Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>

Also, you can see photos on my Tumblr account >>

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.

Next: I know, I know, we’re up to part 4 now and I haven’t even gotten to the damn drugs. We’re nearly there, I promise.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>

I’ve never been a particularly spiritual person. I’ve never been rooted in any particular faith since my early childhood. I had even come to realize that I had little faith in pretty much anything, in the strictest sense of the word. Lengthy depression had left me jaded; I had grown incapable of believing in things based solely on belief. But that same lengthy depression had also left me so tired and worn-down that I was willing to try anything. It was a weird place to be.

On top of that, one of the first requirements of the ayahuasca ceremonies is that my system needed to be clear of any other drugs, and that included the Wellbutrin and Zoloft I was taking at the time. The combination hadn’t been doing me a whole lot of good, my general emotional state was ‘completely disinterested in life.’ Still, that was a lot better than ‘wanting to exit life’ so I wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of going off them. But if I was going to go through with the ceremonies I had no choice, there was a genuine risk to my life if I tried to mix them with the ayahuasca. Three months before the trip I started the slow process of weaning off what I’d been taking, so that six weeks before the ceremony my system would be clear. It was a lousy process and worse once the drugs were gone. By that time I had pretty much severed contact with the outside world and I tried to simply hold on to the idea that what I was doing served some kind of purpose, that as bad as I felt at least this time it was some kind of step towards feeling better.

Sarah and I left for Peru in early December. It’s a six hour flight from Atlanta to Lima that takes you from the Atlantic coast of the US to the Pacific coast of South America, without ever leaving the Eastern Time Zone. It doesn’t seem like that should be right, but trust me, it is. We played trivia on the seat-back video system and I got a question about Mike Viola (who I opened for in Boston a while ago), of all things, and I tried to watch movies and tv shows I don’t actually like. In other words, it’s a long, boring flight especially if you hate flying, and I do, and especially if you’re flying at night, which we were.

We got into Lima at midnight, shambled through customs and out in to the night, taking a taxi to a hotel for literally just the night. It was eight hours until our flight to Iquitos and we’d decided we didn’t want to try and sleep in the empty airport. Both of us had tried to pick up enough Spanish as we could beforehand but, like everyone always says, the gap between studying a language and actually trying to practice it in conversation with native speakers is pretty wide. It made for a surreal experience to start the trip. Our amiable driver spoke better English than we did Spanish (Un poco. Mi Espanol es muy terrible was one of the first phrases I became fluent with), and was happy to practice it with us, so we had a lengthy, halting, multi-lingual conversation about the population of Lima versus Atlanta and why Chinese food is so popular in Peru. We drove along barren-seeming beaches in the dark and through cramped but empty streets that nevertheless included a fire-juggler looking for tips, until we reached the hotel. It was similarly cramped, in a way that suggested it was never built to be a hotel, with a tiny, glass elevator (with a swinging door), paper-thin walls and windows that faced the hallways.

I tried to sleep, but weighed down by the drunken voices reverberating through the building, the six hours in an airplane seat, the three months without meds, the knowledge that I was in a place where I could barely communicate with those around me and the general feeling of having untethered myself from any feeling of security I’d ever had, what little emotional scaffolding I had finally collapsed. Sarah tried to calm me as best she could, as tired and stretched thin as she felt herself, and eventually I fell asleep listening quietly to an old episode of This American Life and hanging my temporary sanity on the solidity of familiar sound.

Next time: Things pick up, I swear.

Everyone wants to know “what happened in Peru?”

Or, more accurately, they wanted to know, back in December when I had just returned. Unfortunately, I turned out to be incapable of writing about it at the time. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve started to feel as if I have any kind of handle on what happened. So, for the next few days I’m going to try and get back to that particular mindset as best I can and put something together in some reasonable fashion. I may digress and discuss other things that might seem unconnected that will hopefully become more clear as this goes on, though it’s entirely possible they won’t. This might end up being terribly long (in return for which I’ll break it into more manageable bits), though again it’s also possible I might get two paragraphs in and find I have nowhere to go. In which case, well, that’s already one paragraph gone right there.

The short version is that Peru was amazing. Life-changing. But it’s all still up for grabs as to what it’s changing into.

First, the context: When I was younger, I smoked pot infrequently and usually to little effect. I never developed any kind of taste for alcohol. On the rare occasions I drank I did it at parties in order to get drunk, and since I grew up shy and introverted I didn’t go to a lot of parties. I also did LSD four times, the most recent being roughly twenty years ago. That’s pretty much a full accounting of the illicit substances I’ve ingested in my life. Of those, only LSD made any kind of impact on my worldview. It didn’t shatter worlds, but it did make their foundations shaky. I knew after the first time I tried it that I had become a different person, or at least now saw the world in a different way. I still think that everyone should try it at least once, I mean, accept or reject what it shows you, but at least look. But, hey, that’s me, and anyway that isn’t the point of writing this.

No, the point is that I’ve tried illegal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. None of them developed into anything anyone could reasonably call a ‘habit.’

More context: I’ve seen various doctors, psychiatrists and therapists to help deal with the severe depression I’ve battled over the past fifteen years or so. This depression, it seems to me, is largely situational and self-inflicted. It stems from certain behaviors and choices and their accompanying guilt and regret, and was exacerbated by a powerful ability to look the other way and convince myself that the cause and effect were unrelated. The particulars are important personally, but they don’t have anything to do with the point of writing this.

No, the point is I’ve also tried a good number of legal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. Certainly, the amount of Prozac, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Effexor, etc. that has been pumped into my system over the last fifteen years is far in excess of the more illegal psychoactive drugs I experimented with in my early twenties. None of them provided any positive results that anyone could reasonably call ‘permanent.’

So, that’s the landscape that more or less existed last November when I wrote that I was going to Peru to take ayahuasca. At the time I didn’t bother to explain what ayahuasca was because, you know, I assume everyone knows everything I do. “Ayahuasca” is a psychoactive brew made from the ayahuasca vine and chacruna leaves, that’s been used by indigenous Amazonian cultures as a religious sacrament and healing medicine for thousands of years.

“Chacruna leaves contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen that’s orally inactive. But it’s dissolved in the stomach [by] monoamine oxydase. They mix chacruna leaves with ayahuasca, which contains several substances that inhibit the stomach enzyme. By cooking the two plants together for hours, it produces a drink that contains orally active DMT and the molecule is absorbed through the stomach intact and goes to the brain. How could they have discovered this recipe when we know there are 80,000 species of evolved plants in the Amazon? Any given combination would give only a one in six billion chance of finding it.”
- Jeremy Narby, anthropologist

DMT also happens to be a Schedule I drug, which creates the odd situation in the US where it would be legal to grow ayahuasca and chacruna but illegal to mix and ingest them.

My first serious exposure to the drug was stumbling onto an article in National Geographic, by a writer who suffered from meds-resistant depression, who had read some of the scientific studies involving the use of psychedelics in treating depression (ayahuasca in particular), and decided to travel to Peru to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. Her experiences (the article was written during a return visit) struck a chord with me and, when eventually my own situation deteriorated to the point where electro-convulsive therapy was being suggested, I decided I had nothing to lose in trying something seemingly crazy.

(As I’m posting these, I’ll be updating my Tumblr feed with photos. If you’re a completist, head on over!)