2009 Trans-Amazon Expedition0Preparation, Preparation, Preparation12-AUG-2009 15:43:09Things are really starting to pick up speed in planning and fundraising for the expedition. After many stumbling blocks and much anticipation the website for the expedition is finally up! click on the Rainforest Partnership link above to check it out. I'm getting excited for the Meet-N-Greet; it will be the first of (hopefully) many events we will be having in the coming weeks to get the word out and bring money in for RP and the expedition.
Sending Thanks to everyone who has already pledged their support and encouragement to everyone else to jump on board,
Joseph Hochman0The Final Countdown01-SEP-2009 13:38:35Tim and I have gotten our vaccinations, I'm putting together the first aid kit and we're going to get our visas for Brazil this week. With only two weeks to go we're scrambling to get everything together, but we're on track for success. The gear is starting to come in; it looks like Christmas in my living room (that is, if your Christmas entails hammocks with mosquito netting). In order to make this already daunting task even more exciting (and because we don't have the money to do it any other way) we will be paddling a dug-out canoe, just like the natives do. It will be the first time I have paddled such a craft but it should be exciting!
Stay tuned!
Joseph Hochman0El Mercado Mira Flores15-SEP-2009 20:17:23Lima is a strange place. It´s alive in the dirty, gritty kind of way that big cities are alive. The sidewalks are slick with rain and dirt and the people always look like they have someplace to go, even when standing still. All of this is not to say that it isn´t beautiful. In truth, Lima has the kind of honest beauty that I´ve only seen in South America; it´s the kind of beauty that is found in things earnestly at work in the way they were meant to be. We are only in Lima for a couple of days and we wanted to get know the people and the culture as quickly as possible, so we went to the market. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat and it´s no exception in Lima. The market was alive with vendors in stalls of every kind. It was a sprawling indoor city of winding aisles that wandered through stalls piled high with fresh fruit and vegetables, dried goods, beef, llama, chicken-- anything you could ever think of. It´s life as usual for the vendors, but to us it was exotic and intoxicating. Needless to say, everyone found it quite amusing when Tim started taking pictures of the food, and were even more delighted to have their own picture taken. Butchers held up their knives and mothers held up their children all for the chance to be captured by the bespectacled ¨fotografo americano.¨ We leave the smell of smog for the smell of rain in the morning. Tomorrow we will be in Tarapoto.0La Selva18-SEP-2009 06:00:22When we stepped off the plane in Tarapoto we were met by a wall of hot, dense air and a palpable feeling that we were in a very different place than Lima. Maybe it´s the heaviness of the rainforest air or the afternoon siestas, but things move slower here. People don´t walk with their heads down, hurrying from one place to the next, they savor each step, stopping to talk to friends along the way. Today is the first time we got a chance to see the rainforest, and what deforestation means. Outside of Tarapoto there are large plots of tobacco, rice and fruit carved into the flank of the rainforest. We walked the fields and talked with the workers as they were on their way for lunch and it elicited many different emotions for me. Protecting the rainforest is the cause that brought us here, but it´s hard to tell these people who work all day under an unrelenting sun for meager pay that what they are doing is wrong. It has put into perspective the delicate balance man must strike with nature; everyone and everything is just trying to survive. Perhaps the work of the Rainforest Partnership can help level the scales. There are instances though when the scales are level, and you can feel it when you engage them. Next to the place we are staying is a small river, and in the afternoons it´s full of children playing, women washing clothes, and men fishing. It´s a beautiful and humbling thing to witness, people living simply. On Monday we are leaving to spend three or four days in the jungle with people who are working on the plots of land under the management of the Rainforest Partnership. After that we´ll spend some time with the community of Chipaota.0Chipaota27-SEP-2009 20:19:07Chipaota is a collection of cane huts with thatch roofs and dirt floors centered around a mud path that leads to the Huallaga River nestled into the buffer zone of one of Peru´s national forests. During the day the children go to school; the men, clad in rubber boots and armed with machetes go to tend their fields; and the women stay at home to cook, clean and wash clothes on the banks of the Huallaga. They have no electricty, no running water, and one refrigerator that runs on a gas generator to keep the beer cold. This is the meager lifestyle they wake up to in the morning, and they´re the most generous and caring people we´ve met so far.
We set our hammocks up on the second floor under the tin roof of an unfinished house open on all four sides. Around five every morning we were awoken by the sounds of crowing roosters, barking dogs and children shouting ¨hola Gringo¨ while passing by. The second day we were there a neighboring community came over for a festival, the highlight of which was the futbol game between the men from each community. I presented them with a gift, a new soccer ball and pump we had brought from the States and the game began. After that many people would come up to me to tell me what an important thing that soccer ball was to them. After the game everyone gathered an enormous pot of a white, frothy drink called Masato. Masato is made from yucca that is chewed and spit out by the women of the village and allowed to ferment and tastes something like milk mixed with club soda and a hint of sour yogurt. They dip large mixing bowls into the pot and pass them around, dumping anything remaining back into the pot. We were a little reluctant to drink it for fear of getting sick, but were more reluctant to refuse for fear of offending the community. The next day I went fishing with some of the village kids and they taught me how throw the nets they used. We didn´t catch much, but it was a great opportunity to learn from these people. In the afternoon we had a swim race across the tributary to the Huallaga that flanks the village. We wagered cigarrettes and I came in second. For the remainder of our time in Chipaota I woke up early and learned how to cook the common ingredients of the region and spent the day working with the men who were building a casita in the village. We returned to Chasuta to see how the boat we commissioned was coming along and made some last minute modifications to the design.
Now we´re back in Tarapoto again for the skype conference and to buy some last minute supplies. We´ve spent two day in Tarapoto. I love this place but I´m ready to go. I´m tired of waiting; I want to be on the river.0The First Leg: Chasuta to Yurimaguas07-OCT-2009 01:55:23To save money and to get a taste of how the everyman makes the trip from Tarapoto to Chasuta, we forked over eight soles a piece (the equivalent of five dollars total) and hopped in the back of a waiting pickup. They cram a dozen people in the bed of these four cylinder beaters, stack them high with luggage, crates of eggs and anything else one could think to tie onto a truck and gun it for an hour and half straight to Chasuta. We held on, people seldom spoke, and we made great time bouncing and skidding all the way down the mountain pass that leads to that little riverside town. After an hour and a half we unfolded ourselves from the back of the pickup all blurry-eyed and groggy from the fumes and dust and carried our bags back to Hugo`s house, the man who was helping us acquire the boat. He drew us a map by memory and the next day as soon as the morning rain ceased, we struck out for Chipaota for one last goodbye with the community. Walking back down the center path of Chipaota was like walking into a family reunion; everyone was all smiles and calling our names as we walked by. We left Chipaota laden with gifts of platanos, eggs and a hat and we continued our trip down the river. Hugo left us late afternoon that day, after he accompanied us through the rapids and we were finally doing it; it was just us and the river.
We stopped for the night in Paraizo, a native community not altogether different than Chipaota and pitched our hammocks in an abondoned building where a pair of palm-sized spiders watched us sleep through the night. We woke up, broke camp and were on the river by 7:00 and by 8:00 it was pouring. The rain came down thick and heavy, blowing slantways upstream and we paddled for hours like this right into the maw. Just as we thought the rain would never stop it did and not long after we were flagged down by a young guy working on his canoe. He was excited to see gringoes passing by and wanted to show us his farm. He had moved down from Iquitos with his wife, dad, and kids in search of something different from smog and bustle of the city only three months prior. We talked and walked around the small farm and they sent us off with more oranges and limes than we knew what to do with. That day we made it down to the slightly bigger town of Papa Playa. Some men helped us unload our gear and we settled into a large cane hut. That night the men of the town greeted us the only way deserving of a couple of weary boatmen. With aguadiente. Aguadiente is a cane alcohol made all up and down the Amazon. In Chipaota the aguadiente tasted like sake mixed with coconut juice. In Papa Playa it tasted like sake mixed with paint thinner. We drank bottle after bottle of that wretched stuff and it was mad. Their was urgency in the air as we drove at the type of intelligence native to the rainforest, an intelligence that comes only through an ancestry that lived closed to the land, something wild and primal and pure and completely foreign to the asphalt and celophane of America. We gestured madly and a crowd gathered at the door to see who these maniacs were and when their was too much more to say but no more words with which to say it we went next door. There, an old man plucked gypsy chords out of his beat, out of tune guitar and haunted the night with his high, ghostly wail as people moaned along knowing or not knowing the words but without a doubt knowing why. The next morning the men helped us load the boat and by 6:30 we were back on the river, paddling into a fog so thick it we couldn`t see the other side of the river. It was then that Tim discovered that one of the men had slipped off his tattered old boots and swapped them with a pair of ours ¨Well, you never really stay anyplace for free,¨ he said as we rounded the next bend, and it was true.
I found out how true that really was in Yurimaguas. We holed up in a hotel with the intention of taking a day off to rest up and resupply before making the push to Lagunas. At five pm I laid down and couldn`t get up. I spent that night wrapped in sheets drowning in sweat and feverish dreams. Two days later I called my mom, the doctor, and told her I had a one hundred and four degree fever. She told me to go to the hospital and in my febrile delerium i hung up and went. the Hospital was a sad place, the waiting room was dirty and full of sick kids and pregnant women and the smell of sweat. I sat and watched the dirty tiles of the floor move with feverish saucer eyes and when it was my turn I shuffled off slowly and confused. After a quick exam they sent me to a backroom that looked like something out of a Halloween haunted house. There were piles of oxygen masks in the corner and jumbled instruments on stainless trays on the counters. There were bloodstains on the sheets. An uninformed man came in and said he would give me the injection. I asked if i needed to roll up my sleeve. He told me to turn around, and I understand what would happen next. Right before the injection he said ¨just like in the military,¨ and then there was the pain. It burned all the way down my leg like hot tar and ran back up it like liquid fire and I collapsed on the bed. In ten minutes though, I felt remarkably better. The tests came in and they showed I had amoebic dysentery so I got the meds I needed and limped home and went to sleep. All this for no more than eight dollars. Even so, I guess it is true, you never really do stay anyplace for free.0Pacaya Samiria Reserve01-NOV-2009 22:18:12After being laid up for so long we were itching to get back on the river and start making time. At first light we loaded the boat, shoved off and watched that mad city on a hill fade slowly into the morning fog. We pushed hard all day, made camp and did it again in the morning, yearning to get to Lagunas and into the reserve. We made Lagunas in two days and rolled into the small rough and tumble port at night fall, found the guide´s office and were promptly told that he wasn´t going with us. He had arranged for us to go with Genaro, a sixty five year old frail looking and stooped man sitting silently in the corner. I shot a skeptical look at Tim and he returned it twofold but we were here and we were going.
After spending a day buying food and portaging the boat to the entrance of the reserve we woke up the next morning, paid our entrance fees and headed out.
That big blue boat which is so perfect for the waves of the bigger water of the Marañon and Amazon handled like a yacht in the tight bends of the upper reserve. Everytime we took a turn the stern would swing into the opposite bank and i would get raked by branches and palm spines and vines. It was hot, the going was slow and by noon I had spines in my back, twigs in my hair, dirt and and ants everywhere else and a nasty temper. Tim wasn´t fairing much better up front and that day was one of the few times we went at it. He was telling me how to steer and I was telling him if he knew so well he should just do it himself and sit back here and get pelted with sticks while I sat up front and drank water. So I dug in and cranked a hard right turn snapped the paddle and Tim shot back with a ¨well I saw that one coming.¨ I started laughing then he started laughing and I thought to myself, ¨well, there´s Day One in the Reserve.¨
From then on, Genaro rode with Tim in the yacht and i paddled his canoe which had a gash six inches long in the side that was patched with mud and leaked all day. When I wasn´t paddling I was bailing water out of the boat. I asked how many years old a canoe could be before it was no good. He said five. I asked how many years old this canoe was. He said eight. We were a strange looking bunch; a big, blue barge, and an old, dilapidated canoe, but we were going down river
As the river widened we slipped into the rhythem of waking early, taking a long breakfast, and spending the day on the river, listenening to the rich din of shreaks and growls and sqwuaks of the rainforest, and listening to Genaro tell stories about catches long since had as a fisherman in the reserve. We saw monkeys and guacamayos in the trees and turtles on the banks and were followed for days by pink dolphins surfacing feet away from us, diving down and blowing bubbles under our boat.
Any reservations I had about Genaro evaporated as soon we got on the river. He was sixty five, had been guiding the Reserve for twenty two years and had fished it for another decade before that. He grew up in this rainforest, this is all he knew and he wore that knowledge in his leathery bare feet, work-hardened hands and sun-blackened arms. Sixteen days is a long time to spend with someone in a boat, and despite the language, generation and cultural barriers that stood between us we became close. He taught me the skills that seem almost innate to people in this region and he did it with a real enthusiasm because it meant something to him that we had a real desire to learn. When we stopped in ranger stations for the night we would cook dinner, drink coffee then go out fishing at night with a flashlight and machete, looking for sleeping fish near the banks.
There is a large turtle repopulation effort going on in the Reserve where they dig eggs up from the beaches, hatch them in artificial beaches and release them in the river. By chance at a station named Santa Elena we had the opportunity to help with the release of over five hundred baby Charapa and Taricaya turtles. At sunset we paddled downriver with the baby turtles in buckets and let them go by the handfuls, watching them dive down and disappear into the water. Wildlife mangement is different here than in the states. There are no quartered off sections of beaches. There are no rubber gloves. There are no people with poles chasing off pigeons. These turtles are just turned loose. I asked the ranger, ¨won´t a lot them be eaten?¨ as he tossed in another handful. Of course,¨ he said, ¨some of them will be eaten by fish that will be eaten by bigger fish, and this is the way, one dies so another can live.¨
The days passed as we floated through the reserve until we reached the mouth of the Rio Samiria. After sixteen days we were at the end and I was sad that we had to leave the Reserve. It wasn´t like other backcountry trip I´ve taken where you go in and kind of make do until you leave. We ate and bathed and washed clothes on the river. We woke up and fell asleep to the sound of the rainforest. We began to live there, and that was a way of life that was hard to leave.0The way to Iquitos02-NOV-2009 17:45:00Early in the morning we said goodbye to our friends at the last ranger station and left the Reserve behind. Before noon we had paddled into Marañon, the river that will later meet the Negro and form the Amazon. We paddled all afternoon and didn´t quite know where on the river we were. We pulled up next to a fisherman who told us that he and his friends on another boat upriver were going to float down to Nauta to sell there catch. We talked for a while and ended up tying the boats together to float down with them. At around six we paddled to this small A-frame hut where one of the fisherman lived. It was situated on a big plot of rice and there were fifteen people eating and mulling around by the fire. The fish was plentiful, the rice was hot and the people were friendly. After that we headed back out onto the river.
Waking up early, paddling and making camp at night every day is a routine that is easy to get into. It´s easy to forget where we are and how unbelievable this trip is. There are moments however when we are forced to stop, look around and are stricken by the overwhelming truth that we are in a completely different world. As we were all laying down in our boats and the sun was streaking red and gold across the horizon and the clouds were billowing up and passing over us I had one of those moments. We were floating down to Nauta with a couple of fisherman on the Marañon under the setting sun and all there was left to do, and all that we could do was be silent and hold in reverence those passing minutes when the gold fades to inky black and the clouds open up and the stars fall and the river runs regardless of whether we were there or not. And that´s exaclty what we did.
As night fell we stared at the stars and talked about where we had been and where we were going. They asked how to say certain things in English. It was a lazy kind of talk. One filled with lots of space to just lay down and take it all in.
We floated that way until three in the morning, then they hauled the huge nets of fish that were hanging over the sides of the boat in and filled there twenty five foot long and three foot deep boat to the brim with a catch that must have been no less than eight hundred pounds. We tied our boat and the other canoe in single file and we snaked our way behind the pecky-pecky into Nauta.
We spent a day in Nauta saying goodbye to Genaro and picking up some food for the two-day paddle for Iquitos. The next morning I woke up at four to see Genaro off to his launcha for Lagunas and we got the boat loaded and were on the river by 6:45.
It was an uneventful on the two-day trip down. Until about two hours outside of Iquitos. A lightweight aluminum boat with an outboard engine came flying upriver towards us, bow pointed skyward, tearing a gash up the river behind it. I tried to turn the boat out of their way but they turned with me. As they approached I saw that it was a boatful of men with AK-47´s and pistols out and aimed at us. My first thought was ¨damn it, we came all this way only to be robbed two hours outside of Iquitos,¨ and I just shook my and smiled. Then I saw that they were wearing bullet proof vests with ¨POLICIA¨emblazoned across the chest. ¨Well, at least we won´t be getting robbed illegally,¨ I thought. They stopped us, asked for our passports and searched our stuff. They were Narcotics Agents and were patrolling the pass into Iquitos. So I talked to them, told them what we were doing, showed them some of our gear (they really liked our backpacking stove) and they asked if we wanted a tow into Iquitos. We ended up shaving off two hours of paddling and arrived at the port with a police escort. I guess that´s one way of getting into Iquitos.0to Leticia17-NOV-2009 21:21:34Paddling the final few meters into Porta Masusa in Iquitos was like stepping into another world. We rounded a bend in the river out of the ether a mass of lights and urban sprawl lay ahead of us. We spent four days surrounded by the concrete and grime of this lost city dropped in the middle of the Amazon. It was a dismal place and everyday I woke up longing to be free of the noise and smell of cars and motorcycles and back on the river. This was the first time I realized how truly off the map we had been travelling; before we had stayed at the hostel in Iquitos we had met three other tourists in the month and a half that we had been travelling. In Iquitos we were surrounded by English speakers, the menus were in English and where there was once presumably something that resembled culture there was now whitewashed tourist-friendly restaurants and kitsch stores. I was glad to leave when we did.
From Iquitos we made our way down to Indianna, a modern little town unlike anything we had seen on the river. The further we travel down the river the richer and more more modern are the communties and Indianna was no excption.
We left the cement sidewalks and street lights for Pevas, a smaller town tucked away off the main river on a small side channel. When we pulled into Pevas we saw a big sprawling ramshackle mansion of plywood and tin with a lookout tower that dominated the otherwise nonexistant skyline situated on a hill overlooking the town. there lives Pancho Grippa, one of the most bizarre, crazed, tragic, and mad men I have met on this trip. Grippa is an artist and a living legend on this part of the river. Everyone knows him and they haven't met they know of him and he doesn't give damn about anything. He built his sanctuary on a hill and lets travellers stay in it for free, has a full-time staff to cook and clean for him and spends his days walking the streets, painting and drinking and he does all three with great enthusiasm. There are pictures of him on the walls of his gallery when he was younger with a willd head of thick black hair, beard like Che Guevara and madness in his eyes. Now he's fat and his hair is thinning, but there is still something in his eyes that tells that still burns and is still captivating. At his house we met Cassandra, a twenty-six year old girl from Miami. Her father used to smugle plane-loads of cocaine from Colombia to Miami. He was on his last run when the law caught up with him on a pit-stop in the Bahamas. The plane was to put away seventy five million then quit. He lost everything and spent fourteen years in jail. Sometimes it takes losing everything to find out what you really want. He now has a farm outside of Iquitos and is lives simply with this family and wife. Cassandra wanted to come with us to the border and she seemed nice enough so we said "why not," and that was that. She paddled with us for three days and decided she had had enough so we parted ways in Caballo Cocha. It was a big three days for her. She camped on the beach with us, paddled with us and slept on the floor of a thatch hut in a little community we stoped in one night. It was something that she herself said she would never forget, and I was thankful that we had the opportunity to give something special to someone because the trip so many people have given so much to us. We paddled another three lazy days to the border. The last night we camped on the beach, ate a quiet dinner and watched the sunset sad to know that that would be our last night on the river. The next day we arrived at the border and gave our boat away to a guy who owned a small balsa in the port. We were in Leticia, the destination we were aiming at for over a month and it was strange, empty feeling to be there. There was no fist pumping, no back slapping, no triumphant snapshots like those of a mountaineer on the summit of some great peak. We were there and all I could think was 'well, now what.' The only thing left to do was look for a hotel and go buy a ticket on a slow boat for Manaus.0The Slow Boat to Manaus29-NOV-2009 21:39:21We had made it to Leticia, the end of our paddling leg, but we still had a long way to go to get to Manaus. Leticia is a Columbian town situated on the tri-border of Peru, Columbia and Brazil. As soon as we set foot on the banks of Leticia and climbed the wooden steps that led to the central plaza we knew we were no longer in Peru. There were bars and Coca-Cola signs and paved streets and everything was very far from the thatch huts and dirt roads we had come to know over the past two months. We found a cheap hotel, stashed our bags and went out to dig Leticia. I was still weak from a second bout of dysentery I had caught on our way down but we walked the streets none the less, trying the street food and talking to the people, trying to figure out what exactly this place was. The next day we rented a scooter and spent the day driving through the mad mix of motorcycles and pedestrians that filled the streets. We could drive four blocks down from our hotel, cross a yellow line painted on the cracked asphalt and be in Tabatinga, Brazil. There amongst the four lane streets and gleaming bank buildings we felt even more estranged from the Peru we had grown to love. We went to the port, bought tickets for a slow boat to Manaus and spent a few leisurely days walking the streets and relaxing in that sleepy town, waiting to get onboard.
The day finally arrived when we packed up our bags, loaded onto the boat and strung up our hammocks. There was a line running out the door two hours before they started boarding the boat, everyone waiting to get a prime spot. The trip was going to take three days, and everyone on the boat who paid regular passage got three meals a day and place to string up a hammock. When they opened the doors to board, people streamed onto the boat and within an hour the decks were a sea of multi-colored fabric. All of a sudden where there was once an empty deck there was now an impromptu village with winding paths in and out of bags, hammocks, fruit and all other sorts of cargo as people settled in, crammed shoulder to shoulder for the three day ride to Manaus.
This haphazard mass of people grew quickly into a floating community. We were on the outskirts of the foreign nationals neighborhood where all the travelers had clustered together to guard eachothers´ belongings.To my right was Tim, and to my left was Omar, a young guy from Cali, Columbia who had lived in New Jersey for a couple of years and was going from Manaus to Rio de Janeiro to ¨check out the beaches and all the fine girls in bikinis.¨ Further down the line was a lesbian couple from England who had taken a leave from their jobs as school teachers to travel for six months. To their right was a quiet, pensive Frenchman with glasses and sad blue eyes. He quit is job as an engineer and shoved off to South America because ¨one day [he] woke up and asked what does any of this mean?¨ He sat in his hammock and sketched, looking out over the tops of the city of hammock and sighing, then laying down his pencil to flip through the pages of Camus´ La Chute. There was the Chilean couple who shared pineapple with the group everyday and brought bottles of Chilean wine to drink on the way down and the brothers from Patagonia with dread locks and ¨Patagonia Sin Represa¨ buttons on their packs. There was a group of hard drinking young guys from Tabatinga going to take their tests to become firemen and all sorts of other people coming or going, crossing paths in that floating colonoy in the middle of the Amazon. There were eighty people on our deck and one dining room with fifteen seats. At meal time everyone line up and filed in fifteen at a time, ate as quickly as they could and left, so that the people behind them could come in and sit down. There were no tickets or assigned seating, no name cards or tablecloths, just a line of hungry people and big bowls of rice and beans. We talked and read all day, passing the time with people who started as strangers and left as friends and the three days on the boat passed in no time. We cruised into port and passed the Meeting of the Waters in Manaus, where the Solimoes and Negra meet and where, for the Brazilians, the Amazon officially starts. We had made to Manaus, and it couldn´t have been in better company.0Difficult Questions26-JAN-2010 15:26:29When people from home ask me about people from the river, I always tell them about the teacher's wife.
We had been staying in Chipaota for the better half of a week, living and working with the men and women of the community and trying as best we could to assimilate ourselves into the daily ebb and flow of life on the river. Early on a question came to mind and stuck there until I asked it and the answer I recieved did not clarify, but rather complicated everything.
Chipaota is a native community of thatch huts lining a mud path. It has no electricity, no running water and no connection to the outside world save a couple wooden canoes with outboard motors. It's on the right side of the river.
Chazuta is a town of cinder block houses along paved streets. It has electricity, running water, cable television and a road that connects it to the thriving city of Tarapoto. It's on the left side of the river
In Chipaota they drink from the river.
In Chazuta they turn on a tap.
On the second to last day of our stay in Chipaota, I asked the teacher's wife the question.
If you could, would you move across the river?
Absolutely.
You would leave this way of life, this connection to the land, for cable?
Of course.
When people from home ask me about people from the river they want to hear stories about the virtues of a life lived simply. They want me to conjur images of smiling people who have nothing, but are happy in their simplicity. They want fables about the noble savages naked and naive on the banks of the Amazon.
What they get is the dark honest eyes of the teacher's wife when she gave me an answer that I didn't want to hear.
_____________________________________________________
I wrote this a few days after we left Iquitos, almost a month after our stay in Chipaota. In Iquitos we met lots of foreignors who came to there to shell out their few hundred dollars, take a three-day jungle tour, visit a "native" village, and come back with stories of how simple, and innocent and happy these rainforest natives were. One could say that this is nothing more than a bourgeois tendency to romanticize poverty with notions of unfettered simplicity and to confuse the chains of necessity with the nobility of choice. That it is merely a way to ease the discomfort one who has options feels when in the company of those who do not. And that would be fair. Yet I couldn't help but find myself revering the beauty I though I saw in what could very reasonably be called destitute poverty. I admired the tenacity and rawness of the human spirit when the human spirit is engaged in the simple work of surviving. Maybe those were just my own bourgeois sensibilities.
I loved living that simple way of life on the Amazon, and when I left for Antigua, I sought it out again, feeling more comfortable sharing the work and the company of a poor farming family in San Antonio, than the company of the tourists and ex-pats that walk the streets and fill the bars of Antigua.
I chose the simpler life for a while because I saw and knew and could come back to an upper-middle class life in the United States. But maybe that appreciation of the simple can only come through having the choice to take it. How do you answer the teacher's wife? How do you tell her that those material gains only come at the great loss of culture, of purity and beauty? How can you make someone appreciate what they have for what it is, when what they have seems so beat and dirty and poor when they compare it with what could be had on the other side of the river?
I spent a long time living in the shadow of these questions, and I still really don't have an answer.00