Jungle Conversations
Campervan Dispatches is a weekly blog about campervan travel, parenting on the road, and family dynamics when mom, dad, two daughters, and an old blind dog travel across South America for 10 months. The concept of the blog is to entertain and inspire readers to go out and get a campervan and fill it with your family!
We had a conversation in the jungle. Alberto is a curandero who criticizes curanderos for calling themselves curanderos. Plants heal people, not the medicine man, he says. He’s the son of Huachiperi father and a Matsiguenca mother, sister cultures nestled in the Peruvian Amazon. Alberto is famous in the selva and known as a medicine man who elucidates on the Amazonian cosmovision for audiences all over the world. We found a shirtless Alberto surrounded by family and neighbors, engaged in the late afternoon tasks of crafting and babysitting.
We reached his community of Huacaria, located near the town of Pilcopata, after a bumpy journey over the Andes, down through a steep cloud forest, and finally into the Amazon proper. To move so quickly from staggering verticalness of the Andes to the unfathomable horizontalness of the jungle is yet another lesson in culture and geography and a first-hand experience with the way settings shape people.
In the village, Elisa and Lucia made quick friends who were excited to engage them in tree climbing, collecting fruit, and the bartering of toys. One of these friends, a young girl named Ana no more than seven years old, displayed how to correctly climb a tree, a talent likely gleaned from the monkeys themselves. She swung deftly from one branch to another, faster than any average human would. Her simple amusement in the day’s routine impressed us to the point of being exceptional. This is what makes cultural immersion so educational. Daily occurrences are chalked up to extraordinary. The same thing would happen if Ana visited a community in my home state of Utah. The movie theaters, enormous televisions, rock and roll: though standard practice for any American, these things would overwhelm her mind. In this light, the chasm of mutual understanding seems intractable.
We had not planned driving back into the Amazon; Colombia was the last time we were there, but the repetitiousness of the sierra began to wear on all of us, with the cold nights, searing sun, and dry air: all in all, a waterless straightjacket. Though conducive to avoiding showers, the high altitude climate batters the skin, eats at the scalp, and is hard on the eyes. Elisa had turned the inside of her nose into a bloodbath from the relentless picking, scratching, and scraping of nostril scabs that never seem to heal. After only a few hours in the jungle, her nose was back to normal, a rejuvenation of the body, quick to absorb the moisture. And then the non-stop sweating begins, and the bugs — hungry for fresh blood — remind you that the body is once again hydrated.
Sweaty Westerners come for more than the impressive heat. They come for the curanderos, men like Alberto, and their powerful plants, especially ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic concoction made from a jungle vine. The plant’s story goes back thousands of years, we know thanks to depictions of its use painted on pottery and carved into statues. It is believed to allow shamans to travel through time in either direction, as well as across physical spaces. To the shaman, ayahuasca is a metaphysical portal to unlimited quantities of knowledge and realization.
Anything so potent is always at risk to be exploited, especially by a society already deeply afflicted with insecurities, addiction, and neurosis. Alberto tells us the medicine is being prostituted by these dizque curanderos all over the Amazon. The line between medicine and drug is fuzzy, and the advent of Internet and fast money has turned the plant into more a commodity than a medicine. They are coming with their problems, their emptiness, their melancholy, and hoping the potion will cure them, or at least upset a vicious cycle of emotions.
Ironically, the sought-after hallucinations are a far cry from how curanderos, their families, and their communities were persecuted by European and US missionaries for centuries. The zealous crusaders were, and in many cases are, hell bent on converting the Amazon’s poor savages and selling them on their judeo-christian interpretation of salvation. Many have failed, realizing that jungle people are just as immoral and irascible as any other society, no matter the weekly sermon. In the end, it is the jungle that converts the missionary, tethered like prisoners who have lost their minds to a forest their brand of righteousness could barely penetrate. Alberto’s village Huacaria is located somewhere between the towns of Patria and Salvación (fatherland and salvation), each name a symbol of the efforts to shear the Amazon tribes of their identity.
Tourism is the new religion. The village already has a series of eco-cabañas, a community-tourism protocol, and a craft center where the latest styles in forest seeds, feathers, and monkey teeth can be appreciated and purchased. My family, atypical in our form of arrival, manners of communication, and desire to look but not touch, was not contemplated by the community. Although we drive a bus, we are not by the busload. The sporadic family in a campervan did not so much get the attention of Nancy, the Huacaria woman assigned to receiving visitors. Still, we bought necklaces and bathed in the nearby river, a refreshing departure from the oppressive heat.
Where the Incans failed to explore deep into the jungle they called Amaru-Mayu, the Great Serpent-Mother of Men, the denizens of Cusco are succeeding with backpackers, birders, and eco-tourists looking for jungle adventures. These tourist trails are rapidly expanding. It’s no longer just Machu Picchu on the traveler’s retinue.
The buses, the trains, the tours led by group leaders with local guides are where you find the “real” tourists, the drivers of the local economy and a much-deserved largesse for a land and people continuously plundered 500+ years. I can’t blame the operators or the communities for converting to this new religion or for the unintended damage it causes. And honestly, I can’t blame any individual tourist either. They too are just travelers, each motivated by their curiosity and desire to see stunning landscapes, interact with unbelievable ruins, and in the case of Huacaria, immerse themselves in culture. They are two sides of the same coin.
It has been twenty years since either my wife or I visited Peru. In the time since, Cusco has grown enormously, has improved in many ways, and it’s offering of services, food, and entertainment has swollen to astounding levels of sophistication. There is no doubt that Machu Picchu’s popularity has irrevocably changed the Andean kingdom. The Inca-trail is booked out a year in advance. Tourists rush to buy tickets for certain entry times, which if missed invalidate the ticket. You have to pay extra just to hike to the top of Huayna Picchu for a bird’s eye view of the site. There is crowding and jostling. Lines. It’s all insanely ridiculous, and also the outcome of being over-saturated with group tourism, adventure tourism, backpackers, or whatever you want to call the lot of us.
My daughters are not old enough to know their parents decided against taking them to Machu Picchu. While visiting the Sacred Valley, Elisa asked me why we call these open-air structures of stones and blocks, terraces, and stairs “ruins”. I half joked saying it is because they are ruined by tour groups. Still, Elisa and Lucia may be back, and it may be worse. But I figure one day, if our girls decide to take the ayahuasca tour, they can go back in time to Cusco, when a visitor was more an exception than the rule, and visit the once majestic city on a mountain from the eye of the condor.
