Author: Paul

Previously: Part 4, in which we journey into the jungle and I am afraid of water.

So, I feel like it would be fair to say up front that there’s an awful lot about the ceremonies I don’t remember.

I’ll wait in case anyone wants to storm off at this point.

Okay.

It’s not that I blacked out or anything, but what comes to you in those few hours is really an overload of… information? Images? Emotions? Yes. All of those. I took a notebook with me to try and write while I was in Peru, but by the time I was there my emotional state was so bad and then the experiences themselves so draining that I never wrote anything. And like a really powerful dream the further you get from it, the less you can recall most of the surrounding detail, and just the big images stick out. It becomes, like everything, a memory of a memory.

More importantly, I’m not entirely sure how to describe a good portion of what happened. I’m actually just sort of writing as I go and hoping by the time I get there I’ll be able to get something intelligible out. The funny aspect of how I’ve been handling trying to describe all of this is really kind of immersing myself in every bit of it that I’m able, to try and recreate as much of that mindset as I can. On my computer screen as I write I have Sarah’s posts that she had written shortly after the trip, along with an excellent piece written by a friend we made while in Peru (who was also there for the first time) and my fairly voluminous Flickr set from the trip. As I write I stop to reread a lot of what they wrote as well as re-researching a lot of things, all in an effort to feel connected to the whole affair rather than just describing it dispassionately from a distance. If only because I don’t think that kind of ‘view from above’ would help me convey it in any way. My point is, wish me luck.

As I said, the ceremony building (“building” describing a structure that seems too large to actually apply, but “hut” being similarly too small-sounding) was a large screened-in circular affair with a conical roof. Inside there was no central support pillar, instead the thatch roof was held up by criss-crossing beams. During the day, Mayan-style hammocks hung from the main horizontal beams but for the ceremonies these were wrapped up out of the way. The bathrooms (we made sure to note) were hidden behind a half wall in the back. Most of the rest of the floor was taken up with with sleeping mats, each of which came with a pillow, a blanket, a metal cup of water, a hospital pan and a roll of toilet paper. Around the outer ring of the room were fifteen or so lounge chairs, in the middle of which were three large office chairs and a small rug. On the rug was an enormous collection of various religious idols, Buddhas, crystals, marble spheres, a Lucky Cat or two and even a small statue of Yoda.

I know, and I’ll explain.

Part of what Hamilton is trying to teach at Blue Morpho is what he calls “Universal Philosophy.”

“It states that each human being IS the infinite universe, the one universe and each individual universe is the same, whole. In universality we are the same. You already know everything. You are already whole. You are already enlightened. You just have not thought it or experienced it yet.”
– Hamilton Souther

He makes himself available at times during the day to talk about his beliefs and some of the return visitors seem to follow these talks closely. But while in many ways it’s central to how he leads the ceremonies, it’s not an aspect he tries to push on visitors. As such, I’m not really going to get into it here since it wasn’t my focus. However, one aspect of the philosophy is the idea that all religions and cultural ideas are valid that are based on Love, and you can worship or focus on any belief that works for you, because in the end they’re all the same, hence the collection sitting on the rug.

The lounge chairs were meant for return visitors and the mats for newbies, since ayahuasca has such a strong effect they feel it’s safer if the first-timers are already on the ground, so we chose our spots. Slowly the rest of the group trickled in and the same nervous energy that seemed to infuse everything so far began to build a little higher. We’d already learned what the extra items were for… The blanket for the sudden extremes in temperature we might feel during the ceremony. The metal cup with a small amount of water was there to rinse out your mouth, if needed, but not to drink. The round hospital pan and the toilet paper were there for more or less the same reason: an inevitable part of the process called the “purge” which is exactly what it sounds like. How it decides to vacate your body depends on the individual, and some will be able to calmly be assisted to the bathrooms, while others might have a more misplaced faith in the efficacy of their digestive systems. Around us would be several native helpers with dim red lights in their hands, ready to assist anyone’s plaintive cry, “Baño… Baño, por favor…”

Through the screens I could see dusk was settling outside. Finally, Hamilton entered, followed by the shaman who had trained him, an older, smaller Quechua Indian called Don Alberto. For every bit of California charm that Hamilton exuded, it was surpassed by his mentor’s aura of vitality and wisdom. You knew he knew things, things you could never understand, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. They sat in the two largest chairs on either side of the small rug and pulled out two large bottles containing a viscous brown sludge, the ayahuasca, and set them upon the floor. Hamilton spoke briefly about the ceremony as the light outside continued to dim.

He and Don Alberto lit their mapachos, cigarettes made from an extremely potent South American tobacco, and began blowing the smoke over themselves as a means of cleansing before doing the same with both bottles. Mixed in with the smoke were the first stirrings of the icaros, the medicine songs sung by the shamans in order to call forth the plant spirits, to clear the room of dark energy and to bring on the mareación, the actual visionary journey we were all there for. The icaros at this point were not much more than a soft, whispery whistle, blown into the bottle of ayahuasca, and in the expectant silence of the room it was a compelling and soothing sound. Each shaman had a small tin cup he filled with the thick liquid and began the same process of blowing tobacco smoke and whistling into the cup before eventually drinking. Hamilton joked that Don Alberto had taken a “jungle dose,” a nearly full cup.

One by one, the process was repeated as each person in the outer ring of seats came and sat in front of one of the shamans to receive their dose. The maestro, a word they were using interchangeably with shaman, would pour an amount either requested by or which they felt sufficient for the person, blow mapacho smoke into the cup and whistle a soft icaros intended for that individual. The woman from the bus with the friendly face was one of the first to drink and as she received the cup she held it aloft and toasted, “Salut!” All of us responded.

Watching was like sitting in a roller coaster just as it leaves the station, and as each person toasted “Salut!” and drank you saw their car latch onto the chain taking them up the first big drop. Eventually, everyone on the outer ring was done and it was time for the first-timers on the mats to begin. Because of where I was sitting, that meant me. I went up and knelt in front of Hamilton as he poured about a quarter of the way up the tin cup, the amount he recommended for those who’d never tried it before. He blew the smoke and whistled and I closed my eyes and tried to sink myself into the moment, which was pretty impossible given the amount of expectation I felt. I accepted the cup and held it momentarily, looking down into the deep brown liquid, the acrid smell hitting my nostrils for the first time. Drink it or you never will, you idiot! I toasted the room and downed the cup, and a taste somewhere between bitter chocolate, dirt and battery acid went speeding down my throat.

I went and sat back down on my mat. My car had latched onto the chain and I waited for the floor to drop out from under me.

Next: I experience something amazing and have a literal dark night of the soul in the bathroom.

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.