Source: Montreal Gazette
I had travelled by car, plane, boat and foot to a place where the old ways have not been forgotten. Here local people interpret the world through their dreams and the forest spirit known as arutamis said to inhabit the mighty kapok tree, and healing and insight is sought from a hallucinogenic plant brew the indigenous people call natem, known elsewhere as ayahuasca, or "vine of the soul."
My trip was to be a departure from the typical Amazon tourism, which tends to package wildlife viewing with a certain cultural voyeurism. I wanted something more immersive and participatory: an experience with Ecuador's indigenous people known as the Achuar that would expose me to a different orientation altogether.
Casting myself into a world that was utterly foreign, I hoped to return with new insight into the familiar.
Earlier in the week, I had landed in Quito, Ecuador's capital, which sprawls at 2,850 metres in elevation along the base of an active volcano in a distinctive atmosphere of thin air and diesel fumes.
With me was David Tucker of the Pachamama Alliance, a San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization that supports the cultural and territorial rights of Ecuador's indigenous people and operates specialized tours into their homeland. (In my case, it was a weeklong trip to explore the Ecuadorean rainforest and get to know the Achuar, who, for more than a decade, have been using limited tourism as a means to preserve and protect their land and way of life.)
Tucker had arranged for us to drive to the Amazon basin; fly to Tiinkias, a remote community that had recently built a small tourist camp in the forest; and then travel by foot and river to a more established lodge, Kapawi.
The five-hour drive east from Quito into the Amazon basin passes through a highland corridor known as the Avenue of the Volcanoes.
Pichincha, Cotopaxi, Antisana, Illiniza -their snow-white peaks rise above Ecuador's fertile central valley like giants, and Andean indigenous people humanize them as such, relating to them as elder family members who hold great influence.
The Achuar people, numbering about 6,000 on an ancestral territory of 8,000 square kilometres in southeastern Ecuador, were among the last of the country's rainforest tribes to have contact with outsiders (Salesian Catholic missionaries arrived in the 1960s). Elders say that in the early '90s they began having dreams about an imminent threat coming from the external world. Soon after, they learned the western edge of their homeland had been given over to Arco as an oil concession.
Most of Ecuador's estimated 4.7 billion barrels in crude oil reserves -the third largest in South America -lie under the northeast Amazon region, where foreign corporations have left a legacy of pollution and displacement that has been widely decried.
But the Achuar had watched northern tribes struggle against oil companies, and beginning in 1991 organized their scattered -and historically warring -communities into a political entity that has so far saved them from a similar fate.
Recognizing a need for outside allies, they met with a group of Americans to form the Pachamama Alliance, which for the last 15 years has helped the Achuar and other Amazonian indigenous groups from its Quito office with land titling, skills training, economic development and policy advocacy.
Turning to tourism for development, the Achuar in 1996 opened Kapawi Lodge & Reserve, which receives an average of 1,000 visitors a year. In September, the United Nations named it one of the top five outstanding environmental conservation and community development projects in the world. Most of its 30 staff members are natives, and some received hotel management training in Quito.
But the benefits of tourism have a corollary: the loss of communal values and a new market mentality, alcohol abuse, litter, men cutting off their traditional ponytails. The Achuar now want to expand a controlled form of tourism farther into their territory, and have built a camp in the forest near the remote community of Tiinkias to offer visitors a more rustic experience than Kapawi. I would be the first tourist there.
After spending a night at the luxuriant El Jardin Hotel in Puyo, a provincial capital, we took off that afternoon in a small Cessna operated by Aerotsentsak, the Achuar's aviation service. Below us, wispy clouds lingered over the virgin forest, while mochacoloured rivers coursed through it like capillaries.
After an overnight stop in Chichirat, a forested settlement of 10 families where I met my guide Shakai, we headed off to Tiinkias, which we reached after a short trek through the muggy forest and a motorized canoe ride down-river. Its two dozen inhabitants were awaiting us in the communal house, beside a dirt clearing with a volleyball net woven from plant fibres. Laundry hung to dry between thatched-roof dwellings. An uneven footbridge spanned part of a small lagoon where a caiman rested on a log.
Over two idyllic days, I found myself content simply in the Achuar's mellow presence. We spent hours in the communal house drinking nijiamanch, a staple brew of sweet fermented manioc, tended by women constantly squeezing the pulp by hand.
We slept in the new tourist camp, built on a forested knoll just outside the settlement, with a simple layout of elevated wooden platforms covered by thatched roofs that extend into eating and sleeping areas meant to accommodate groups of up to 16 visitors.
Shakai became not just my guide to the forest but also its interpreter. In a nondescript leafy plant, he saw a remedy for gastritis; in an electric blue morpho butterfly that fluttered erratically past, he saw the ears of a deceased ancestor. "What does a stick bug represent?" I wondered aloud. Shakai said it was just a stick bug.
Our next stop was the Kapawi Ecolodge & Reserve; we motored down the Bobonaza River, up the wide Pastaza, to the Capahuari -a four-hour journey that dipped us briefly into Peruvian territory. The lodge is set on a sheltered lagoon; 18 palm-thatched bungalows, built on stilts above the shallow water in traditional Achuar style -without nails, but with modern comforts like solar-heated showers and eco-friendly flush toilets -are connected with airy dining and lounging areas by an elevated boardwalk. The lagoon behaves as a town plaza for bird life, and screened back walls and shaded balconies ensure that guests are always well positioned, from bed or hammock, to observe its lively happenings.
Visitors typically fly in to the lodge from Shell -a one-street frontier town on the edge of the Amazon basin that was established in the 1930s and later abandoned by the Shell oil company -on four-, five-or eight-day packages of standard jungle lodge fare: dugout-canoe rides, guided forest walks and spotting animals (Kapawi's remote location within a protected reserve offers a particularly excellent chance of that). Riding back the next morning from a clay lick enjoyed by chestnut-fronted macaws, we came across pink river dolphins. Later we paddled a canoe looking for anaconda but returned satisfied by yellow-rumped caciques nesting beside hoatzins, a prehistoric-looking, pheasant-sized bird with a spiky mohawk.
But Kapawi places an emphasis on cultural activities, and guests can learn how women make nijiamanch or spend a night in a local Achuar community. Lodge staff members also can arrange participation in a dream-sharing ceremony with guayusa tea. Through a local shaman who knew and trusted Tucker and Shakai, I received a special invitation to drink natem, which is how I landed, on that final evening, in Tsumpa's house.
Tsumpa and his wife, along with a dozen children and grandchildren, live high above the Pastaza River on a tidy clearing ringed by coconut palms, manioc plants, fruit trees and a garden of various plant medicines. It was dusk when we arrived; in the distance, isolated cumulonimbus thunderclouds were set aflame by the pink-orange sun.
Tsumpa served me the natem in an adjacent hut. All appeared normal, until after what seemed like 20 minutes it no longer did. Unmoored and disoriented, I became adrift in a more expansive reality. My thoughts wavered between visions. Afterward, I stepped outside. The night was alive and glorious. "Look at the stars," Shakai said. The constellations stretched overhead as a low-hanging ceiling.
I laid myself down on a palm leaf, spent and contented. Tucker and I chatted into the night. The Achuar conversed in their huts. Babies cried and were hushed. A gunshot went off in the forest, the sound of a lone man hunting. Within this dynamic nightscape, the boundaries between waking and sleeping, between inside and outside -indeed between humans and nature -blurred to nothing.