Tag: Peru

Previously: Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state.

We woke early the next day. Outside the window various divisions of the Peruvian military marched around the square and performed a flag-raising ceremony and I watched for a bit before getting my things together. When I was in high school I had discovered Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares so I had a weird sort of quasi-romantic image of… well, Argentina, really, but South America in general. Looking out at the skyline of the square as the troops moved in formation I felt nostalgia for something I really had no experience with, something that was about as real a memory as a Francesca Fiore/Bruno Puntz Jones sketch, but still, there it was. I suppose being in a perpetual state of semi-sleep-deprivation will do that to you.

We left the hotel and found a mototaxi to take us to the Blue Morpho office. Twenty minutes of spinal-adjustments and hanging on to our bags on the luggage rack through the back of the canopy later we arrived. The office really wasn’t much more than an open-air garage space holding two of the ubiquitous wooden buses and a separate room full of chairs and couches that currently held about thirty people. I sat on one of the couches while Sarah chatted with some of the others. I couldn’t really sort out whatever it was I was feeling… apprehension, impatience, a soul-crushing existential weariness? It was something in-between those. The room was friendly but guarded since everyone had their own personal reasons for being there, after all, though there was a certain survivors’ camaraderie you could sense between the repeat visitors. Eventually, forms filled out and money exchanged, we all clambered onto one of the two buses for the hour and a half drive into the jungle.

The woman sitting in front of me had the kind of face that said she’d chosen at some point to love people by default, and I realized I had known people like that before and for some reason always been wary of them. She turned around early in the ride and asked me where I was from and if I’d done this before. I answered and her face lit up, she’d come from Colorado but had lived briefly in Atlanta, so I answered a few questions about the city. She explained she was a frequent visitor to Blue Morpho but that this was her first time back in a few years, and then she lightly broached the subject of why I’d come. I gave her my ultra-slim “extreme depression” answer and she seemed genuinely excited for me to experience my first ceremony.

As we hit the edges of Iquitos our bus pulled off to the side of the road. The driver pulled out a wrench and I wondered if my daydream of being stranded and driving a mototaxi for the rest of my life was about to come true. Another man hopped on board with a large container of gasoline, though, and we were quickly moving again. It was a lonely road bordered by jungle and the occasional thatched roof. The air felt light and different and every now and again rain would fall into the windowless bus. My mood was no better but I understood, even so, that this was something new. I looked around at the others, the ones engaged in quiet, extended conversations and the ones who, like me, either stared out the window or occasionally glanced about. From behind me a guy leaned forward and made a quick remark, I laughed softly in response. Friendly, but guarded. I realized how badly those of us who’d never done this before stood out.

Finally, we turned left off the Iquitos-Nauta road onto a sloping dirt road, past a small lake and into the trees before coming to a stop on a concrete platform. In front of us was a small collection of thatched-roof bungalows tightly surrounded by the jungle forest and we were directed towards the largest and closest of them. Inside, an Australian named Malcolm gave us an overview of the rules and the upcoming schedule and let us know that lunch would be served soon. It was nearly noon and it would be our last meal until breakfast the next morning. Sarah and I went to our room, a small space divided off from a larger bungalow, with some shelves, a small table, and two single-sized mats inside a mosquito net tent. Tellingly, there were two round hospital pans next to the mats. The bungalow itself held three other rooms like this, as well as a sink and mirror, a shower and a toilet. We unpacked and headed back to the main building to eat.

Lunch was plain chicken with pasta, flavored with a mild spice that seemed to be in every single meal I had while I was in Peru. Still, it was more flavorful than I expected with the dietary restrictions we were under. Afterwards, Hamilton, a tall, blond, ex-Californian who was the owner of Blue Morpho and one of the two shamans who’d be presiding over the three ceremonies we’d be taking in total, came in. He settled into one of the lounge chairs and explained what we could expect over the next three days and answered some questions before eventually holding court with a smaller group of people who seemed to clearly be regular visitors. That left the newer among us to get back to the important work of nervously looking at each other without looking too hard, and asking questions that didn’t probe too deeply.

Sarah and I decided to head back up the dirt road to the small lake we passed, a spring-fed body of water that we’d been told was safe to swim in. Before we got there a small, skinny black and white dog came hopping towards us. There seemed to be dogs running loose everywhere in Peru so it was no shock to see one now, but she reminded me of my own dog at home. Worse, she made a pitiful sight in the heat, panting hard and her ribs showing through her narrow chest. Sarah remembered a packet of beef jerky in her bag from the flight (and we weren’t going to be allowed to eat it for at least a week) so we sat for a little while and fed her before continuing on to the lake.

Ever since I was young I’ve had a weird aversion to swimming in anything other than artificial pools, from some combination of living creatures darting between my legs, the sensation of my feet sinking into mud (or not finding the bottom at all) and the fact that I nearly drowned in the ocean once. Deep down I think the thing that disturbs me the most is not being able to see below the surface of the water. So, while Sarah wasted no time getting in I just sat at the edge of the covered dock and dangled my feet.

The first ceremony would be taking place at 6pm inside, appropriately, the ceremony building, a large circular affair with a conical roof. It had been suggested that we make ourselves familiar with the layout, in particular how to get to the bathrooms available in the back, before the ceremony began since we’d be in no shape at that point to figure that sort of thing out. So after drying ourselves off in our room we made our way towards the ceremony building… AND DESTINY!

Too much?

Next: Finally, the first ceremony.

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.

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.