June 21st, 2006
6. 21. 06
Our boat comes upon a sandy clearing at the base of the cliff, our guide shouts out greetings to the people taking their morning baths in the water. Shampooing their hair, wrapping themselves in brightly colored towels. We walk with them up the path and into the village, where we are informed by the shaman of the tribe that if we wish, he and some of the others can don tribal costumes and put on a performance of traditional songs and dances.
Both of us have travelled in the past, and both of us have been duped and extorted on the tourist trail before. We are immediately suspicious of the Indians´motives. Will they ask for an obscene amount of money when they finish, spoiling the experience of their performance with an unpleasant haggling situation?
The guide assures us that whatever we want to give will be acceptable. Luckily, we come bearing gifts: packages of candy, pencils for the children, cigarettes for the shaman, and MIMA rubber bracelets for all.
We wait for the troupe of performers in a traditional lodge built of straw and bamboo. They arrive after some while, and their transformation is astonishing: the same people we have jsut seen shampooing their hair, wearing t-shirts and dresses, all appear before us in traditional costume and body paint. The women wear grass skirts and nothing else. Their faces and bellies are painted with some tribal design. The men wear loin cloths, but for shame wear speedos underneath. They are, however, able to partly obscure their speedos by sticking big feathers in them, creating some kind of camouflauge. An orange speedo, nonetheless, is an orange speedo. The shaman and the rest of the men wear headresses. A young pregant woman in her third trimester is part of the troupe. As is a little two year old girl. She wears a purple straw skirt of her own. Her mother holds her on her hip for the duration of the performance.
The Shaman explains each of the three dances before they are performed. They are for welcomes, weddings, and goodbyes. The music is played on pan pipes and is repititious. The scale they use is some kind of melodic scale dictated by the lengths of the ten reeds in the pan pipes the men play.
The dancing isn´t any more complex. Men and women stepping in unison; in circles or in lines moving back and forth. Music and dance that hasn´t evolved or changed much from it´s pre-historic beginnings.
The troupe is thrilled to receive the gifts we bring. A young man distributes the pencils to the children who stand in front of him with outstretched hands, the candy is evenly divided among all, as are the MIMA bracelets. Christoph tells them it is my birthday (it is - my twenty fourth) and they heap beautiful necklaces and bracelets upon me. The kind they sell to tourists for income. A woman comes forward and sings me a song in their native language - wishing me health and good fortune.
As we walk back down the to boat, we are somewhat overcome with feeling. The experience of sharing with these people has warmed my heart to its very core. Can´t speak for Christoph, but we venture out onto the river again feeling very positive about the whole experience.
Now, the jungle itself? It is a strange, scary, magical place. The guide takes us on a four hour hike through it. It´s a veritable pharmacy in there. He scrapes vicks vapor rub off of trees, rubber, the stuff bubble gum is made of, the stuff aspirin is made of - and when I ask about Ayahúasca, the most powerful hallucinogen on earth, he takes us ten minutes off the trail and walks us straight up to the stuff. Did we want to try, he asks? No, we reply. We aren´t quite up tonight for a revelation of the universe.
One of my mentors did ayahuasca in the columbian rainforest back in the sixties. He took it in a village during a ritual presided over by a shaman. He drank some earthy porridge of it and it sent him into a paroxysm of puking, peeing, pooping, snotting, and crying for about ten minutes. Completely purified his body. He went down to the river and stripped his clothes off and cleaned himself in the water. When the roots of a nearby tree came out of the ground and embraced him, he went on a journey that stretched through eternity and all existence - for about twenty hours.
So that´s why we pass it up. Such experiences must be taken very seriously after all, and must be administered in the proper conditions. On some guy´s motorboat in the jungle after dark would maybe send us into the water to go alligator swimming and those little fishies that swim up into your privates would get us. Then we´d be corked forever.
Anyhow…
We spend the night on the porch of a wooden house floating in a swampy waterway, in a hammocks, listening to a deafening chorus of jungle creatures that becomes hypnotizing after awhile. We watch two little indian boys playing checkers on the wooden floor planks next to us by the light of a single candle.
At some point in the evening the guide comes up with a trident and says, “Wanna go Alligator hunting?“ Sure, we reply. We put our shoes on and follow him toward the boat. He shines the beam of his flashlight into the still-waterway that seems to go forever into the black night jungle. Itapó it´s called - the part of the forest where the ground is buried beneath the water and you have to take a boat through it.
His beam stops all the sudden on something that glows in the distance like a fluorescent orange Christmas light. “What´s that?“ we ask. “The eye of an alligator,“ the guide replies.
We step into the leaky, rotting wooden boat with two indian teens - brothers of the guy who has walked us through the jungle earlier in the day. One stands at the front paddling with a single oar with the flashlight in his mouth, scanning the edges of the waterway for our alligator. The other stands behind him, trident at ready, reaching down every couple of minutes to bail water out of the leaky boat with a tin bucket.
The alligator we have spotted from the shore is wise to us and has already taken his leave. We keep going deeper and deeper into the Igapó, ducking out of the way of branches and reeds passing by.
It´s amazing how dark it all is. A halloween canvas to project all of your nightmares on. Anything scary you ever imagined projects like an IMAX show in that enviroment. Is that hanging vine a snake? Is that log one of those five meter alligators they told us about? Is it a body? Someone dead? A vampire? A clown?
We arrive at something like the end of the Igapó, but our orientation is so skewed neither Christoph nor I have any idea where we were. The guides get out and wade into some tall grass and leave us into the boat. Great. They are going to go find an alligator, they say, which is fine with me. I don´t call myself a Buddhist, and I´m not a vegetarian - but I just don´t like the idea of spearing an alligator to death in its own living room. Just doesn´t sit well.
They leave us there for an HOUR.
We start making bird noises to pass the time, while we use the bucket in the boat to bail out the water that is steadily leaking in. They respond for fun every now and again, far far far away. Wanna know something crazy? The jungle echoes. Isn´t that weird?
The alligator they bring back is a little anti-climactic after the ordeal they put us through leaving us there to bail water and make bird noises. They came back with a little eight inch baby. We get some camera footage of it. They have us hold it by the neck. Christoph makes a joke about it biting my genitals off and the guides laugh and say I would then be a woman. Ha ha. Very funny.
We let the little guy go back home after awhile, shining the flashlight on him, watching him wiggle-swim back down into the water, until we can´t see him anymore…
Entry Filed under: Brazil
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