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Day 1 - Night arrival at Iquitos airport
The stars aren�t in the �right places.� (We are three degrees south of the equator.) This is a world of windows without glass, upper walls open to the wet air. The weather is the same all year. When the river is high, it is summer. When the river is low, it is winter.
Day 2 - Hot, humid, sunny
We�re rumbling in an open-windowed bus through the Iquitos marketplace, our faces striped red with fresh paprika. People are open and playful here. No roads enter or leave Iquitos, so we take the bus to the main highway � the Amazon River. The river is high. It�s summer.
Day 3 - Pink porpoises are playing in the river
We turn onto black water (the cleanest water) taking the Napo River to Napo Camp where the shaman and his sons live. One son bathes my head with cleansing herbal waters. Another son, the shaman�s apprentice, answers our many questions with stoic solemnity and a touch of a smile.
Day 4 - Still at Napo
We go birding in the morning (5 AM) in open boats. The birds are plentiful but difficult to spot. We use binoculars, telescopic lenses, and point, point, again. Some of us gather in the hammock room, all sides open to the jungle, for an afternoon collapse. (All homes here have hammocks.) Gently swaying, we listen to raucous birds, cicadas, rain coming and going across the ubiquitous palm-thatched roof. Raoul, a black-bodied, white-tipped-winged, trumpeter bird with iridescent eye-shadow-blue legs and beak, stands on one leg beside my hammock. I enjoy touching his soft supple head and neck; he receives the strokes with calm, birdly delight.
Day 5 - Raining hard in the rainforest
We trudge, slide, and schlep on and around a corduroy path between Napo Camp and ACCEER (Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research). This is it: primary rainforest; the canopy walkway. When a tree falls close by us, we hear slow motion sound � tree limbs shattering and water falling, falling. Rainforest trees support small bromeliad pools of water to canopy heights. We step, one at a time, in groups of three, onto the canopy walkway. I am alone, 110 feet above the rainforest floor, in the treetops, swaying side-to-side, swinging up and down, standing on what appears to be an aluminum extension ladder with an eight-inch-wide slippery wooden board lying overtop. But there is netting, there are cables and the view �.
Day 6 - Our shaman returns
Antonio Montero Pisco does not call himself a shaman. �Shaman� is our word. He is an herbalist, as were his parents. When he was eight years old, he began studying. His hands move like silk. They are his eyes. He sees through his hands; he learns through his dreams. He has a distinct sense of what he can and cannot do. He heals; he teaches; he is a peacemaker. Sometimes the police ask him for help finding a criminal. He uses songs, whistling, when healing. He asks permission from the plant before he pulls it up.
Day 7 - Back to Explorama
Since the river is high, we go by boat where we would have walked before. We stop to visit with ribere�os, people who live near the river. We are welcomed into every part of all the homes. This particular home belongs to a sugarcane rum �manufacturer,� and is nicer than many of the homes we have visited. Turtles are growing in a pen beneath the house (All houses are on stilts.) One turtle rests against a pig. Our guide and accomplished musician, Basilio, sits in the cantina playing a guitar and singing �Take Me Home, Country Roads�
Day 8 � Are we home yet?
We have taken eastern Peru�s country road (the Amazon) to what now feels like home � Explorama � and is home to American Dr. Linnea Smith, who has grown a medical practice here. We enjoy her incredible strength of will and body and her quick running sense of humor (the only dry spot here!).
Basilio tells us we are the messengers. The rainforest does not belong to the people who live here, to Peru, or South America. It belongs to the world. The rainforest cares for us, giving us medicine, giving us air to breathe. We all must care for the rainforest.
Day 9 of an 8-day trip - Life, stranded in the airport
That smell we smell. It is we!
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