by guest author Skip Kaltenheuser

A speedboat departs the Iquitos slums, which hover over the water on stilts and rafts to accommodate mercurial high-water marks that vary 15 meters with the Andes snowmelt. Devouring Peru's Amazon for several hours, the boat slows as it enters the tributary Yanayacu that snakes through the jungle like an anaconda.

The tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the Earth flows sombre under an overcast sky.


Joseph Conrad would have gone for it. Villages disappear, but after every few bends in the river, I can see Indian fishermen netting or gigging catfish, from armoured ones that can "walk" on dry land, to giants that can swallow a small pig. My destination, Loving Light Amazon Lodge, keeps a shaman on retainer. I seek his vision.

An endless palette of greens shifts in light filtering through cloud patterns and treetops. With 11 times the water volume of the Mississippi, the river system moistens the strongest lungs of the earth. As ill-advised development schemes narrow species diversity, jungle shamans are also endangered. These medicine men and spiritual leaders carry rain-forest knowledge accumulated by countless generations. Most villages are now without a leader. Remaining shamans are elderly, and do not have apprentices. As they die, libraries burn. This blows an ill wind for modern medicine, which acquires many of its clinically useful prescription drugs from the rain forest and the realm of folk medicine.

Of 80,000 Amazon plant species, only a fraction have been thoroughly analyzed.

One shaman hanging tough is Marcelino Nolorbe Talexio. Third generation and in his mid-30s, with hopes for his son to join the mystic guild, he looks like an Indian James Mason. Talexio's house specialty is Ayahuasca, the Inca "vine of the dead, vine of the soul." Boiling down a species of Banisteriopsis vine and a half-dozen other plants, he produces a potent mix of hallucinogenic alkaloids, used for millennia to enter sacred supernatural worlds for worship, healing and insight.

In the meantime, my fellow travelers and I spend several days gathering our jungle rhythms. We occupy the day with plant lectures, drinking water from one vine, climbing another, and avoiding one caustic enough to burn skin. Traveling the river and adjoining lakes, we take in the local village life that revolves around the river. Children in a one-room schoolhouse sing for us, then play soccer in a jungle clearing. A woman we visit downriver climbs down the high riverbank with several children. They carry parasols and wear pained looks. She lost a child the week before, another is down with fever. A simple gift of ibuprofen is gratefully accepted. The small mounds in a family graveyard, marked by tall yellow and scarlet plants, betray the Amazon's sadness -- high mortality for children.

At night, we hunt tree tarantulas. Is it the brown or the black that really nail you? Whichever, it's the opposite for scorpions. Or we paddle in suspenseful search of caimans, alligator-like reptiles whose glowing eyes don't betray their actual size. Our boat guide's hands move with startling speed, tossing small ones into the boat that unnerve those wearing sandals. Small, colourful frogs land in our arms, one leap ahead of the repeated query, "Is this a poison dart frog?"

Fishing for the legendary peacock bass requires special tackle -- one quickly takes my lure like an hors d'oeuvre and keeps going. But piranha are a no-brainer -- eat 'em before they eat you, that's my motto. Actually, you can swim and bathe in the river as long as you're not bleeding. The tough part is retrieving the hook from the razor teeth of a decent-sized piranha. The best implement I've found is an Indian carving of a phallic symbol, although hook removal sends a shiver.

And best not to get caught in a downpour while fishing. Sheets of rain pound our long dugout canoe as lightning slices the gray horizon, thunderclapping applause and layering dread on the faces of the young Indian couple guiding me. We bail wildly until comically pitching our metal pots to the far end of the canoe, as if lightning is so choosy. No jumping to land, either -- the thick reeds on this river section hide vipers and, the speedboat long gone for supplies and the shaman who knows where, I chance lightning in preference to the bushmaster and his cousins.

The night of the vision quest finally arrives. The house band -- singing guitarist, a maraca shaker and a bongo player -- warm up Peruvian blues of unrequited love as we light lanterns and ponder a dinner spiced with a side dish of yellow seed pod sauce known as "monkey-dick." Offered by the chef with a sly look, its memory alone makes my face sweat.

Read the next page for the Ayahuasca Ceremony.