We flew from Dublin to Lima and then north to Iquitos, where we were collected in motocarros (basically a carriage seat attached to a motorbike– not very safe but a lot of fun) by our friendly indigenous guides, who drove us to our hotel.
Iquitos is the world’s largest city that cannot be reached by road. Most people fly there, but it is also the starting point for boats heading north on the Amazon River. It is the remote jungle capital of the huge department of Loreto.
It was founded in the 1750s as a Jesuit mission, fending off attacks from local tribes who did not want to be ‘converted’.
Iquitos felt remote, until we set off on a boat that would take us 14 hours and 200 kilometres further north on the Amazon.
We reached a very small town called Genaro Herrera, where we had a delicious breakfast of water buffalo cheese.
Then we got into a leaky canoe to go two hours further, to the jungle home of our guide, Rubar, where we stayed for about a week in true native fashion, in wooden houses on stilts, with hammocks and mosquito nets.
The day we arrived, we learned we could swim safely enough in the Amazon River, in the daytime. But NEVER after 6pm, when the local predators– anaconda, caiman crocodiles, and others– start to hunt. Imagine my dismay when our tour leader, Peter Gorman, an expatriate American journalist, cheerily informed us that he had arranged a night canoe trip for us, rowed by a local native.
However, we did not get eaten by anything, and I will never forget the beauty of the Amazon in the moonlight, or the myriad of jungle sounds all around us. It was like a dream– and not just because I was still jetlagged.
In our outdoor kitchen, cooks prepared fish and eggs for us. One day they had a ‘treat’, a huge dead water rat which someone had shot. I stuck with the fish and eggs, although several tried the rat and found it tasty indeed.
Another Peruvian delicacy is cuy– guinea pig. I also decided I could live forever without trying worms. Also, a toucan and a parrot helped themselves on a daily basis to our fruit and bread, and no one ever said ‘shoo’ to them.
If anyone had a health problem of any kind, a local person headed off into the jungle and invariably came back with a leaf or root or tea as a cure.
One day we hiked for three and a half hours into the jungle. I am not a fast walker, and keeping up the pace with our Matses tribe native guide, Pepe, armed with rifle and machete, nearly killed me.
As we sweated our way through, up and down hills, occasionally swinging on vines, we clutched our water bottles. Pepe smiled and chopped off a thick branch of some kind. Out of the wood poured the coolest, most delicious water I have ever tasted, enough for all of us to quench our thirst.
Local people are very fit and seemingly think nothing of a five-day trek through the jungle. As we walked, our guide showed us the plant that had cured his kidney stones ten years ago; a tree for cancer, a tree for diabetes, a sap for skin ailments, a sap to treat poisonous spider bites, a tree that provided fuel when you lit the bark, a leaf that treats swelling.
The only thing that attacked me was a vine, that I swear reached out and grabbed me and wrapped itself around my body. Our guide untangled me and looked grave. “That is a bad plant,” was all he said.
I was truly in awe and relief by the time we ‘escaped’ to a clearing, and were met by people who gave us coconuts filled with watery but delicious coconut milk.
If you read only the health warnings, you would never go to an exotic place like Peru. Yellow fever, malaria from mosquitos, rabies from animals, trichinosis from pork or guinea pig or rat (microscopic worms crawl between your muscles), hepatitis A, bartellonosis (from sandflies), not to mention ticks, leeches, and snakes.
The piranha, by the way, evidently does not deserve all the bad press it has gotten and unless starving they tend to leave you alone.
To sum up, with plenty of insecticide sprays and mosquito-repellent clothes from the Great Outdoors, we braved it, met wonderful people who live healthily in and love their jungle– and we have lived to tell the tale.
Hopefully, the so called ‘civilised’ world will stop calling them savages and killing them off, and realise that oil production will never replace the true treasures of the jungle– its foods and medicinal plants and the people who depend on them.
Pictured: Snapshots of Peruvian life.