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.

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!