Brook and I went up to Iquitos, which is a jungle city that can only be reached by boat (on the Amazon River) or by airplane. The city is HOT and you can hardly hear yourself talk because the sound of the motorcycles overpowers everything else. Iquitos has a poor shantytown where all the people live in huts on the Amazon River, the water is filthy with garbage and human waste and children swim in the water and people take baths in the water, wash their clothes in the water, cook with the water, everything.

Brook and I decided to rent motorcycles while we were in Iquitos because it is the only way to get around. We just walked right into a shop and a young boy about the age of 12 asked us if we knew how to ride a motorcycle. I said yes. That was all we needed. So the boy took us to our motorcycles and as we got on we asked the boy if he could just remind us again how to turn the motorcycle on and how to drive it and all that stuff. We told him it had been a while. Needless to say, within the first hour I ran into the sidewalk twice and almost hit a motor taxi. Brook, however, is a naturally gifted motorcycle rider and she dominated the streets of Iquitos.

While in Iquitos we also ate the local specialty, crocodile (or crocodile nugget as the menu explained) and turtle. We also tried the local psycho tropic drug used by native jungle community for thousands of years to tell the future or to hunt better or what have you, a drug called ayahuasca.

We went to a local Shaman’s house (his name was Don Juan, he was 54 with 8 children, 2 grandchildren, and another child on the way) We were originally supposed to have the ceremony when we first arrived but apparently a male witch (brujo) hit him on the shoulder with a magic yet evil dart so he asked to postpone the ceremony. (true story) We went to a small wooden room where Brook and I, two foreign guys being trained in shamanism, and about 10 peruvians all drank a cup of ayahuasca and then spent the following five hours in the pitch dark listening to the Shaman sing songs and having visions.

At one point he called Brook and I up individually to sing us special individual songs, her song was about a butterfly and my song was about a flower. He also only called us by our astrological signs and never learned our names. At the beginning of the ceremony I thought that both Brook and I were connecting to each other and even though the room was pitch dark she could hear me talking to her through our minds. She later told me she completely forgot that I was there with her. All in all, it was an interesting experience but I don’t think I would do ayahuasca again.

From Iquitos we took a 26 hour boat ride on the Amazon River to stay with a native community. The boat ride was probably the worst traveling experience I have ever had. There were hundreds of people squished into each other in two small rooms strung with hammock after hammock. The engine was so loud and hot and the boat was just filled with human filth and waste. For food, we ate fresh fish that had been caught by locals and then a small boat brought over to our big boat and we just ate the fish with our hands. When you lied on your hammock you couldn’t move at all or you would hit the person next to you and it would hit all the people lined up.

There was a group of Baptists who stayed up all night singing along with a guitar songs like, “Dios ama a usted” and going around spreading the word. We tried to go the top deck as much as possible and watch the communities on the shore and spot occasional dolphins (both grey and pink) but the heat was too intense to stay out for long. We finally arrived at a small community that lived off of a tributary of the Amazon where the water is black and is called the “mirror of the Amazon” because everything was so well reflected.

Staying in the jungle was awesome, and I would love to go live there and volunteer for a year or so, if it weren’t for the constant mosquitoes and the terrible heat, made worse by the fact that we only wore pants and long sleeve shirts so we would not get bitten. (Although we still got bitten all over our behind from going to the bathroom)

We swam in the water a lot and apparently a piranha (a baby) bit Brook on the foot where she had a huge cut from burning her leg on the motorcycle muffler. We went fishing for piranhas using all the little fish that jumped onto our boat or on us when we sailed along the water in a small dug out canoe for bait. In this same small boat, at night in the pitch dark, we went out searching for crocodiles. Tulio, a 26 year old native in the community was amazing how he could find the shining red eyes of crocodiles in the dark along the shores of the water by shining his flashlight along the shores. We got too close for comfort to a 20 foot crocodile at night. We also found a tarantula where we slept and other deadly spiders. Besides seeing tons of jungle birds (you have to say JUNGLE before everything to make it sound cooler) we also saw monkeys, pink and grey dolphins, drank water from a tree bark called Uno de Gato, and did lot’s of other jungle things. I enjoyed camping out in the jungle and waking up to the sounds of every animal, including the dolphins, all around you.