Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (3 page)

‘I don’t usually wear underwear to bed’, Kenny, the eleven-year-old, informed me as we swung side by side in our hammocks on the jungle lodge porch. ‘I mean, sometimes I do, but I just find it uncomfortable, don’t you?’

I looked up from my book, slightly shocked and not quite sure how to answer. However, as we moved on to discuss the surprise success of Justin Bieber — ‘he hasn’t even got very striking eyes’ — and the sad demise of a man who’d died by licking a frog, I realised I was actually quite enjoying my Amazon experience. I don’t think I’ve had such a deep and meaningful conversation with an eleven-year-old since I was … well, eleven.

For AU$200 I booked a three-night, four-day tour via one of the many operators in Quito’s touristic-maze, La Mariscal, to experience the jungle with a bunch of randoms. I’ve come alone because Farzana had to fly home to London after our Galápagos adventures. And yes, I made sure I knew what I was letting myself in for with
this
trip.

Or so I thought.

To get to our lodge at the border of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, I had to take an arduous overnight bus from Quito to Lago Agrio — an uninspiring town with a name that means ‘sour lake’. This town was rainforest itself until oil was discovered in 1967 and the American oil-explorers built it up as a base. From this point my group and I were driven two hours to the river and put on a boat for another two hours. Getting to the Amazon is not easy. Still, here I am, deep in the green, currently under a blanket in my dorm room, with a family of stripy cockroaches scuttling all over the bathroom. A sleeping Taiwanese girl is snoring softly in the bunk above me and the door is bolted shut to my right, in spite of us being in the middle of nowhere. More on why in a minute.

The Cuyabeno Reserve has one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. This croaking rainforest is home to thousands of species of flora and fauna and hundreds of animals endemic to the area. Indigenous communities still practise shamanism and ancient medicinal rituals in villages dotted along the riverbanks.

When I arrived, I asked if we’d be seeing any tribes with their penises strapped to their waists — something they do to avoid the invasion of the candiru fish, which has a tendency to swim up the human urethra and parasitise it if you dare to pee in the river. But allegedly the most exciting tribes, the ones who used to grunt and shrink heads in boiling cauldrons, live around the fringes of the Amazon, mostly in the border regions of Brazil. Shame.

‘I do not want to see a tarantula,’ I stated to our jungle guide, a strapping, black-haired man in his mid-thirties I’ll call Mowgli, as soon as I stepped onto the boat.

‘You and everyone else who comes here,’ he replied, smirking.

Prior to signing up for the trip, I Googled what I was likely to encounter here and the Internet informed me there are approximately 3600 species of spiders inhabiting the Amazon basin. To not encounter one, I’d have to walk around blindfolded. To not encounter a tarantula, Mowgli told me, I’d have to keep my eyes off the ceiling in the jungle lodge dining room.

Our group consists of a family of Americans (including Kenny and his two brothers), two French friends, a cool Ecuadorean girl my age called Dani and her mum, and the girl from Taiwan, who doesn’t speak English. Between our no-language-necessary appreciation of the jungle over the past few days, we all seem to have bonded. Except with Mowgli. He’s the reason the door is currently bolted. Don’t worry, I’m coming to it.

I estimate I’d been here roughly one hour and twenty minutes before I saw my first tarantula. Kenny actually spotted it, crawling out of the rafters about two metres above our heads. Mowgli hadn’t been joking about the dining room ceiling. The rest of the group rushed in to see what all the noise was about and we all jumped around, making a fuss for about five minutes before we realised that in spite of its big, black, hairy presence, it was really quite boring, just sitting there like a pink-toed stuffed toy. They actually have
pink
toes, these ones. Not that it makes them any less scary-looking. It’s like putting ballet shoes on the Grim Reaper.

Mowgli stood nonchalantly on the sidelines as we composed ourselves, before announcing we were heading out to see the sunset over the lake, to fish for piranhas and to look for the famed pink Amazonian river dolphins. These dolphins have no natural predators, so they can happily live and hunt alone, although Mowgli explained that they often choose to live in families. They’re known to have a brain capacity that’s forty per cent bigger than ours. Imagine that! It’s hard to believe that dolphins haven’t figured out a way of taking over the world. Or maybe they have but they’ve since decided it’s all too much effort and they might as well stick to swimming around and eating fish, which is easier.

After a thrilling adventure involving sailing through sweeping branches, ducking on command and fishing for piranhas in the mangroves (I caught three — and while some guides will let you cook and eat them, we released all ours back into the water), we paddled around in our giant canoe in the cotton candy colours of the setting sun. The most the pink dolphins offered us, though, were a few bubbles and snorts, which broke the coffee-coloured surface of the water and proved to us their existence, at least.

‘Did you know, the Amazon River itself releases more water into the sea in one day than the London Thames does in one whole year?’ one of the guys in our group piped up.

We all shook our heads.

Not to be outdone with the facts, Mowgli sat up straighter. ‘Did you know, a snake smells of earwax? That is how you know you are about to stand on one.’

Enlightened, we all shook our heads again and I realised, along with everyone else, probably, that I’d never even thought to smell my own earwax.

The smell of the rainforest is one of warm peat, like a greenhouse in a garden centre. It’s absolutely bursting with life — every time you turn your head there’s a flicker of a butterfly’s wing, a movement in a tree, the squawk of a bird taking flight. It’s one living, breathing organism, the ineluctable circle of life and death. Every living thing plays a vital role here and every
dead
thing in due course becomes a life-giver, a buffet for the unborn, allowing in its passing something new to thrive. It’s so mysterious and huge you cannot help but feel as though you’re constantly on the verge of discovering a secret.

You rarely see any animals up close; it’s always in the corner of your eye. But you can almost see Pachamama herself — Mother Nature — smiling through the canopy in a sunbeam, an unseen spirit of the wind swinging in a spider web between two ferns, big enough for a human to use as a hammock. It’s so intense, so thick and in places so impenetrable that it threatens to swallow you if you go even slightly off course. The people who live here have a deep, deep respect for the rainforest.

‘Last year, a biologist got lost in here,’ Mowgli told us. ‘She was found fourteen days later, eighty kilometres away in … how you say … in the door of death?’

‘On death’s doorstep?’ I offered.

He ignored me.

‘The worst thing you can do when you get lost in the jungle is keep moving,’ he continued, looking at us seriously through dark, glinting eyes. ‘If it ever happens to you, stay where you are. You’ll be found. If you move, the jungle will consume you.’

Such words from such a man can make a woman moist, even without the clammy jungle climate. Rain pelted us occasionally from all angles through the tree tops, threatening to send us off course, and every time I followed Mowgli along the paths he’d cut with his machete I was consumed by the thought of the jungle consuming me.

After fishing, when we reached the lake at the end of the river, locals from nearby villages and tourists were competing in a canoe race and swimming. Call me daft, but I never expected to be able to swim in the Amazon.

‘It’s perfectly safe,’ Mowgli informed us, ‘as long as you save your toilet time for later.’

My urethra contracted just thinking about it but Kenny and his brothers jumped in and splashed about and they seemed just fine, so I lowered myself in to join them, keeping my eye out for piranhas and other evils. I don’t have to be afraid of the candiru fish (it’s not exactly an issue for girls), but as Kenny’s uncle pointed out, they should introduce these to public swimming pools back home anyway — way too many people piss in those things without consequence.

Back in our motor-powered canoe, every now and then as we cruised the river, a dazzling blue
Morpho menelaus
butterfly the size of a sparrow would rise and fall like a buzzing electric current in the sky, and then hide itself from our lenses in a flowering bush. In the twilight, kingfishers swooped and as darkness threw the banks into shadow, our driver hurtled full-throttle towards the starting point of our night trek, using nothing but the stars and the familiar shapes of the treetops to guide him.

‘He knows them like his hand,’ Mowgli said from his place beside me at front of the boat, when I asked if we were likely to crash.

‘You mean the
back
of his hand?’ I corrected him.

He ignored me.

Our night trek was a forty-minute hike over flat land on what seemed to be a well-worn path. Mowgli seemed to spot things with some extrasensory power, because we’d all be admiring, say, a giant cricket, and suddenly he’d appear holding a frog, which he seemed to produce from nowhere. I half suspect he has a hundred props dotted about the place in case his visitors are disappointed, but I do admire the passion he has for the jungle and its critters, even the huge-pincered, multi-toothed beasts and bugs that make me want to scream bloody murder and vomit on my nice new trainers.

At one point, he whipped out his machete and cut down a branch to make a walking pole for Dani’s mum, which made her gush her thanks in Spanish and the rest of us females gaze at him in wide-eyed wonder.

Mowgli, I’ve since discovered, is a man of the land, the kind who knows nothing of trivial things like Facebook, or Twitter, or clothes without camouflage printing on them. He has a mobile phone, he told me, but he rarely turns it on. Instead, he plugs into the jungle, where he’s lived on and off for twenty-five years. He’s seen anacondas two metres long. He’s seen a thousand tourists scream at his spiders. He had a girlfriend once, but she didn’t want to live in the Amazon, so he dumped her.

After the night trek, Mowgli asked if he could hold my hand on the way back to the lodge. I thought it was a bit weird, seeing as he’d ignored me for most of the day, but by the time I got round to replying, he’d already grabbed it and was pointing out the Southern Cross in an indigo sky speckled with stars.

Later on, Mowgli asked if I would accompany him in the canoe, just the two of us, so he could show me even more constellations. We’d just had dinner, during which he’d walked to the table, still in his camouflage combats and Action Man vest, carrying a live fruit bat by its wings. He’d just plucked it from the sky, in flight, it seemed. This simple act caused the eleven-year-old to shriek and every female in the room to swoon again.

Something inside warned me not to succumb to his charms, but … the way he’d wielded that machete and sliced it through the vines; the way he’d jumped up in the boat with his bare biceps glistening and gestured to every passing bird and butterfly; the way he doesn’t even have a Facebook account … you just don’t
get
men like this anywhere else. It all did something funny to my heart. I surrendered.

‘You and me, we’re twin souls,’ Mowgli said, sitting next to me a little too closely after he’d rowed the wooden boat roughly three metres round the corner from the lodge and tied it to a tree, where we couldn’t be seen.

‘Really? Twin souls?’ I said, furrowing my brow in the darkness and keeping my eye out for caimans along the riverbanks. Mowgli told us earlier that caimans don’t tend to attack humans, but you never know when one of these mini-croc type things will be having an inquisitive day.

‘Yes, I can tell.’ He put his arm around me then, leaned in and sniffed my hair. I didn’t ask why.

‘How do you know we’re twin souls?’ I asked him. After all, we’d only met eight hours ago and we’d barely spoken.

He ignored me. ‘I like you so much,’ he said instead.

‘Do you? Why?’

‘When I saw you in your bikini I knew I liked you.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Can I kiss you?’

‘Um, well, we don’t really know each other.’

‘I want to kiss you so much.’

‘Well. All right.’
Fuck it, why not? I’m in a canoe in the Amazon. This doesn’t happen every day and I can’t escape anyway. We’re surrounded by caimans.

After our kiss (which was decidedly unromantic, seeing as he merely shoved his tongue in my mouth and wriggled it about in a way that suggested he’d been studying lizards for too long), I made him row me back. But Mowgli decided to follow me to my room, meaning I had to run in order to shut and lock the door behind me. He proceeded to shadow me everywhere for the rest of the night, beckoning me from darkened doorways to get me to follow him into the jungle like a love-struck Tarzan unsure as to how to woo Jane. I started to get a bit creeped out.

For the whole of the next day he’d sidle up to me and touch me, whereupon I’d have to bat him off like a pesky horsefly. So yeah, this is exactly why I’ve been bolting the bedroom door shut at night. He’s a little over-amorous, our jungle guide. I also found out he tried it on with Dani shortly after I’d run away to the dining room to play cards with Kenny and his brothers that first night. I think he knew he liked her when he saw her in a bikini, too.

Anyway, after another one of our treks, we made our way to a nearby village along the river, where we were immediately set upon by the community’s pet woolly monkey, Nacho. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to play with a monkey but, seriously, it’s one of the most fun things ever. I could have watched him all day. Nacho would swing about from tree to human shoulder to tree, and at one point, some German guys from another group who were drinking beers turned around to find him swigging the dregs from their discarded cans. Nacho actually thought he was human.