Welcome to the Amazon Jungle.
You’d be crazy to go in there without a guide. Hiking is insane. Five minutes of walking and I didn’t know where I was, it all looked the same.
The river is the life of everything. We bathe in
her, drink her, wash our clothes, dishes, move along her and feed from her.
Village life is simple.
Women run the town. The family I stayed with had four
young children. The mother (only 32 years old) would cook, clean, fish – she
knew how to do everything. We would load the canoe up with the kids and take
off piranha fishing for the next day's breakfast. She was a skilled fisherwoman.
My bedtime was early as I craved the safety of my mosquito net. My
sheets were from a hospital; they still had the logo and the splattered bloodstains.
After a while my bug bites started to grow stuff but the kids helped
me scrape them all out.
The family sent me to school with the children
for two days. They told me “your Spanish is so bad you need to go to school.” So I did, but I couldn’t even keep
up with the five year olds. They all thought it was pretty funny.
The Tarantula We spotted its dark living hole just off the
path, with a few big hairy legs and sparkling eyes barely visible. It took four
people and a few large sticks to extract it unwillingly. It was everything I could
have imagined – big, hairy, and totally unreal, like straight out of a movie.
I’ll miss the morning swims and the sounds
of the jungle. Taking a slow breath and swimming deeper and deeper into the
cool brown water and racing the kids to the other side of the bank. The magic of the life in the Amazon.
