You know that feeling when you get up in the morning tired, not from a state of sleep, but a state of frustration, the kind that leaves you somewhat dreading the day ahead? And all of it manifested from the course of a sleepless and otherwise uncomfortable night? Well this was such a morning. It was worse for Blake then it was for me, I actually slept a little, he did not. You see, Ayahuasca keeps you awake, because it, like many other drugs, keeps your mind, or your body, fully engaged. Making sleep a very difficult proposition, even for someone like Blake, who finds sleep easier than I could find water falling out of a boat.At 8 in the morning Wilder came to our hut with two plates of food, each with a portion of Patarashka, vegetables and boiled potatoes. After finishing our meal, which actually took us some time because we weren't really hungry and still in slow mo from our long night, Wilder asked us about our ceremony. Did we have visions? what did we feel? were we ok? that kind of thing. Caesar ate nothing, he just watched and listened while smoking a jungle cigarette (pure tobacco, no chemicals, but strong as all hell)I told him I had no visions, but to clarify for the readers, I had no hallucinations, I did see many things in my mind, but not through my eyes, a distinction I make because in my own opinion, for it to be a true vision, it should be seen, not only thought about. Semantics perhaps, yes, but the most powerful psychedelic trips I have ever experienced, those I truly felt to of had visions with, were those I could not outrun by the simple closure of the eyes.I went on to say that after the ceremony was done I felt a great sadness come over me as I went through all the friends and family I have suffering back home, and all over the world, from a multitude of things really, things like drug abuse, post traumatic stress, anger issues, identity problems, broken homes, debt slavery, cultural occultism, obesity, anxiety, bipolar-ism, materialism and the list goes on..I felt their pain and their struggles to survive against the monsters that haunt them all. How lost each of them are in their own world of sadness they cannot escape. Each of these people has a history with me, moments we shared, both good and bad. They are important to me as companions in the long and unknown journey that is life. I travel the world in search of the things that will change me for the better, forge me into who I will one day become, and in so doing leaving them behind on their own.It is a new idea I've come to recently, one that has shown great promise for the dreams I have for the future. That is, to help them, I must first help myself. For no broken man should hope to successfully lead another before mending himself. This means we must walk the paths we choose, and look not back upon the choice as an abandonment of the other, but a path chosen to lead oneself into the light of your brightest future.We may not stand on the same ground or face the same trials, but they remain inside me, deep in my memories, locked away tightly but free to roam within me as well, surrounding me always, riding my shoulders when I need them to give me strength, when I use them as examples of how to be or not to be, and how to succeed when my base personality requires a certain trait to best suit the moment. It is through them that my adaptation to the ever-changing world I explore is accomplished.Due to a psychedelics ability to emulate any reality, while using them you can actually feel the physical and emotion feelings of others, not just people, but animals, insects, anything. It doesn't end there though, your mind in this state of awareness, depending on dose, setting and the type of substance, can be truly limitless. While emulating their pain, feeling their frustration, I too suffered and I thought about how much I cared for them all and want to help heal their wounds somehow. When you care, you cry, not always because your sad or angry, often because your happy, amazed at your luck, your circumstance, your role in this cosmic play you were born to fulfill. I did cry and all these reasons flooded through me readily.I related this as best I could to the Shaman through Wilder, without getting too detailed, for it would take to long and was not necessary for the Shaman to know at any rate. When I was done Caesar told us he saw the spirit of a large swamp tree surrounding us during the ceremony and that we needed to visit such a tree and pray for our friends there. So after lunch at around 3, Wilder, Moisess, Caesar, a guide, Blake and I all got into a jungle boat, a roofless canoe carved from a single tree, and hauled beside us another boat that belonged to another village at the mouth of the river.At the other side of the river we slid the boat on to the shore, dug an oar into the mud and tied the boat to it. We all got out and started walking into the jungle. There was a path there, cut through the brush, by my uneducated guess, Id say it was traversed a few times monthly at best. It was not very wide or well-defined, it was swampland so for most of the walk we trudged through murky water or mud, always minding our steps as our gum boots got stuck from time to time. We came to the tree only 15 minutes into the walk, but before we were to engage in the ceremony we walked another 15 minutes to get to a small pond with large water lilies floating around the edges.On our way back we stopped at the tree, which was a big black old growth, with large fanning roots that suspended the entire tree above the ground and into the air. An evolutionary trait many trees in the Amazon developed to survive the extreme rise and fall of water that happens every year with the coming and going rains. All around us were vines hanging from its upper branches that also dug into the swamp around it. Some vines in the Amazon are known to strangle the trees they attach themselves to and use the energy they produce to survive because they themselves cannot perform photosynthesis.Caesar, who had been smoking the entire day, blew cigarette smoke all around us, in our clothes and into our faces, making us lower our heads so he could blow smoke into the crowns of our skulls, using his hands as a tube as he blew while chanting with each exhale. He asked us to gather all the positive energy we could and then place our hands on the tree and pray, and so we did. For 10 minutes my mind raced through all that I had thought of and felt in the night, and I asked the spirits of Ayahuasca and of the tree to send all our energy of love and compassion, hope and strength to all our friends and family, but mostly for those friends of ours who are truly lost, truly in need of change. We finished our prayer and left the swamp returning to camp.For dinner we had a plain noodle soup and plain rice, which is much different without being cooked with salt, a truly bland starch is hard to swallow, so we got a lime and squeezed it over it, when that wasn't enough we used a jungle orange, which is actually green and tastes much less fruity than the orange ones were used to, it was a process we would come to repeat almost every meal while at the retreat. When dinner was finished we retreated to our hut in the woods and waited for the Spaniards to come, who can made a deal with Wilder and Caesar to have a one night ayahuasca ceremony. I stayed awake just long enough to hear Caesar begin chanting and then dozed off, my mind lost in the heavy air of sleeplessness and strained emotional faculties...
Fairwell Cusco, Bienvenido Iquitos
Early in the morning, at around 6, I got up and said goodbye to Luiz whose bus left at a 7am, "When I get outside I will cry." he said, gave me one last hug and squeezed through the narrow slit in the doorway with his large pack. A couple of hours later Ninoska left, we had a nice hug, and then it was just the 3 of us, Blake, Humberto and I. Humberto made a delicious enchilada breakfast with last nights left overs and then he too left us to tend to his business.Our flight to Lima was at 2:40 so we waited until 12 to get a taxi to the airport, which was 8 soles. Upon arriving the woman at the Avianca counter asked us for our tickets, we had only the print out given to us at the main office, she seemed terribly distressed by this, asking us if we had signed in electronically via the net, we said no and this didn't help her worried demeanor. She told us it was a security precaution and that someone had already signed us in. "must have been the people at the office we bought the flights in." We said. We eventually we settled this and then she informed Blake that his pack was to unorganized and had to be wrapped in a plastic wrap before being allowed on the plane, so they charged us 35 soles and wrapped it in an alien green plastic sheath.When we went through security the guard pulled me aside and asked me if I had a pocket knife in my bag, I did, he made me remove it and was going to throw it away, I stopped him in his tracks and said, "this is my father's knife, I'm not throwing it away." His face turned ugly and he said it wasn't possible to keep the knife with me on board, I asked him if there was a way to get it into my checked baggage and he said It was very unlikely. With a final plea he let me through the security door in the back and said I had 5 minutes to return through security and that getting the knife checked was my responsibility. It wasn't really my father's knife, but I had gotten it in Switzerland with my mom more than 15 years ago and I wasn't going to let it go just because it wasn't a good enough story to pass mustard with this guy.I went back to the Avianca counter and asked if they could check my knife in my bag, they said it was impossible, I would have to check another bag with the knife inside. I feel silly to have suggested checking my toiletries bag, but I did and they almost snickered at the idea of it. So I checked my trusted yellow backpack, the one I've been traveling with right by my side for the last 9 years, without ever checking it. I did remove my money satchel first though, if nothing else, Id have that to get me through things if it was lost or stolen. Money is the most important thing to travel with after all. I got back through security and joined Blake sitting in the waiting area of our gate.I looked at my ticket and thought I saw our arrival time as 6:05, I had told our couch surfer in Iquitos that we would arrive at 8:30, So I paid the 3 soles at the cafe for use of their wifi and related to her our change in arrival. Blake got a medium size bag of classic Lays potato chips for us to share and we waited for the gate to open. Soon we were boarded, and as soon as our plane took off I checked my ticket again and noticed with great disappointment in my powers of observation that our flight didn't in fact arrive at 6:05, but at the original time I had told her. As if to ease my conscience, the pilot informed us that due to better than expected flight conditions we would be arriving in Iquitos at around 7:40, which made my blunder a little easier to take.We arrived in Iquitos and walked off the plane down the steps on to the tarmac for several hundred meters until reaching the building at the far right side where our baggage would be unloaded. Moments later we had our bags and exited the building straight into the parking lot where an army of motortaxi drivers and anxiously awaiting relatives of all types waited to see their kin, or whoever it was they were there to meet.There standing next to the curb was Caroline, our local couch surfing host. The three of us greeted each other and crammed into the first motor taxi who had a reasonable price, which Caroline was easily able to accomplish. The motor taxis which I refer to are nothing more than split down the middle motorcycles with a back-end resembling a two-wheel cart with a plastic roof. Some are nicer than others to be sure, but anything fancier would require some higher purpose that doesn't really exist around these parts, with the exception of those used for hauling commercial goods that is.We reached Caroline's fathers hostel, named the Salamander Backpackers, and unloaded our gear into our double bunk-bed room with a single rickety fan spinning haphazardly from the ceiling. The beds were 20 soles a night, which we didn't have to pay. She took us to a local sports bar that was owned by an ex marine and baseball player from Texas that had amazingly decorated walls, full of jerseys, sports memorabilia, 25 foot snake skins and much, much more. The upstairs bar was named Margaritaville and aptly so, the winding metal staircase was actually pretty treacherous, in the states we'd call something like that a lawsuit waiting to happen, but here in Iquitos, and indeed in South America at large, no such weakness in a local drunks character, or ability to make any claim of fault except that of his own, exists.Looking at the menu, we found the Ayahuasca diet options in the very back. Blake chose the veggie burrito and the fish and I the personal veggie pizza. My pizza was blander than any Id ever imagined, it didn't even have tomato sauce on it, I nearly choked on the dry crust. Blakes Burrito was the same, but at least his fish was alright. We ended up having to get some sugar-free fruit juices just to get the food down. We spoke a little with Caroline about our plans here in Iquitos, that we were looking for a legitimate Shaman to facilitate our Ayahuasca Healing and that we were not interested in a mass ceremony with many people. She said she knew someone who might be able to help us and that we could talk with them in the morning. We returned to the Hostel, said goodnight to Caroline and returned to our bunk beds to sweat the whole night through beneath the rickety, barely effective ceiling fan.