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.

Wireless-less in the amazon

So I´ve got a lot to tell you all, but I´ve typed it all up on my laptop, and put a bunch of photos on there as well, waiting for an opportunity to get online and post it for you. Sitting in a cafe with motocarro´s roaring by.
This is just a note to say, hold on! The voyage continues, I´m ok, and I love you all! I´m in Moyobamba, capital of San Martin Province, on the edge of the jungle. The bathrooms have treefrogs in them, and kids hold snakes on the street.
Follow the path to whatever it is you want out of life. The world will open for you!