A bigamist, a shaman and two gringos go camping
Feeding the mosquitos deep in the Peruvian Amazon.
Hello! It’s been a little while. We’ve been travelling non-stop in Bolivia this week, and if you happened to listen to my audio recording of the previous newsletter, you may have noticed a guest appearance from Darth Vader. My body has generally been falling apart these past couple of weeks thanks to a cold/fluey thing, hacking cough, dodgy sausages and insane altitude. This and the combination of going several days without wifi means I’m a little behind on the newslettering, but I endeavour to catch up this week (apols to your inbox in advance).
For now, we’re casting back a couple of weeks to the Peruvian Amazon – and some poor sleeping decisions that with hindsight did not set us up well for peak health or the coming weeks’ travel…
I learned three things about Peruvian cinema-going the day we arrived in Iquitos. Our day had begun early, being scooted off the cargo ship before dawn, and after spending some time hanging out and enjoying real food again at a lovely riverfront café, Dave and I checked into our Airbnb for much-needed showers. The heat was still stifling, and when we walked past a cinema near the apartment, we decided on a whim to go inside and catch a film alongside some tasty high-powered air-conditioning.
The first thing we learned about Peruvian cinema is that there are no trailers or adverts in the lead-up to the film being shown, unlike in the UK where 30 minutes has become the norm – which meant we missed the first 15 minutes of Twisters, or Tornado as it is called in Latin America.
This was ok, because as suspected, the plot of Twisters was not so deep – which fortunately for us also made it easy enough for both of us to follow in the dubbed Spanish without subtitles. And the air-con was glorious. But the second thing we learned about Peruvian cinema is that movie age restrictions are no barrier for grandmothers seeking a cool, dark place to sleep while their cares tear about the place screaming. And, for reasons described previously, this is not something that any of the other Peruvian cinema-goers will appear to notice or care about.
The third thing to know about Peruvian cinema theatres is that you’ll know when the film is ten minutes away from the end, because the lights will come on and the staff will walk down to the end of the room and open the doors in preparation for kicking you out swiftly, even if the characters on screen are mid-revelation and still in the process of saving the day.
It was a fun experience nevertheless, and for the silly sum of just £2 each – though even that was twice the price of a regular Tuesday because it was, of course, one of Peru’s 324* designated public holidays.
Iquitos was a very fun place to spend a few days chilling out, even if the heat was borderline unbearable at times. It’s surreal to be so far from the rest of civilisation – literally cut off by road – and yet be surrounded by a plethora of very boujie and up-market cafés, bars and restaurants. Dave and I spent a lot of time pottering about the brightly coloured streets with their European rubber boom-era buildings, stopping to enjoy food and drinks at bars including but not limited to Restaurante Fitzcarraldo, Arandú Bar and Le Bateau Ivre (three times).
The city centre is a bit of a tourist hotspot (mostly Americans who fly in from Lima) and the only mildly irritating thing is that you can’t sit and enjoy a view of the river without a touch of harassment from locals and some pan-global hippy-types masquerading as tour guides or masseuses or tarot card readers.
One such local character was a man named Juan Maldonado. Juan knew everyone and everything about the Selva (Peruvian Amazon) region, and ultimately wanted to sell us a tour (“I’m retired now, but I’ll take you into deep into the forest and show you how to get all the benefits from frog poison…”) but he was fun company and not too bothered when we declined his offers. Though I am still curious about that frog poison – cures everything from insomnia to cancer, apparently. He takes it everyday and he’s 113, so go figure. I agreed to give him my Whatsapp number if he promised to send me some of his poetry, and I can confirm that he delivered.
We enjoyed a visit to the Ayapuya steamboat museum (it’s a museum on a real steamboat from the early 1900s) – something I initially dismissed as a Boy Thing but was actually great. We learnt about the terrible history of the rubber industry and how the Europeans very predictably exploited the locals before generally messing things up for everybody.
Iquitos was a very wealthy and international city with at least 25 rubber companies operating during the rubber boom (1870s-1910s), all sending back rubber to Europe and North America and mostly using slave labour to harvest it. There were very damning investigations into the abuse and trafficking of slaves by the Peruvian Amazon Company among others, but it was contested very aggressively and the bloke who conducted the investigation for the UK was eventually hanged.
Then in 1912, one British idiot – sorry, “explorer” – called Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber seeds back to Kew Gardens in London (why are rich 18th and 19th century men who went trampling around the world looting and causing chaos always described in historic accounts as explorers?). The museum also claims that that he was specifically paid by the Royal Botanic Gardens to do so (shocker!). As a result of his bad deeds, British companies were able to set up competing rubber plantations in colonies in southeast Asia and Africa, which were ultimately easier to access and cheaper to run – and so the whole rubber economy of Iquitos crashed almost overnight.
Like I said, a great museum, if not the lightest content. Luckily the various antiquities and historic accounts were illustrated with a series of mannikins that looked like they’d been plucked out of an early-90s grunge band and pickled, so that lightened the mood.
Another day we took a local bus out of the city to visit the Centro de Rescate Amazónico, an animal rescue centre specialising in manatee rehabilitation. I’d never seen manatees before, and they were just as weird and silly as I’d hoped. The babies spend a few weeks in special smaller pools, where they’re strengthened up with the right nutrients and veterinary care. Then, when they’re stronger they can be moved into the small lake on site, where they practice being grown-up manatees fishing and prancing about in their manatee way, sunbathing on their backs like sea dogs, until eventually the rescue team transfer them in groups back into the wild.
The centre also houses some sloths (rescued from being stolen and sold as pets, often with some trauma just like the poor wee creatures at Amazoonico), agoutis, macaws and other birds, and lots of different types of monkey. There’s also Fred, Queen and Mercury the arapaima, or paiche as they are known locally. These Amazonian fish grow to three metres long, can kill a man with their skull and are frankly terrifying. It was a really wholesome experience and well worth the trek out of town.
But the reason we’d come this far by bus, tuktuk and cargo ship, was to get out into the jungle proper and experience the Amazon close-up. For this, we booked a stay at the Libertad Lodge, around an hour outside of the city upriver. The lodge is situated on the Ucalyli river, an offshoot of the main Amazon, where tiny villages exist connected by canoe and little else. We chose the Libertad because it had great reviews and seemed like brilliant value for the amount of activities on offer. We were even assigned our own personal guide for the duration, with the ability to design our own itinerary depending on how active we wanted to be (very).
To get to the lodge required a long drive and another boat ride, all of which came included in the price of our stay. We were met in Iquitos by our guide for the weekend, a rosy-cheeked young man called Juan-Carlos (JC). Our driver was a slightly grumpy wide-boy whose car’s primary purpose was to pick up girls and had been through some serious modifications. We bombed it out of Iquitos, pausing briefly for the driver to chat up some ladies and buy a snack, JC all the while turning around to smile at us in his boy-scout get-up while I tried to keep my head straight and not throw up.
If Iquitos is hot, then the Selva surrounding it was stifling. Humidity was unbreathable levels, as you might imagine for the rainforest, but it came as a shock nonetheless. I was grateful for the boat ride that took us out of Nauta port once again and further and further into the wilderness.
In the rainy season, the river expands to three times the width, covering the village and allowing boats to ride all the way up to the wooden houses, which are on stilts. But this was the dry season, and so we had to trek a good 15 minutes inland by foot with all our bags. It was a sweaty affair.
The lodge was just the right level of rustic: we had our own cabin and shower, with a four-poster bed under an open roof that was mercifully secured with two layers of mosquito-proof netting. Electricity was provided with a generator between 6-7pm only, and any concept of a fan hadn’t made it this far into the jungle. But it was beautiful, and the sight of a comfortable bed was still an appreciated novelty, the two of us still in recovery after five days without one on the journey down to Iquitos.
We were introduced to JC’s associate, our boat driver Carlos. Carlos is a senior figure in his village which, as JC excitedly informed us, means he has three wives. He was a man of few words and many secrets; his fishing skills and jungle whispering left us both swooning and I trusted him with my life. But I’d imagined somehow that King Carlos lived in a big happy commune situation with his three wives and many children, everyone mucking in together and living a free love kind of life. But as the weekend went on, and I gradually got little snippets of conversation out of him, I learned that in fact his wives lived not only in separate houses, but separate villages, and that no, they were not friends.
JC, too, was not a huge conversationalist, but like Carlos he made up for that with a fierce knowledge of the jungle he’d grown up in. We learned that his father and grandfather were both shaman, a profession he figured he’d move into later on in life when he’d gained some more wisdom, but he knew a hell of a lot about medicinal plants as a result. One morning, he took us across the water to a small, semi-abandoned village to show us the plants grown in peoples’ kitchen gardens: lemongrass, ginger and ayahuasca were all stationed together for ease. You just had to make sure you didn’t mix them up when making a casual hot drink before bed. Then there was ishanga for diabetes, patinka for malaria, and even a plant that supposedly prevented cancer.
Jarringly, we walked past an abandoned wooden building that once housed a small western-style pharmacy/doctor’s surgery, funded by an American charity. But the medicines offered by the group were expensive and therefore unobtainable for the villagers anyway – most of whom were happy to continue using natural remedies as prescribed by their shamans – and so the organisation closed down and the Americans left the village.
Not dissimilarly, the Libertad village still receives visits from groups of American missionaries, who appear to set up camp and (reading between the lines) pressure villagers into joining their evangelical church group. They weren’t even the only western church group in the village of just 80 families: one morning during our stay we watched the villagers line up for a parade in celebration of the national day of Peru. Last to the party, scrambling with the air of the uninvited, came a group of people dressed in white with large crucifixes around their necks. “They’re from a church that makes them get up to pray at 3am every morning,” one of the guides told us. “We think they’re crazy.”
On our way back to the boat after our traditional medicine tour, we bumped into a very cheerful toothless man carrying a bucket of white fluid. He was delighted to see us and insisted we have a cup of his yucca juice before departing. The yucca juice tasted nice in all honesty, slightly sweet and refreshing with a hint of fermentation. After three days it would become alcoholic, making a kind of yucca fruit beer. It was only after we’d all taken a big slug that we learned the method of extraction for the juice: the women of the village chew on the yucca and spit out the produce into the big cup we’d just drunk from.
The rest of our days passed in a happy and excitable haze of sloth and monkey spotting, canoeing (difficult) and swimming in the river with pink and grey dolphins (“the piranhas don’t often bite,” JC told us, “just make sure you slap the mud a bit to avoid the catfish.”)
Suffering from a bout of madness or amnesia, Dave and I decided to eschew our comfortable four-poster bed on the second night of our stay in favour of feeding the mosquitos and camping out in the rainforest.
The evening began with some piranha fishing, worryingly close to where we’d just been swimming, and it’s important to tell you that I caught more than Dave (though neither of us presented the skills required to feed a village). Then the four of us headed down a quieter river path to find a suitable spot to shelter for the night. Carlos, ever silent, gutted our fish and made an impressive campfire with the air of a man most at home in the wilderness and away from his many wives.
After dinner, JC asked if we wanted to go for another ride out on the canoe before bed. As we pottered along the river, the darkness was so absolute I couldn’t see a hand in front of my face, until we emerged out from the overhanging trees and all the stars appeared. Carlos cut the engine (quite literally a garden strimmer stuck in the water to act as a motorised oar) and we floated along in companionable silence. Then JC broke the spell by telling us a harrowing story about the time he got lost in the forest overnight as a small child and saw the Chullachaki, a forest-dwelling goblin man with one hoof for a foot.
The Chullachaki is said to appear to his victims in the form of a person or an animal they know, as a way of tricking them further into the forest so they can’t find their way home. JC’s dad had sent him out on his own as a survival test and he had got lost until the following morning and cried all night in fear. I’m not sure which of these tales is more harrowing.
The only way you can tell it’s the Chullachaki when you see him is by his deformed feet, or singular hoof. “When you see him, it means you are really lost,” said JC. As I was wondering why he was telling us this ghost story before bedtime, I remembered with haunting clarity a moment earlier in the evening when JC had appeared from the trees by our camp and started laughing manically that “now we are really lost!” – which at the time I’d noted as weird, particularly since JC wasn’t usually one for humour or saying words unprompted.
Disturbed, we sat in silence for a few moments more until Carlos fired up the strimmer and we crashed into a series of floating logs, almost capsizing more than once and, between the threat of swimming with caiman in the dark and meeting evil rainforest goblins, generally fearing for our lives.
Earlier that morning, I’d asked JC more than once if we needed to bring anything with us for camping – bedding, for example? The answer each time was “no, don’t worry”. Just a toothbrush then, I suggested, though this too seemed to confuse him.
So when it came to setting up camp that night, I was in slight disbelief to learn that when JC said we had everything we needed, what he really meant one sheet of tarpaulin and a mosquito net. No tent, no pillows: literally a sheet of tarpaulin between us and the ground. Thank god for the mosquito net. It seemed to suit JC and Carlos just fine: the two of them were snoring before I’d worked out where to lay my head down in-between the small pointy rocks beneath us.
I wasn’t remotely scared until the moment we lay down to sleep. Suddenly every cracking twig, every ominous splash in the river below us had my brain firing. JC had been very blasé about the fact that black caiman – the big dangerous ones – liked to use this bank as a dating hangout, and now he was snoring soundly a few metres away on the unforgiving tarpaulin we all shared.
Safe to say neither Dave nor I got a lot of sleep. I spent a good proportion of the night wondering how much protection, if any, the mosquito net would provide between me and a hungry caiman. Could I wrestle a caiman, if it came to it? I’m sure Carlos could. By the time the birds were singing and the sun began to peek, I was ready to give up on being horizontal and get back to the lodge, asap. I’d endured one wild wee the night before, which was traumatic enough in the darkness, and I wasn’t about to attempt another in broad daylight in front of the three men, the alternative being a solo walk into the wilderness.
It took approximately thirty seconds to pack up camp, because let’s face it there wasn’t much of a camp, and the four of us pottered slowly back upstream on the boat, stopping for a while on route to throw some of last night’s leftovers to mama vieja, a majestic golden hawk, and watch dolphins springing for their breakfast. In that moment, I felt disgustingly unwashed, bedraggled and aching, but so very lucky to be where I was, in the company of my three quiet and unwashed nature-loving companions of varying outdoor talents.
Travel bits and tips from this week
Our very snazzy Airbnb in Iquitos had air-con and a washing machine, all for less than £17 a night.
In the jungle, we took an excellent three day, two night tour with Libertad Lodge.
A non-exhaustive list of all the places we ate at: Restaurante Fitzcarraldo, this pizza place, Le Bateau Ivre and El Sitio, an amazing little local place that just sold skewers of various meat and veggie treats. You order by the skewer and they bung them all under a huge grill (we had no fewer than nine and it cost about £19 with beers).
We drank at all the above places plus El Musmuqui, a fun bar serving cocktails with mystery ingredients from the jungle that they won’t explain to you; Arandú Bar; and Casa de Fierro, an iconic metal building (not great in the heat, tbh) on the main square that was allegedly designed by Gustave Eiffel and shipped across to Peru in pieces from Paris.
In town we visited the Ayapuya steamboat museum…
And we took the number 60 bus out of town to see manatees in rehab at the Centro de Rescate Amazónico.