Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (20 page)

I thought seeing as I’d had rather a lonely birthday I would book myself into the rowdiest hostel I could find as soon as I arrived in Arequipa, the sort frequented by anatomy-exposing Brits and Australians of the calibre I met on the Death Road. I thought we could all get drunk together and maybe a little bit stupid and I would feel young and rejuvenated and alive.

But on the way to the Wild Rover Arequipa (yes, the place in which the Irish lad soiled his mattress in a drunken stupor is a
chain
), I gave a taxi driver 100 soles, only for him to ditch me and speed off with my 90 soles change.

It’s my fault, I suppose, for breaking the traveller’s rule and handing him such a huge bill, but I was tired after eight hours on a bus and didn’t have anything smaller. So that was the equivalent of $40 down the drain — money I was going to use to pay for the hostel, buy drinks and act like a fool with pissed-up backpackers.

Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something.

I went to the bar anyway, waited about ten minutes for a drunk bartender in a leopard print coat and sunglasses to break away from the girl he was chatting up and begrudgingly serve me a bottle of water, then went to bed in the dorm, where I lay awake waiting for the pulsating throb of house and trance music to stop echoing through the corridors and into my ears.

Not to be deterred, the next day I took myself on a walking tour of beautiful Arequipa and signed myself up for the requisite trip to Colca Canyon, a two-day ‘moderate’ hike to the world’s second biggest canyon (and Peru’s third most-visited tourist destination). The brochure made it all look so lovely. It included an overnight stop in an oasis with a swimming pool, all my meals would be included and the tour company would pick me up at three the next day. Excellent.

‘That’s 3 a.m.,’ the young booking agent at the hostel informed me, printing out my voucher dot-by-agonising-dot on the planet’s oldest printer.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘3 a.m. They will collect you here.’

’3 a.m.? That’s not still a real time, is it?’ I stared at her in horror. I’ve not seen 3 a.m., I don’t think, since I was in Buenos Aires, probably because I’ve not really been drinking much, thanks to all these high-altitude pit stops. Funny what a bit of altitude’s done for me, come to think of it. Maybe I should move to a mountaintop permanently. My lungs would struggle but my liver would thrive.

Anyway, 3 a.m. rolled around and I rolled myself sleepily out of bed just as everyone else in the Wild Rover was rolling into theirs, whereupon I and roughly twelve other people were driven three hours into daylight in a bumpy van. Then, in a dusty village, in what appeared to be someone’s living room, we were fed a ‘buffet’ breakfast of the obligatory tour-sponsored stale bread, some sort of neon pink ham product and some delicious olives.

The olives in Peru are all delicious, I should say. You can’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere (where do they send it all!?), but the olives are first rate. In Arequipa I discovered an outstanding restaurant that serves the best olives I’ve ever had. Its main offering is a variety of gourmet crepes filled with yummy stuff (think juicy steak and mushroom, chicken and Roquefort, chicken curry with pineapple, etc), which are all exceptional, but the olives are worth the detour alone. It’s called Crepisimo. Look it up.

I like Arequipa, by the way. Apart from their thieving taxi drivers, it’s probably my favourite place so far in Peru. It’s dubbed the White City because, unlike the grubby London tube stop of the same name, Arequipa is full of pristinely maintained Spanish colonial architecture, built of sillar, a white stone which was quarried from the surrounding volcanoes. A short walk over the bridge towards a Western-style shopping mall provided humbling views of the towering El Misti volcano, sprinkled with a dusting of snow.

Arequipa seems spotlessly clean. There are some lovely churches and monasteries to idle around. The shops are modern, including an unsettlingly large array of optical stores, which most Bolivian and Peruvian cities seem to have an abundance of, I’ve noticed; are more people blind or partially sighted here than anywhere else? People seem to obey traffic lights, at any rate, a rarity in these parts and their crepes are magnificent. What’s not to love? It’s the most Westernised city I’ve found myself in for several months, which I’m not ashamed to say makes me deliriously happy.

What doesn’t make me happy, however, is thinking back to the tour I just took. So, where were we? Oh yes, the trip to Colca Canyon. After breakfast and paying an additional 70 soles each to enter the park, we were driven to see some condors at a lookout point. I’m quite sure the condors weren’t there, although our tour guide, having promised we’d see them, seemed to think we’d think him a great man if he pointed at distant dots in the sky, which were probably finches, and exclaimed, ‘Look, look! Condor!’

Then, off we set on foot down the canyon, along a winding path with even more terrifying vertical drops from it than the Death Road. It was slippery, too. Everyone’s feet were skidding on the dusty rocks, even in the sturdiest of hiking shoes. I fell over, as did the girl I was walking with, Charlotte. We bonded as we trekked (she was alone, too, as her boyfriend had to leave their three-month trip early because of severe altitude sickness in Bolivia), and both being British we had a good moan about everything. But rightly so, because our knees were in pain — a pain that steadily became more severe the more we walked downhill. It got to the point, after three more hours or so, where neither of us could walk ten metres without stumbling over in sheer agony and exhaustion.

Just to paint a clearer picture, Colca Canyon is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. It’s promoted as the world’s deepest canyon at 4160 metres, which you must drop and then ascend. It might sound like a moderate hike when coming from the mouth of a booking agent who wants your money, but in actual fact, when your quads are about to crack, it becomes clear that it’s not for the weak-of-leg or wimp. Personally, I found it infinitely more difficult than the Inca Trail, perhaps because I wasn’t warned or given any hiking poles.

I will say, though, that although brown and dry, streaked only occasionally with shrubbery or a waterfall — at least until you get to the lush, tropical bottom — Colca Canyon is definitely worth seeing. The perspective it offers to the tiny, insignificant human as the earth gives way to tumbling cliff face is one you know you’ll never forget when you’re standing at the top, listening to an idiot pointing to a finch and shouting, ‘Condor!’

Most of the time, however, you’re just looking at the ground, trying not to fall over the edge.

We quickly realised we were also expected to pay for all of our own drinks along the route. This might sound like a silly complaint to you, but these bottles of water we all found ourselves gasping for were
four
times the price of what they cost in shops, and neither Charlotte’s nor my own booking agent had told us water wasn’t included. On the Inca Trail, they boil water for you as you go, which is free and also helps prevent the trail becoming littered with thousands of plastic bottles.

In Colca Canyon, there are empty plastic bottles scattered everywhere, along with women in those ubiquitous voluminous skirts all trying their best to sell you overpriced beverages at various pre-arranged stops.

When it came to lunch, a stop in a surprisingly green and flowery Garden of Eden halfway down, we were fed a meal of typical Peruvian salted beef and rice and still not given a drink. Apparently, boiling a kettle was out of the question, even though there were hosepipes coiling and spitting their abundant natural water supply all over the place. There was also an overflowing bucket of ‘recyclable’ plastic bottles, no doubt waiting to be plodded back up the canyon on the back of a mule, but which, with a bit of planning, could easily be refilled on-site. It was actually depressing.

Once we finally reached the bottom of the canyon at roughly 5 p.m., weary, aching like never before and dehydrated, we were led to our ramshackle rooms in the equally lush, green Oasis resort, but again, offered no drinks. Nada. Dinner was cheap pasta with chopped tomatoes on top, during which it was explained that we’d have to leave again at 4 a.m. for the three-hour ascent back up to the top.

‘Do we have to get up even earlier for breakfast then?’ I asked.

‘No, there is no breakfast.’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘No breakfast until we reach the top of the canyon, then we will walk to the restaurant.’

‘No breakfast before a three-hour uphill climb?’ I was stunned.

‘You can take a mule, if you like. They are 60 soles.’

‘Can we not even have, like, a biscuit or something first?’

‘No, sorry. But you can take a mule up, if you like. They are 60 soles.’

‘It sounds like you want me to take a mule.’

‘Do you want a mule?’

‘Do we get coffee first, at least, before the three-hour uphill climb?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Then yes, I’ll need a fucking mule, won’t I!’

Well, Jesus. Honestly.

When we finally got to the top, my bare legs were all chaffed on the insides from rubbing on the mule’s stirrup straps. I hoped they might surprise us with a buffet breakfast like no other, a veritable banquet of eggs a thousand ways, coffee of the finest Peruvian bean and semi-naked supermodels in diamante g-strings pouring fruit juice from golden flasks. I mean, you’d expect that, right? But what did we get?

That’s right, more stale bread rolls. Only one each, mind you. When we’d devoured them and asked for more, the grumpy server in the restaurant, bedecked in a grotty, stained jumper, said she didn’t have any. Oh, and could we please stop asking for coffee sachets too, because we’d used our allocated lot.

I should say that even my mule had a bit of trouble getting up that canyon, and he had four legs. I don’t know how I would have done it on two, never mind with no caffeine inside me. Had there been no mule, I’d probably still be sitting there, halfway up, motioning people past me with a pathetic wave until someone three weeks later thought to drop a winch from a helicopter. I can barely walk out of a hostel in the morning without a coffee, and they expected me to scrape my way out of a canyon? We were given coffee on the Inca Trail — why not here? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life.

I guess the moral of this story is, do a bit of reading before you sign yourself up for something silly, which is something I never seem to do enough of before these trips. It’s my fault for underestimating the steepness of the canyon, of course, and for thinking myself somewhat of an experienced hiker after conquering the Inca Trail (ahem). But it’s also the tour company’s fault for not telling us to bring extra supplies, or even providing hiking poles, which would have taken some of the pressure off our knees and stopped us skidding next to perilous cliff edges. Robbing us every hour for drinks that we’d perish if we didn’t buy didn’t help either.

When I got back to the Wild Rover, I dragged my aching limbs round the corner to Crepisimo and, over a fine glass of hard-earned Malbec and some more olives, I Googled the hell out of my next stop-but-one, Iquitos. I was determined to do even
more
research into my upcoming jungle adventures with ayahuasca.

I came across a blog on the dangers of dodgy plant dealers and, as a result, exchanged a few emails with a lovely British expat called Andy, who regularly takes tourists to see a trusted shaman called Don Lucho. I’m getting the feeling I’ve met my guides for this impending spiritual journey, but, as you can imagine, I’m still reading carefully on the subject. After what just went down, the last thing I need is to under-prepare and end up stranded in the Amazon, being eaten alive, while losing my mind to the ‘spirit of the vine’.

Not even a mule could help me out of that one.

28/11

From the sky, the Amazon rainforest is an incomprehensible mass of green. You can’t imagine the sheer size or scale of it until you see it from the window of a plane. I flew into Iquitos after two quite low-key and short days in Lima, and shadows of clouds cast patterns over patches of the formidable forest like darker, deeper sections of a mysterious sea. It was impossible not to wonder at all the life down there, what’s been discovered and what’s still waiting to be found … and what it had in store for me.

My former brush with the jungle in Ecuador gave me hairy, ceiling-dwelling tarantulas, pink dolphins and a surprise snog in a canoe, but this time I’m getting up close and very personal with the mind and spirit-altering plant medicine, ayahuasca. I’m not going to lie to you, I was pretty nervous on the way here. As soon as I took my first breath of jungle humidity, however, filling my lungs to capacity for the first time in what felt like forever, I had the strangest feeling that only good things would come from this adventure. And it
is
an adventure, isn’t it, heading into the Amazon rainforest to drink the sap of trees with people you’ve never met before in your life? I’ve still not told my mum.

The Kapitari Centre, my spiritual station for the week, is located a few kilometres outside of Iquitos on the opposite side of the Nanay River. It was founded in 1980 by the shaman Don Lucho. Now in his sixties (although he doesn’t look a day over forty-five), this sweet, smiley man spends his days training local communities and farmers in land management techniques, thus preventing further deforestation in the area and creating new opportunities for permaculture around Iquitos. By night he is a full-on demon-banishing, icaro-chanting, healing shaman, of course, who I’ve since discovered has learned every ounce of valuable information on permaculture he knows by drinking ayahuasca and taking the advice of various plant spirits summoned via his shamanic ways.

No shit. This is serious business.

I met Andy, my email guru, in the popular Iquitos traveller’s haunt, Karma Cafe. I’ve got to say, while my falafel sandwich was exceptional, it wasn’t very karmic when I was in there, really. The guy behind the bar was shit-faced, pouring himself large glasses of wine and serving all the hippies their alcohol-free smoothies with the kind of violent swagger that could dent even the most perfectly aligned aura.

Anyway, with rucksacks containing insect repellant, sunscreen, swimwear and not much else, Andy and I headed to Iquitos’s little port (in a market, by the river) on bouncy, loud
motocarros
. Here we hopped on a boat and headed out into the thick and sweaty green with a gaggle of soul-searchers, all of us hoping for the kind of head-spinning spiritual enlightenment that would turn our lives around.

I’m currently typing from a netted-in dining room at the Kapitari Centre, doing my best to prevent even more vicious sand flies from feasting on my flesh. I’m wearing a feathered earring, which I bought from a teenage vendor in Iquitos because it felt quite appropriate. I drew the line at fisherman pants and put some deodorant on, but even so, in spite of all this, three days in I’m finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything other than the outrageous itchiness of my skin. Every time I step outside to become one with nature, nature attacks me and tries to eat me.

Luckily there are no tarantulas. We’re not as deep into the jungle as I was before and the only wildlife I’ve seen so far are the numerous cats and kittens who live at Kapitari, and four squawking, Spanish-talking green parrots. These parrots are free to fly around the entire jungle, but choose to spend their days perched in the rafters, shitting on the kitchen cooker or diving at people’s heads. They have an eerie habit of mimicking the laughter of the resident children when you walk past, or screeching ‘Ola!’ at full volume in your ear when they land next to you, eyeing up your pineapple chunks.

Kapitari is located five minutes by boat up the river and then a forty-five minute hot and sweaty stagger through lashings of mud (wellies are a must for this). My group and I arrived at roughly midday three days ago in dire need of a shower, only to learn we wouldn’t get one for six days. The only water available for washing in at Kapitari is a lake the colour of miso soup … oh, and the nightly ‘flower bath’ behind a wooden screen, which is an essential part of each ayahuasca ceremony, intended to cleanse your body and soul beforehand. You can’t use soap in this bath, though, because soap would make the water impure.

We each have our own tiny, netted cabins to sleep in, complete with toilets that have no seats, which is great, but aside from that it’s basic at best. There are tons of these retreats around Iquitos but, as I’ve mentioned before, you have to be extremely careful where you choose to undertake these experiments with ayahuasca in South America, as sometimes, the more expensive, more luxurious options are operated by Westerners with no idea how to hold a proper ceremony.

Or worse. Just a few days before our visit, an eighteen-year-old traveller was found dead and buried in the jungle by a dodgy ‘shaman’ after an ayahuasca session that went wrong. Ayahuasca itself is not dangerous. There are no known long-term negative effects whatsoever. You don’t even get a comedown or a hangover the next day … in fact, you feel reborn. But if you’re allowed to wander off into the anaconda-infested Amazon rainforest tripping on DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a natural component in the brew) you’re probably not at the right retreat.

Go with a reputable shaman, like Don Lucho, who not only knows what he’s doing with ayahuasca but practises animism — nature-worship and the belief that every living thing has a spirit and soul. I learned a bit about this last year in Bali, where they worship the good spirits as well as the bad to keep everything in harmony, but I’m learning even more in South America. There was a time when much of the world practised animism, but the introduction of structured religions, the concept and personification of a God and the belief that He blessed humans as superiors in the natural world, changed things in Western civilisations, where the natural environment has become secondary to manmade creation. This is probably why so many people are miserable and lost, when you think about it. Our roots are no longer planted in Mother Earth. We look for satisfaction in all the wrong places.

Don Lucho undertook his first plant diet at age twelve. He knows the forest and its fruits like the back of his weathered hand and spends all of the money earned from tourists on his permaculture projects (I paid roughly $500 for this experience). If someone charges next to nothing for an ayahuasca retreat, or similarly way too much, take their promises with a pinch of salt and look elsewhere.

Speaking of salt, we’re all on a strict jungle diet while we’re here, which is also known as the ‘ayahuasca diet’. Lots of cafes in Iquitos offer the same thing and it’s basically the most boring diet you can imagine. No salt, sugar, oil, spicy food or sex is allowed. Abstaining from sex is an important part of any ayahuasca retreat because, during the medicinal process of ayahuasca’s healing, you’re becoming at one with yourself. This is essential, of course, if you’re to truly ever let anyone else inside.

I’ve also been drinking a special concoction in the mornings, consisting of boiled plant juices, which was recommended to me by Jeannie, an Australian and our resident healer. This juice is meant to help open me up to the plant spirits, because in my very first ayahuasca session, I got absolutely nothing from it.
Nothing
. That’s right. After all my weeks of reading and psyching myself up for one of the most intense experiences of my life, I had no experience at all.

‘It doesn’t always affect you at first. It depends on whether she thinks you’re ready,’ Andy told me when I expressed my disappointment at the next day’s essential group meeting. They always call ayahuasca ‘she’. The ‘spirit of the vine’ is most definitely female, according to those who’ve seen and heard her.

I was even more disappointed when Gary, an ex-army lad from Britain who’s here with his Ukrainian girlfriend, spoke at length on his new understanding of the meaning of life, thanks to the visitation of some remarkably forthcoming aliens. Aliens appear to lots of people during ayahuasca ceremonies, in various forms. Gary seemed totally blown away by what he’d seen.

‘I was shown that we’re all just energy in human cases, living out these lives, learning our lessons until it’s time to go home. But this isn’t it. This isn’t all there is,’ he said assuredly. ‘Where we come from and where we’ll all go when our human time is up is an infinite space. It exists and it doesn’t. But here, where time matters, all we have to do is love each other. She told me. She
showed
me!’

I listened to him go on with my mouth open. At one point, he was almost in tears. I felt so cheated in comparison. I’d been trying so hard. I was even wearing a feathered earring. Yet, while Gary had drifted away from earth with light-beings, I’d just lain there for four hours on my bed-bug-riddled mattress, listening to Don Lucho’s chanting, thinking it was the most boring sleepover I’d ever attended. I did vomit in my bucket, though, which made me feel as though I’d participated, at least.

‘If you purged, it means the ayahuasca was working on you, even if you didn’t get any visions,’ Andy told me, sitting crosslegged on the floor of the
maloca
— the circular room on stilts in which all ceremonies are conducted at Kapitari. He was wearing an ayahuasca fan shirt featuring crisscrossing vines, which read, ‘Drink a tree. Hug a bucket.’

I already knew from my books that ayahuasca works in mysterious ways and every person at every session, which always takes place in total darkness, gets given a bucket in which to expel their demons when the need arises. The cynic in me still says that in reality I’m downing poisonous tree sap so naturally my body will kick it out, but purging is considered by many shamans to represent the dramatic release of pent-up emotions and negative energy, which tends to build up over your lifetime if left unaddressed.

I felt the sacred medicine swirling around my stomach pretty much straight after I drank it. Ayahuasca, I should tell you, is one of the most hideous things you will ever put in your mouth. It’s a rich, thick, brownish-orange substance that tastes like … God, I can’t even describe it. Even thinking about it makes me want to puke again. I guess it’s a bit smoky and at first I thought I detected a hint of cinnamon and maybe chocolate, but once it’s down it’s so potent, bitter and vulgar as it burns the back of your throat that your body wants it out, instantly. Some people shit themselves, another form of purging and nothing to be ashamed of.

When you take ayahuasca, you have to kneel before the shaman, who blows some sacred tobacco, known as
mapacho
, over a little bowl of the brew before handing it to you. You down the mixture like a shot, and then try not to hurl on yourself as you walk back to your mattress. You can’t chase it with water because it’s important not to have anything else in your stomach as the spirit gets to work.

While I said I experienced nothing that first night, I did get a dizzy feeling akin to being strapped onto one of those fairground gravity wheels … which eventually caused me to throw the ayahuasca up, roughly half an hour in. Before my eyes shot open I heard my inner-voice chanting,
faster, faster, faster,
which appeared to be a response to both the spinning sensation and the fluttering sound of Don Lucho’s
chapada
, a bunch of leaves, basically, which to me, sounded like a flock of birds taking flight.

After
that
I lay there waiting for aliens to land, until the potion wore off without consequence.

Well, actually, I did find myself crying at one point. It was over something stupid, like being horrible to an ex-boyfriend over four years ago.

‘You were crying?’ Jeannie said. ‘Well, you were releasing your emotions then. And you heard your inner voice, your Higher Self! The ayahuasca was definitely working! You purged, too. How can you say you didn’t experience anything?’

‘I didn’t see heaven or hell! Or aliens,’ I replied.

‘Then that’s not what you need to see. She’ll only show you what you need to know.’

‘I need to see aliens!’ I wailed at the whole room. Well. I’ve failed at this alien business in both Capilla del Monte and Nazca now, and quite frankly I’m starting to doubt they exist, which is sad.

‘She’s got other things in store for you,’ Jeannie said then, smiling knowingly. And I had to believe her because, since we arrived, this fascinating lady from Sydney, who’s been seeing spirits since the age of five, has been startlingly accurate in all sorts of psychic matters. I’ll have to tell you more of her extraordinary story later.

I also saw my own aura by torchlight when I staggered back to my cabin after that first session. Waves of energy surrounded me as I did normal things, like brush my teeth and crouch over my toilet with no seat. I seized the opportunity to act out a scene from
The Matrix
in the middle of the floor. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I amused myself for at least an hour, crouching and kicking in slow motion, making whooshing sounds like Trinity dodging killer laser beams.

I put it down to the lingering effects of the DMT but, strangely, no one else saw anything like that, that night. That’s the weirdest thing about all of this, I think. Normally, with any other drug, people tend to experience more or less the same things, but not with ayahuasca. So yes … while I said I had no experience that first time, I
did
have an experience, I suppose. It just wasn’t like anyone else’s.

After a long day in the jungle with not much to do except read, swim in the lake and get eaten by more sand flies, I entered the
maloca
for my second ceremony, expecting much of the same last night. But perhaps something in the plant juice Jeannie had me drink really did open me up because, shortly after I downed the brew, I had a flurry of thoughts and flashbacks to my childhood, stuff I haven’t thought about in years.