The Eduardo VI dropped us at the pier in Lagunas, the town that serves as the entry point for the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria. Here we organized a canoe and two guides and embarked for a four-day canoeing/camping trip into the jungle. During the days, we paddled. Javier and María, our guide and cook, talked over our heads in heavily accented jungle Spanish – a disjointed melody with stops and uplifted notes in an exotic patois. Their voices stayed in my head like a song, working, knocking around until the tune was familiar, pleasant, and I could almost sing along. In moments, our paddles struck the water in perfect unison, propelling us through the quiet, dark water, between narrow river banks overhung with dense greenery. Papagayos (macaws) and parrots exploded from the canopy, feathered fireworks of red, green, blue, yellow. Small yellow butterflies landed on Jesus’ bare back, tasting his sweat. Our guides’ sharp eyes picked out monkeys in the trees and spotted the markings of crocodiles and turtles on the sandy banks. The first day, it rained – poured. I sat in the canoe and tilted my head up, drinking the warm rain, letting it drench me, feeling wild and real and alive. At night, we searched for caimans and hunted the fish that jumped in the shallows, spearing them with a three-pronged lance. We slept on spongy palm branches under tarps and mosquito nets. After dark, we went to the bathroom in pairs, checking the ground and branches carefully for spiders and snakes before squatting. I fell asleep every night listening to the whooping of the frogs and counting the flashes of the lightning bugs flickering through the dark trees. This is the Amazon, the real deal: there are trees that walk, and other trees that kill, clinging with their roots to a healthy trunk like a giant squid wraps its tentacles around a ship, squeezing, strangling, subsuming.

There’s a potent magic in the jungle. Primitive, elemental, it stirs something deep in our bodies, something we already know but have forgotten the words for. Jesus and I returned to Lagunas enchanted. Time passed differently. I caught myself drifting, waking after minutes, hours; four more days slipped through our fingers. We spent hours at “the beach”, and more hours in the town’s only bar, drinking cold beer and watching the heat shimmer on the packed dirt of the main street. There was lots of walking barefoot and playing volleyball in the street with the same group of kids, every afternoon at four. There was nothing to do and so much time to do it in, but no one ever seemed bored. Different to the culture of the States: Do MORE in LESS time – IMMEDIATELY!! Life is simple: simple foods, rice, eggs, fish, bananas, and yucca, simple homes with dirt floors that still need to be swept, hammocks instead of beds. And yet, in the month I spent in the jungle, I saw more people laughing, more smiling and joking, more families at ease: more enjoyment.

I took a lot of pictures. The town of Lagunas is incredibly photogenic, the grass and trees are tall and bright green-yellow against the blue and green houses and the dirt streets that look golden in the baking midday sun. A girl moves through the grass with a bucket of water on her head, a toddler walking at her side. Women use machetes to chop at the grass in front of their houses. Half-naked boys stand on the gunwales of their canoes, leaf-shaped paddles in hand. A fisherman hauls his nets across the river, shouting and stamping his feet to scare off the pink river dolphins that circle his catch. The realization that came to me was simple, but powerful. These images, these faces and scenes in front of me are real. Not from the pages of magazines, romantic, exotic, staged, or contrived. This is life. These people don’t know that they’re beautiful, that what they’re doing is special or photogenic. It’s just life. It’s just the jungle.

Just.

15 July – 6 August

On the Jeisawell.
I rock in my hammock on the second deck next to Jesus, a tall, bearded hippie from the Canary Islands. We met in Pantoja, the only two gringos crazy enough to attempt this trip. We talked as we waited for the launch to depart, about traveling, about dreams. I mentioned Antarctica. Jesus raised his eyebrows, then grinned. “I don’t know you yet, but I think I’m going to like you.” Outside, the world is divided into three horizontal layers: brown water, green trees, blue sky. This, no more, and the air in between so thick it sticks in my lungs and between my teeth. Except for the diesel roar of the engine, the world is smooth, soft, and beautiful. And then the boat stops. The square prow slams against the bank, the crew swarms over the edge and onto the shore, the captain shouts instructions. Dark skinned villagers emerge from the banana trees pulling blindfolded water buffaloes on ropes. Bunches of green bananas are hefted from shoulder to shoulder, bags of rice and peanuts too. Swearing and sweating under the weight of the cargo, the men wrest screaming pigs onto their backs, haul them aboard by the legs, tails, ears and cram them into their pen next to the engine; ducks and chickens are passed up to the roof and stuffed into bamboo cages head first. The action carries on into the night, and for the next four days, the cargo – human, vegetable, and animal – growing with every stop.

At the start, there were six hammocks on the second deck. By day three, Jesus counted thirty-eight. Strings overlap and intertwine; it’s impossible to move without jostling someone. Families sleep four to a hammock; chickens and turtles rustle and coo in woven bags among the piles of luggage. A pet parrot climbs up and down the hammock ropes. Little kids run and duck between the hanging bodies, grabbing randomly for balance. Below, the pigs fight and root and scream between towering stacks of bananas and lengths of bamboo. The engine bellows and spits and spilled diesel floats on the water like sooty marbles. At the back of the cargo deck is the bathroom, a dark closet with a seatless metal toilet and a water tap overhead to shower. Water sloshes around the floor and drips from the walls, and there’s a bucket of water with a scoop to flush the toilet which I’m pretty sure empties directly into the river. Next to the bathroom the cook, Carlos, sweats barefoot in his tiny cement kitchen, cooking rice and bananas and meat for our three meals a day. To wash the meat (wild boar or chicken) he scoops a bucketful of brown water from the back of the ship and squats over it to scrub, then empties the bloody waste water directly onto the floor, where it mingles with the water from the bathroom and eventually washes back over the edge into the river. Women scrub clothing in the same space off the back. I gasped in pain the first time I saw a plastic bottle pitched over the side, followed by a dirty diaper. Then a plate of food scraps and greasy napkins. Then I quietly bound up my environmental conscience and spat my toothpaste into the river alongside everybody else. To know a culture, one has to live the culture. Judgment halts the learning process. The bones and food scraps, at least, the piranhas will eat.

Sunrise: tiny, searing, and orange, seen through a loose jigsaw of clouds over a great distance. Jesus and I watched from the roof as we ate breakfast: tacachos, huge balls of banana dough, mashed with cooked onions and garlic and salt, simple and delicious, and served with thick, sweetened milk and oatmeal. We’d been warned about the questionable sanitation on the boat, and had brought supplies to feed ourselves for the four days, but curiosity and an unwillingness to be those snobby gringos mastered our fears of stomach infections. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I reasoned, and I ate what Carlos scooped into my tupperware bowl. As the light of day grew on the horizon, so did the heat, slowly but insistently, until midday, when being hot became an activity that required all of my attention. The passengers lay in their hammocks, eyes closed, paralyzed by the heat. A few scraps of a tabloid newspaper were passed around. The roosters crowed ceaselessly from the roof. I wandered the decks taking pictures and I could feel the eyes of the cargo boys following me. I offered to show them the shots I was taking, and suddenly I had an audience. They crowded around, mesmerized by the instant replay of the digital screen. I handed the camera off to a couple of them, showed them how to use it, enjoying their excitement as they snapped pictures of each other then hurried to see how they looked on the small screen. Seeing the images they chose to capture with my camera was like being allowed to sit behind their eyes for a minute, to see the world with their same focus.

We stopped at one village located away from the main flow of the river. The water of the tributary was a clear, dark green, and as Jesus and I stood on the deck, roasting in the midday sun, Sofia, one of the women who worked on the boat, suggested a swim. The wharf was a temporary structure, made of massive floating tree logs chained together, waiting to be floated downstream to the sawmill in Iquitos. I walked across them, balancing against the pitch and roll of the trunks. Later, I would stand on a pile of sawdust in Iquitos and watch other hundred-year-old trees like these being turned into boards and chips. This was the closest I came to the old growth Amazon jungle. The water was smooth, cool, and delicious on my hot, two-days unbathed skin as I swam in place against the strong current, like a water treadmill. Sofia followed us out and took a sponge bath from the edge of the tree-wharf, lathering then rinsing, the white foam bubbles drifting down the tributary to mingle with the brown water of the Napo’s main flow.

Arriving in Iquitos after four days on the river is like landing in the middle of a dream. Houses float in the harbor with bright yellow walls and blue roofs. A hundred dugout canoes paddle between massive, sparkling oil rigs and sagging fishing boats. Jesus and I climb the stairs from the port to the street, passing through a hazy indoor marketplace. Yellow light filters through the open windows and catches in the dust and the thousand shouting voices that stir the exotic, steamy air. We pass through in our bandannas and sandals, four days of sweat and river water on our sunburned skin, and we are one with the teeming crowd. My eyes are full, my shirt is sticking to my back, and I feel like a traveler in the third world. Iquitos itself is una locura, a crazy thing, the largest city in the world inaccessible by roads: a jungle in the middle of the jungle, a city of 400,000 people and 76,000 motorbikes. It is impossible to hold a conversation on the street. The bikes move in hordes, lining up five and six across at the stoplights, revving their engines. On the edge of the city, the stilted shanties of Belén lean over the muddy river banks. It’s the dry season, and the famous floating houses are grounded on their wooden raft-like foundations, warped and slanted and waiting for the winter rains to raise the river and lift the houses. The hotel that Jesus and I find overlooks the ghetto, and beyond it, the low river. In the evenings, tiny lights glow from below and smoke from five thousand cook fires rises in the faint breeze off the low river and blows up the hill into the city proper.

Lives are lived in the open in the jungle. Chairs are hauled out onto the sidewalks, TVs, dining tables. The buses have no windows. Passengers in the moto-taxis can wave and converse with each other across the lanes. Everyone, everything is visible. One night, traveling across the city, I leaned on my elbow out of the window of the bus, into the heady sunset air, watching the families in front of their houses as we sped past. Children running, a couple embracing. A woman bathing at the public water tap, shampoo running from her hair over her wet clothing. Two girls poring over a love letter, men shaking hands over a table. A smile, a look, a movement. Women rest their chins on their hands on the window frames and a teenager rocks backward in his chair in the doorway, a serious man studies a test booklet. One hundred stories in one hundred seconds.

Two things Jesus and I did with our time in the city. One was to spend three days with the Cupay Peña family, members of one of the indigenous tribes of the jungle near Iquitos. We ate at their table, slept under their roof, and watched the flow of their life: cooking and cleaning, occasional trips to the city in the peke peke (the slow-moving motorized canoe), fishing, school, and visits from the community’s shaman. Andres, the one-year-old grandson, wasn’t sleeping. It might be an evil spirit, they told us. The shaman sat in the kitchen, ate a fried fish at the table, and then held the child on his lap, smoking a pungent, hand rolled cigarette and blowing the smoke over the boy’s skin and head to cleanse him, whispering to the child with one breath, exchanging a joke with the mother in the next. The family wore ordinary clothes, watched telenovelas (soap operas) at night, behaved like a family anywhere in the world, but their energy was something different, something more in tune with the jungle on their doorstep. This plant cures this ailment, one would explain. Hear that bird? It’ll rain tonight, another pointed. Serenity flowed through the wooden house with the open walls.

The other thing we did was visit Belén, the floating ghetto. It was like walking into a dream. And as in dreams, better not to ask questions or pass judgment, better just to observe. Even with eyes wide open, I saw some things and wished I didn’t see others, understood parts but often couldn’t grasp that the things I was seeing were real. The filth was unbelievable, indescribable. I watched black scavenging birds circling the reeking stream beds between the houses, diving into the floating piles of refuse along the riverfront. At the port, shirtless, barefoot men staggered across rickety plank bridges carrying two hundred pound bags of rice on their shoulders. Others lugged wooden crates of pineapples and papayas on their backs, the weight of the fruit supported only by a strap around their forehead. Necks bowed at forty-five degrees, tendons popping, stomach muscles writhing under sweaty brown skin. Their jaws clenched, their eyes focused only one step ahead. In the market, the wealth and the irony of the region are plainly displayed: bananas, fish, and fruit pour into the city, every day of the week, a non-stop harvest, and in the alleys between the stilted houses, children go hungry. I watched people shitting into the brown water, tossing bags of trash off of barges, mothers pouring buckets of water over naked children on the beach fronts.

I watched my values lose their meaning. To the people who live at the waterline, the jungle and the river are not important for their beauty. They are resources: jobs, money, and transport. Developing a sustainable way of life in harmony with the environment takes money and energy that the people of Belén don’t have and that the government of Perú isn’t willing to spend. It’s more profitable to keep drilling for oil, chopping down trees, dynamiting for fish and over-planting cash crops like rice and sugarcane. Conservation is a luxury, a ludicrous gringo imposition. No wonder they look at us as they do. A wry grin here, a turned back, a shy wave or a shout of “Hello!” full of bravado from a gang of teenage boys in a doorway. How we must seem to them, we foreigners. Whatever our intentions are, whatever we tell ourselves, whatever reasons we give for being there and however appropriately sympathetic we feel afterwards, the truth is that we are exactly as we seem: rich gawkers. I’ve never felt so off balance, so muted. I struggled with a moral vertigo, as my eyes continued to observe and to record.

The four days on the cargo boat, then the ciudad loca, Iquitos and its floating ghetto, Belén, and time with the Cupay Peñas: this was the beginning.  Next, another boat ride into another village, and a camping trip in the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria.