managed it. Two baby llamas practiced spitting as the gringos passed. The archaeological workers busily re-mortaring the architectonically placed limestone, squatting for lunch on the top of the highest watchtower, joked with me as I approached the edge. ‘Don’t jump, gringo.” They said, and we laughed. One of them told me that they had built their fortresses following the curve and shape of the mountain because the mountains withstood earthquakes, and that’s what they wanted their home to do as well. Apparently the color red in any Chachapoyan structure indicates it is a funerary site. The site of Revash, which was pictured in a reconstruction of a Chachapoyan dwelling just outside of the fortress, seemed so remote, embedded in a cliff hundreds of feet up, that it ignited my passion. I will get to it one day. I was also told that despite the fact that Kuelap has long been thought of as the primary city of the Chachapoya, a new city was recently discovered somewhere in the cloud forest with over a thousand of the circular homes inside. This sounds more like the metropolis of this civilization that understood Feng Shui so long ago.
Three Germans who we had met the day before in Levanto on their way trekking to Kuelap arrived when we were leaving, and immediately fell asleep on the sloping hill in front of the main entrance of the fort, the one that was used solely for the most venerated members of the society, a slim slit in the wall tapering up at the top, leading into the fort by means of steps fit only for giants, about five feet high, each. The guide informed us that the Chachapoya had carried personal ladders for their entrances so invaders would have more trouble getting into their homes.
We left the fortress, but it was difficult for me. We drove the three hours back to the capital of the region, through countryside that defies words, such is its grandeur. The path of waters through rocks over centuries, the heaving of gigantic stones. We stopped on the way back at a tiny village where we ate soup and a plate of chicken and rice. Slat-ribbed dogs begged for and received food, while the locals shook their heads in confusion that we would feed their animals.
The power went out in the town that night, and the women in the plaza lit candles to illuminate their selection of candy bars, drinks, and knick-knacks. We walked to a pizza place and ordered pizza and a sweet red wine, feeling lucky to be getting a candle light dinner. The pizzas came out four inches in diameter and, still hungry, we left the place and headed to another joint with the same size pizzas, which we devoured equally fast. Then we split aa couple of liters of pisco sour and played one of my favorite games. The game is started easily enough, with me asking each person to tell me their favorite word. This then becomes a frolic through the many languages spoken at the table. Some of the words we came up with include a beautiful Portuguese word I can‘t remember, Knutchen, alabaster (still!), the German word for ivory which translates to elves’ legs, and many others. Slept a few hours and woke for the trip to Cochta falls, one of the highest waterfalls in the world. We brought our things because we would be dropped off in Pedro Ruiz after the trek. After a barely conscious ride to the town from which the trek commenced we disembarked from the van, all fourteen of us, and were hastily offered coffee and eggs numerous times, until someone finally accepted and we all ended up breaking our fast in a small concrete room with little puppies everywhere begging for scraps and a small child playing with a fire engine on the floor. The coffee was prepared in a way I’ve never seen before, in which a carafe of distilled essence of coffee is brought out, and then cups of hot water to add it to.
After drinking this slowly, trying not to see the dense ‘sinkers’ at the bottom of the cups, we began the hike to the falls. The path passed small farms where men and women worked their land, plowing, fixing a roof, or leading their horse in a circle attached to a pole as it twisted a grinder. We descended into the jungle and the places where the breeze didn’t reach brought sweat immediately and in torrents. A dozen species off butterfly flitted about, and rope bridges crossed the many rivers leading up to the cascade. Long before we reached the falls we could see the moisture falling through the air and here the water hitting the ground like a plane passing overhead. Once I got there I walked up to the very base of the 771 meter high waterfall and felt one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever experienced from a force of nature so powerful it left me in awe. The wind created by the falling water whipped my clothes around, and the moisture in the air soaked me to the bone. It was spectacular. The guide, a happy man with no English, told us the legend of the falls. A man had come to the falls alone one day, and when he returned his wife found pieces of gold in his pocket. She followed him the next day only to discover him there with a mermaid. Jealous, she tried to forbid him going, but he had fallen in love, and the man and his ‘la serena’ disappeared into the waters below the fall.
Afterwards I ate two helpings of the delicious lunch a village woman had prepared for us, laughing at a trio of young girls on what seemed a gigantic bike as one of them learned to ride in a grassy place across the street. The two girls would push the third as she tried to peddle and balance and move. It was beautiful. Their were strange chickens with no feathers on their necks, and the woman who made our food had truly beautiful eyes of pale green.
We were dropped off in Pedro Ruiz, a crossroads on the bus route from the coast to the jungle, and immediately felt the change in atmosphere. All of a sudden everything was raw. A boy on the street held a de-fanged snake around his shoulders, smiling when I noticed it only after getting quite close. We got on a bus heading for Moyobamba and the difference was even more apparent. This was a place far less gringos ever went. Halfway through the five hour journey we stopped for a bathroom break in Neuva Cajamarca. As I closed the stall door I came face to face with a tree frog, which looked at me and seemed to smile.
We got to Moyobamba late in the night, taking a motocarro through the quiet streets. This tri-wheeled motorcycle was a welcome relief from the stifling heat of the bus. Refreshed from the ride, we arrived at the ‘Country Club Hostal,’ a gated courtyard with inward facing rooms and friendly staff. I passed out.
This morning I awoke to the patter of little feet on the roof and the screech of chickens in the courtyard. Walked into town along the dirt road and had a breakfast of stewed pork, rice, beans, and slaw, lubricated with fresh papaya juice and that peculiar kind of coffee in the carafe I‘d had for the first time the day before. From their we strolled through the electric streets, wild with the awakening city, full of tiny storefronts offering every conceivable ware, hair salons with yawning patronesses, restaurants, internet rooms full of busily chatting and gaming Peruvians, the library in which I inquired about books relating to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the busy market with heaps and piles of local produce, electronic stores with men already nodding off, stores full of plastics, stores full of bags of grains and seeds, stores full of shampoos and soaps, clinics, the tourist office, and another church being rebuilt in the central plaza - as was the case in Huaraz. This led me to wonder whether a religious organization is launching a revitalization initiative for Peru’s churches, a revangelization as it were.
Now I sit in my hotel room eating an abundance of produce, experiencing my first true rainstorm in the jungle. It is as if the air has turned to water outside, and the rolling thunder is shaking the roof. Tomorrow I’ll be on a bus to Yurimaguas, from where I’ll try to hire a guide with Manguire (?) Expeditions to head up the Paranapuras river to the town of Munichas. But first, a lazy day watching T.V.