Previously: Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby.
One extra drug of note I should have mentioned before: about two years ago I started having serious trouble falling asleep. I’d had the occasional bout of insomnia before, but this was different. It felt like I had forgotten HOW to fall asleep. I would lie in bed and wait to fall asleep, as if it were a state of mind I could recognize with clarity, as if the mere act of thinking now I am falling asleep did not in fact mean I was now wide awake again. As the night would wear on I would feel more and more unhinged until I would give up and get out of bed, and sunrises began to feel like the worst thing I had ever seen. Eventually I started taking Ambien, which worked wonders, but I had to take it every single night. By the time we were going to Peru I had been taking it every night for close to two years and I couldn’t sleep without it. Unfortunately, it was another drug that had to be purged from my system before I could take ayahuasca, though since it had a short half-life I didn’t have to quit taking it until the day we left.
I woke the next morning in the hotel after three hours sleep and we caught a taxi back to the airport as the sun was just edging over the horizon. I hadn’t slept very deeply and I was drained from my little emotional breakdown, too, and it left me in a weird state of disorientation that would become almost a default for me until well after we were back home. In that daze we made it to the airport and our flight from Lima to Iquitos, in the Peruvian rainforest.
Iquitos is not a small town, in fact it has a population of close to 400,000. Nevertheless, it is the world’s largest city that is inaccessible by road. If you want to get to Iquitos you either arrive by air or by water. Or you could walk, too, I suppose, but I wouldn’t recommend it, really. Actually, all that’s kind of a lie, as it used to be the largest city inaccessible by road, but they recently completed a road to the small town of Nauta, 100km to the south. But as Nauta itself has no major roads leading out of it other than the one that now leads to Iquitos, let’s just call it even. Flying into the airport provides a small adventure of its own, as you slowly descend over miles of jungle forest, and hey, there’s the Amazon, some other small rivers, small villages, boy we’re getting low, some small huts with backyards, some weeds, wow we’re really low HEY THE RUNWAY! Where the hell did that come from?
We came to a stop, the doors opened and we disembarked the way god intended, directly onto the tarmac. The airport in front of us, “Coronel FAP Francisco Secada Vignetta” written above the doorways, was about the size of a large grocery store in America. For the first time I processed in concrete terms that I was deep in South America, unmoored. I turned back to snap a couple of photos of the plane and the passengers unloading and watched as several fans were having their pictures taken with a university futbol team that had been on the flight. I smiled and somehow felt reassured.
Inside the terminal we found a representative from Blue Morpho, the company that ran the center we’d be heading to the next day. He greeted us and said he was waiting for a few more arrivals. This kind of “adventure tourism” is big business for Iquitos, and Blue Morpho is only one group of many in the area offering what it does. I watched the rest of the crowd from the plane filter inside and wondered how many of the other gringos would end up with us. In the end a group of about fifteen gathered together and eventually caught the two small shuttle buses to our respective hotels. Driving into town we passed few actual cars, instead we were swarmed on all sides by buses, seemingly made made mostly of wood, and mototaxis, motorcycles that had been modified with a cabin on the back supported by two wheels. Somewhere in my mind I thought, if somehow we end up trapped here, I’ll drive a mototaxi for a living. It didn’t sound so bad.
The hotel we were staying in was across from the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Iquitos. We didn’t know it yet, but the square was really the social center of the city. For now it was just a few vendors hawking jewelry, toys, framed insects and copyright infringing balloons and balls. After checking in we walked out into the square and were swarmed by young men, Blue Morpho? You Blue Morpho? We were so easily spotted. For us they had maps of the Amazon and bracelets containing a crosscut of ayahuasca vine. We tried as politely as we could to shoulder past, but the friendliest of the lot followed along and unofficially appointed himself our tour guide. We walked down the street to the river Itaya, where signs for a company called Anaconda offered boat rides into the jungle proper as well as access to ayahuasca shamans. We tried to pause and take it in while our guide continued to suggest various things we could pay him for. But sleeping in last night’s bed had left me with a sharp lower back stab and it was getting worse as we walked, so we said our polite but slightly firmer goodbyes and went back to the hotel. I tried to read… an odd book I’d found months previous about a former writer for Superman who met a man who claimed he had been created solely from another man’s imagination, but my mental state was up and down and I couldn’t focus.
Eventually we attempted another foray out into the streets for dinner. In the square things were picking up, and we stopped at a sidewalk restaurant called “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Apparently owned by a Texas expatriate, it was decorated in the colors of the Texas Longhorns, featured tabletops painted in the style of tacky tourist postcards and, most importantly, offered food that was allowed in an ayahuasca diet. We had both been on a fairly restrictive pre-ceremony diet for a week, and now that we had arrived it became especially limited. I ate plain chicken with plain rice and a slice of pineapple and we headed back to the square where two different military marching bands were trading off songs. We wandered through the large crowd that had gathered to listen as children played with glowing spinning discs and a five-foot-tall man in his homemade Predator costume walked aimlessly around.
According to the hotel desk it was a typical night in the square. Back in our room we tried to rest and my mood collapsed again. Eventually I fell asleep, watching the fireworks shooting off in the Plaza de Armas.
