“So, if we see the pink dolphins are you going to swim with them?” Miranda asked. Her curly hair slapped my shoulder as our motorboat puttered down the Amazon: seven journalists crammed up against each other, along with one PR woman; our Peruvian escort, Maria; Cilso, our local rainforest guide; and Abigail the boatman.

“Not a chance.” I looked out over the Amazon as it rippled out of our path. It was broader than I had imagined, like the sea. I’d expected it to be shimmering green with overhanging vines but this water was opaque, a pink, silty brown.

“How can you have this opportunity and pass it up?” she asked.

“Well, maybe, since we’re also going piranha fishing, wouldn’t I technically also be swimming with piranhas?” Not to mention some two thousand other aquatic species that live in the Amazon, this sultry, super waterway that runs through nine countries between the Andes and the Atlantic. Caneros, for example: inch-long, translucent fish attracted by the scent of urine and only too delighted to swim up off-limit orifices.

“If you go in, don’t pee,” I said.

Crazy as it seemed, I understood her urge to leap into the river, the desire for physical contact. In Lima, where we’d flown up from this morning on a four a.m. flight, I hadn’t connected with anything or anyone, not the locals, the streets or even the other journalists. It’s not that I didn’t like the other writers; they seemed like vibrant and attractive people, and ever hopeful that I, too, am vibrant and attractive, I felt we had much in common. I liked Lima, too, its boisterous enthusiasm and raucous edge that contrasted with the elegant seafood restaurants and sweeping boulevards overlooking the Pacific. In my mind Lima was a series of images: blue and pink shacks scrabbling up hillsides, colonial buildings, a man with a hooded falcon on his arm, a voluminous stone couple embracing in the Parque del Amour. But these were all pictures. I’d seen them, but I hadn’t felt them, and travelling, for me, is as much about touch as it is about sight. I wanted to press my fingers into the layers of Lima, to step into its dirty backstreets, to sit in cafés and lock eyes with young men whose hair was the colour of wet soil. Instead, we’d shopped for handicrafts in popular tourist markets and feasted on tuna ceviche during three-hour dinners in which we talked only among ourselves. At night, the hardiest writers would continue on, but I had no energy for nightclubs, not on this whirlwind trip with its pre-crack-of-dawn starts. I would have been happier spending my time in dusty museums or sitting on a park bench in the Parque Kennedy, where pickpockets mingled with teenagers and vendors selling paintings on easels.

It’s a drawback of being a travel journalist, the long days in which you are overloaded with sights but rarely have time to soak it all in. On this ten day trip our itinerary would include Lima, the Nazca lines of Ica, the Amazon, and Lake Titicaca – all places to linger, not to whiz through. Four “authentic” villages, one city tour, one night lights tour, one folkloric dance show, two hikes, one fishing excursion, two Inca ruins, one floating island made of out reeds, and six flights — seven if you included the ride over the Nazca lines. It was a matter of economics, I knew. The more tourist boards could cram in, the more we would have to write about later, and I understood their point of view, but I was weary and worried my life was becoming an endless package tour.

Before I wrote professionally, when my time was my own, I travelled slowly: two months in Thailand, five weeks in Bali, six months in Spain. And though I’d only been able to afford rat trap hotels, there was always some way to make money: temp work in London, English teaching in Korea, an occasional job as a movie extra when a foreign blonde was needed and, in one lucky instance, a scholarship to study abroad.

Now I was traveling on someone else’s schedule and credit card, and there were so many obvious pluses I could see myself doing it forever. I’d visited hand-carved caves as big as mountains in India, ridden a horse named Jughead through the Australian outback, and attempted to train rescued elephants in the jungles of Thailand. It was an Ali Baba’s cave of travelling, all right, but I found it hard to keep up.

I’d read once that the soul travels at the speed of a camel (the true cause of jetlag) and that, I thought, is the pace by which I would like to see the world. The worst thing about this trip was that the other journalists seemed to thrive on our frenetic race through Peru. Laughing about their exhaustion, propping themselves up with lunchtime pisco sours – Peru’s potent national drink – they would flake out on the bus or the plane, soaking up energy on the spot, while I, gritty-eyed and jittery, an eternal insomniac, stared out the window, waiting for the next ruin, the next Jesus on a cross, the next mystical line we would see from the air.

A soft wind batted my face as our small boat approached a Amazon tributary. Cilso, our leather-faced guide, leaned forward. “There! A dolphin.” We all turned and saw a steel-coloured head poking out of the water. “It’s a grey one,” he said.

We sat back disappointed. Normally, seeing any dolphin would be a thrill, but we were on a quest for a pink dolphin and nothing else would do. Classified as vulnerable, if not endangered, these unique freshwater mammals range in colour from blue grey to bright pink and live in exotic locales like the Amazon and China. Theories about their unusual colouring vary, but the most likely explanation is abundant capillaries just below their skin. Unlike other dolphins, pink dolphins can crane their necks, as people. Local tribes believe them to be gifted with supernatural powers. On a full moon, it’s said, they can shape-shift into handsome men, dress in fine clothes, and come ashore to seduce local girls.

At the end of our first day in the Amazon, though we’d had an interesting visit to a rainforest tribe’s village where I’d bought two seed bracelets and Miranda had purchased a piranha tooth necklace, the dolphins remained underwater, and the only person who caught a piranha to grill for dinner was Abigail the boatman. It didn’t matter. We still had farther to go. Remote as we were, forty miles upriver from Iquitos, the largest city accessible only by water or air, we still hadn’t reached primal rainforest. Even here, literally beyond the end of the road, the jungle around our lodge had been tampered with, but we would journey in deeper tomorrow.

At 6:30 the next morning we —with the exception of Miranda— met Cilso and Abigail at the dock at the foot of our lodge. As we sat in the boat waiting for Miranda, a few people started muttering about tardiness but secretly I felt quite pleased, vindicated by the fact that this pace had finally made someone’s body give out. Relieved it hadn’t been mine.

Maria, our Peruvian escort, was dispatched to Miranda’s cabin, but there was no answer to her knock. Miranda has vanished, I thought. Melted into the forest. Maybe she’d gone for a midnight swim and the piranhas had eaten her. Or a pink dolphin had come calling and lured her away.

Cilso was growing increasingly vocal about the delay, his thin lips pressed into a grimace when he wasn’t threatening to tell the boatman to drive off. It’s a privilege to be here, I could almost hear him thinking, not a right!

Forty minutes later Miranda walked down the wooden steps to the bank. She hadn’t received a wakeup call, she said. Maria hadn’t knocked on her door. I gave her a small smile because no one else was looking at her, and made room for her to sit down. I liked Miranda because she was always doing the wrong thing. Sometimes on quite a spectacular level. At the windswept pyramid of Pachacamac near Lima, an ancient sanctuary of a pre-Hispanic god, she’d picked up a large bone from the ground. A child’s bone, I’d imagined. Maybe even a human sacrifice (though more likely a pig’s).

“Look at this!” She’d held it aloft, as if it were another piranha-tooth-necklace souvenir, as if she wasn’t reducing centuries of ritual and worship to novelty.

She’d carried the bone all around the ruins and even onto the bus, clenching it with her fist so that the joints stuck out both ends. I was horrified but awe-struck, too, that someone could steal a bone from a sacred place. I was also jealous. After the trip was done she would have a bone on her mantelpiece but I would have only the satisfaction of righteousness.

“I really didn’t hear anyone at my door,” she said to me as our boat set off down the Amazon with Cilso scowling out over the water.

“It’s okay,” I said, thinking of the extra half-hour sleep I could have had, but feeling bad for her anyway. Who could blame her for sleeping so deeply?

A couple of hours later we veered off onto the dark Rio Napo where the banks grew closer together and the trees were twisted and stealthy. Here, finally, was the primal rainforest I’d been waiting for, where trees were a thousand years old. We pulled up to a rustic lodge that was dwarfed by the jungle around it, a tangle of vines and ferns and moss-covered trunks.

Clouds furled and threatened above us. “Do you think it’s going to rain?” I asked.

“This is the rainforest,” Cilso said. “It always rains.”

The deluge held off as we hiked into the interior, and in the hot humid air my fatigue seeped away, disintegrating like a corpse into the earth. I liked that the rainforest was gloomy, rich with the smell of orchids and rot, animated with flashes of monkey tails and the screech of macaws. And though we didn’t see any large animals – “People are making too much noise back there,” Cilso snapped – I knew they were out there. Jaguars and pumas, we were tramping their ground.

Keeping close behind Cilso, hopping from side to side to avoid a line of army ants streaming down the centre of the path, I lost the feeling of alienation that being a tourist automatically brings. The rainforest doesn’t care about your privileged Western background. The poisonous plants will kill you regardless of where you were born (though of course a local is more likely to know how to avoid them). The mosquitoes will still offer malaria and jaguars will still chew your flesh. It was liberating somehow, and sensual, too, these roots and trees and strangler figs writhing in an orgy of growth and decay. I forgot the others were behind me as I followed Cilso past giant ceiba trees, armour-plated centipedes, pink-spotted tarantulas, and vines like feather boas.

At the end of our hike we visited a garden tended by shamans, created to keep rare plants and ancient healing traditions alive. A shaman, Cilso explained, is like a witch doctor – -a combination folk healer, botanist and spiritual leader. A link between the forest and people. The tropical downpour finally crashed around us as we sprinted for a thatch-roofed pavilion where a young shaman in a feathered headdress, black T-shirt and cargo pants was standing behind a table. His name was Guillermo, Cilso told us. We sat on a wooden bench and watched as the man held up a vial of dragon’s blood sap.

“Rainforest Viagra,” Cilso translated from Guillermo’s Spanish. “Also good for TB. And three or four drops in water help hemorrhages after childbirth.”

It was nothing I needed at the moment. But looking at the roots and vials displayed on the rickety table, there were a few other herbs I thought I could make use of: lemon grass, for example, good for insomnia, or cat’s claw, an immune system booster.

“And this is ayahuasca.” Cilso passed around a musty bottle filled with deep red liquid. I was so excited I almost jumped up. “I know it!” I said. I’d read about it, the most sacred plant in the rainforest.

“It’s also called vine of the soul.” Cilso handed the bottle to Miranda, who passed it to me. I held the bottle up to my eye and looked inside, then put my nose to the opening and breathed in the smell of old port. Brewed from ayahuasca vine, this visionary potion has led rainforest people on spiritual journeys for millennia, a hallucinogenic that’s said to conjure archetypal visions of snakes and jaguars. Unlike pisco sours, this was not a drink to be taken lightly. Not that we were about to be offered any.

“The Amazon isn’t a forest to us, it’s a medicine cabinet,” Cilso continued, holding up a fer-de-lance, a brown snake-like plant that is the antidote for a deadly snake of the same name. With the plant flopping in his hand, he told us what we already knew, that as the rainforest shrinks the Amazon medicine cabinet is shrinking too, and with it goes the ancient knowledge of the shamans. But here, at least for the moment, the forest felt immense and invincible.

“Who wants to sample a healing?” Cilso asked.

My arm shot into the air. Beside me, the other journalists looked startled, as if they had only half-heard the question. But I couldn’t be fair about this. I wanted the healing too badly. I felt, in a way, that so far this trip had been for other people: the shops, the dinners, the camaraderie I was too exhausted to share. Now this was my chance to connect with the rainforest, the mental equivalent of rolling naked on the jungle floor soaking soil into my pores (minus, I hoped, the leeches and poisonous plants). I didn’t want the jungle to be only a jungle like Lima had been only a city, a place where I snapped a photo, bought a cheap Inca necklace, and flew off. I needed the jungle to mean something. Like a selfish lover, I wanted to mean something to it.

Not that I was under any illusions. This was a sample healing for tourists, and Guillermo, at thirty-one, was no wise old elder. Yet I instinctively liked him, his quiet dignity, straight posture and stocky, grounded build. According to Cilso, Guillermo had been a plant shaman since childhood, using knowledge handed down from his mother and grandfather.

As Guillermo instructed, I walked to the front of the pavilion and sat on a bench with my hands palm up on my knees. “Close your eyes,” Cilso said.

Outside, the rain slapped down over the flat wide leaves of palm trees. Mosquitoes buzzed and the air was stifling. Guillermo started chanting an icaros, a power song used to get in touch with the spirits. His hand rested lightly on my head. Something was burning; sweet smoke billowed around my face and I was hit on the skull with a bundle of leaves.

I told myself to stop thinking and simply feel the moment, but it wasn’t easy with everyone’s camera flashes turning the inside of my eyelids red. I wanted to ask the others to please go away and give me this moment, but that was impossible. This was a press trip, and just as the Amazon was part of the show, now so was I.

Guillermo’s high-pitched song filled the air and I suddenly felt nervous. I’d volunteered so quickly I hadn’t considered what a healing entailed. Was it dangerous to toy with spirits I didn’t understand? Was the shaman going to look inside my mind? What would he see? A raw ugly psyche or something worse, like a tumour?

Conversely – though these thoughts were fleeting and barely half-formed – I was worried the healing would end too soon. Traditional healing ceremonies are intense processes involving cleansing diets and can take days or even weeks to prepare for. The ceremony itself can go on all night. And of course, I wasn’t drinking ayahuasca, the mind-expanding elixir so potent and controversial that William Burroughs wrote about it in the fifties, and the Jesuits denounced as diabolical in the 1700s. Without it would the healing have any effect? And if it didn’t, would the Amazon lose its allure?

Eventually, between Guillermo’s chants, the fragrant air and drumming rain, I was lulled into a state of calm. At one point I thought I felt his energy. The thatch pavilion disappeared from my mind and so did the garden. For one heady moment it was just me and the rainforest. On one level it felt as if I were racing. I imagined speed and strength and leaves flashing by. But even while I was thinking this, the image felt false, manufactured by me. I hadn’t, after all, magically turned into a puma. Yet underneath, a deeper experience hovered, like dense sunless seawater beneath a warm splashing surface. I felt centred and still. It was the forest that was expanding, barriers between it and me falling like silent, toppling trees. Just when I felt I was stepping into something vital, Guillermo spread oil on my cheeks and it was over.

I sat there, not wanting to open my eyes.
“Are you okay?” asked Cilso.
I looked up. Everyone was staring at me. “Fine.”
“We have to go back to the boat,” he said. “We’re late.”

“Okay.” But I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in this overgrown forest where things had grown and died and fed off each other for centuries. Where everything was interconnected, even me. This had been the whole point of my trip, I realized. If I’d been on a Christian pilgrimage this would be the moment when I reached the cathedral, prayed at the relic and turned around to go home.

As everyone filed out I lingered to ask Guillermo in faltering Spanish what he’d discovered. “You have low energia,” he said.

No shit. I smiled, relieved he hadn’t seen something malignant, or at least if he had he’d had the grace not to mention it. “So what did you do?”

“I took out the negative energia with smoke. And summoned the spirit of the tiger to give you strength. Or in your case–” He smiled. “The tigressa. And the plant spirit of ayahuasca.”

I liked the thought of a tigressa dwelling in my breast. An intangible souvenir, far better than a piranha-tooth necklace or even a sacred bone.

The others were already out of sight. Cilso circled back like a herd dog and I thought he was going to shout at me but he came up to see if I needed help translating.

“What medicines should I take?” I asked Guillermo, glancing over at the table piled with dark roots and herbs. “Que medicinas yo necesito?”

“Garlic.”

I’d expected something more exotic but I supposed sometimes the simplest cures were the best. And certainly easier to get through customs than a suitcase full of dragon’s blood sap.

“Come on,” Cilso said, gently this time. I nodded and followed him to the boat. As we set off over the water, I stared at the wall of trees surging up from the shore. Had the healing actually accomplished anything? I didn’t feel any surge of vigour, but the jungle looked different to me. More inviting. As if I could slip through the trees.

“We didn’t see any jaguars,” Miranda said, her face silhouetted against the trees.

“No,” I said, but I understood then that I didn’t need to see jaguars. I could feel them under my fingertips, details of things I had and hadn’t seen, all coiled together like snakes. Brilliant green leaves, armour-plated centipedes, the hot fur of a tiger’s neck, and a dolphin’s pink skin. I could taste the jungle, too, a sweet bitter liquid the colour of blood, the vine of the soul on my lips.

 

End

 

*Some names have been changed.