Ten years ago I met Pedro Yaure, an indigenous member of the Tikuna tribe who has lived his whole life in and around Puerto Nariño the Colombian part of the Amazon. He was a young man, hyperactive, always busy and for the a few days he was our guide and companion who showed us a small part of his world. Myself, a Chilean girl and a Dutch guy, together we roamed around the jungle, Pedro made musical instruments out of plants; we ate grubs and termites; painted our faces and snorted “tobacco”, a local plant mixed with ash and other elements that gives you strength. Pedro actually uses the “tobacco” or rape as it is known as pick-me-up when he has to carry out heavy-duty tasks such as carrying large logs from the interior of the jungle. With his friends we went out on a canoe to see the pink and grey dolphins and one night he left us abandoned in the jungle while he went off to fish, sleeping in hammocks surround by what felt like a billion or more mosquitos. As we walked back to the village the following day, after not getting much sleep, Pedro showed us a plot of land that he said was his, there he was going to build his house and have guests stay. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook we kept in touch all these years and last week I returned to see how my old friend was doing.
He had built his house a few years after my first trip and subsequently built a second house alongside a kitchen/living area that is separated away from the two buildings. He is now married, to no less than 3 wives and has had 2 children, one from his first and “main” wife and a second from a wife who takes her turn to be visited. His third wife, yet to bear a child is only 19, he visited her while we were there, early one morning to take her out on one of his daily fishing trips. He told us that she was complaining about the lack of attention and as she likes to fish he killed two birds with one stone; I am not clear if there are romantic opportunities at 5am on the river, but he did return with a handful of small piranhas, with very little flesh, that made a pretty pithy lunch that same day. Having maxed out on the number of wives allowed by the Tikuna, he does not hold back on chasing other women with a mixed degree of success. The macho lifestyle is alive and kicking within the tribes of the Amazon and there is very little resistance or fuss from the women. With 24-hour discos in the hamlet, the most notable named “Mister T”, there is plenty of opportunity for the local men to couple up with more than their official quota of wives. With the influx of tourists as well, and those “Eat, Prey, Love” fans who are looking for a different experience, from time to time the local men can vary their dalliances with more exotic options.
Pedro had lost his youthful sprightliness in the ten-year span between visits but his enthusiasm and knowledge of the jungle had not abated. His project to build his house and guest house “Yaure Lodge” has been completed, he is now a father and with the income from tourism he has started to travel further afield within the interior of Colombia. His day-to-day routine has remained the same, he rises early to fish, he is a tourist guide in the day and at night hangs around like a teenager on a street corner looking for whatever action he can find. The years have been incredibly kind to Pedro in regards to his physical appearance, he has not aged much, in fact his father who is 80 does not have a grey hair on his head and I doubt that there is an obsession to use Just for Men or other dyes so far from our Instagrammable world. His lifestyle and healthy diet contribute to his ageless looks and it seems if you research a little the studies that are taking place, scientists are revealing how healthy the Amazon tribe people are compared to the western counterparts. My wife asked about the health of those living in the community and Pedro’s (main) wife, Dolly told her that very few people die of cancer or heart conditions, normally people just get old and those that die prematurely it is because of an accident or fight between neighbors. She said that pneumonia is a bigger threat, especially to the young, as they do not have any local medicines that can combat this. Logically the biggest threat to life are the creepy crawlies that roam literally everywhere, Pedro had recently had a close shave with a snake when hiking with two German girls. He showed me the teeth marks in his wellington boot as much as a warning that my Gore-Tex hiking boots would be no protection against the realities of what we might come across during a night trek that we went on one evening.
Walking through the jungle in the pitch black, with no moon for company we only had one torch between us; Pedro updated me on the changes that had taken place, not only in the last ten years but also throughout his life. We did stumble across a hunter out looking for a class of rodent, but in general Pedro told me that the local people don’t hunt birds and the larger mammals such as tapirs anymore. The infrastructure and commerce has improved so much that for 4 US$ you can buy a chicken (local Colombian chickens are more like 7 US$). Tins, rice and many other food products are hauled up river to feed the masses and this availability of food means that apart from growing some fruits and yucca on his land, Pedro can supplement his daily fish haul with other products with the minimal of effort. Gone are the days of hunting with the blow pipe, the macaw can now fly without threat as an accord between the tribes and the government has brought in protections against many of the animals and birds that live in the rainforest.
Pedro told me how his life had become more complicated, how he struggled for many years to be tied down not to just one wife but multiple. It cannot be because his sexual freedom was any way inhibited but more that he had to focus on giving time and energy to others, instead of being independently able to roam. He said he didn’t want any more children and it seemed in part because of the responsibilities of family life and his wanderlust to see more and undertake adventures; this had been driven on in the last few years as he had started to travel away from the Amazon for the first time. We talked a little about social justice and how the local tribe controls delinquency. Most of Colombia has a series of areas carved out called resguardos where local leaders are able to administer their own civil and criminal law, distinct from the state government and penal codes. Here it is no different, each group has their councilors who oversee the management of the social fabric of their village and surrounding environs. I asked him what the maximum penalty was as in other places it can be 100s of lashings with the dried leathery penis of a bull or simple banishment, but for the Tikuna it is to enclose someone inside a trunk full of biting and semi-venomous ants, with thousands of bites it can kill or severely debilitate the person for months. Pedro himself very much believes in the maxim that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, his rationale was that the pay was so low for those that are active in government that even if they start out ok, they will eventually use their influence for favors or worse to siphon off any money that they have to manage. He cited his sister as an example who had entered as a councilor and left years later as somebody dishonest. Pedro himself talks of a life that is connected to nature, that is honest and wholesome, apart from what we might see as his philandering. He is angry with Bolsonaro (the current president of Brazil) and his burning of the Amazon, he refuses to use electricity from the grid as this is mostly powered by fossil fuels, so he has installed solar panels to run some very low watt bulbs during the night. His house was built from wood that he himself collected under license with the promise to repopulate any timber that he had to fell. He fishes by hand, with lines and not nets, there is a sense that everything he does, through a broadly agrarian lifestyle he does with the presence of mind of sustainability; he insists he will teach his son the same.
It is hard not be cynical about the modern Amazon native that you run into on your albeit limited ravels, despite the very human and open nature of Pedro. Ten years ago as tourism was in its infancy in Leticia and Puerto Nariño, the two largest dwellings on the Colombian side of the Amazon triangle, all of the natives had shed their traditional garbs and lived in houses with water, electricity and sanitation. On my first visit we were pretty much the only foreign folks making it up the river that day. The boat duly sank, we dove into retrieve our luggage and I think some days later the boat company went back to pull out what was left of their livelihood. The only other faces on the Lake Tarapoto were small brown native ones (not actually a real lake), a part of the river where the pink and grey dolphins would surface and sometimes leap from the water. Now the day-trippers roll into Puerto Nariño, with their all inclusive tour that stops off for the selfie with a squirrel monkey and then in 50-100 seater monster cruiser they head upstream to scare the dolphins and the poor tourist who is still old school in a small wooded canoe. There are so many dolphins that one or two will always oblige the tourists with their presence, the pink one makes the minimum of effort to surface, so you will only get a brief glimpse of them. The grey ones however are more playful and some will leap from the water completely. Unfortunately they only make one leap then submerge, so it is very hard to capture them on the camera; those that do well, are those that run a video continuously and get lucky as to where they point and shoot.
With the rise of tourism and I understand from a few locals the growing drug (cocaine) trade a lot more money can be seen in the small villages that run along this small section of the Amazon. Many of the houses are now painted, the locals are wearing last season’s fashions and the shops and business are well stocked with products from the central parts of Peru, Brazil and Colombia. The prices have gone up, last time we paid about 3 bucks a head for the dolphin sightseeing, which went out on a canoe with no cover. Now the boats are slightly larger, with a tarpaulin roof and a small motor. Pedro was our guide (again) and said the gas prices had risen in his effort to explain why the cost is now 25 dollars a head. To be fair the boat was a lot sturdier, before there was no motor, so this time we travelled for several hours and not just around 30 minutes. But life has changed; with the volume of tourism, instead of just you and the local fisherman you will now pass tens of different river craft, from the smallest fishing canoe to the large cruisers carrying the industrial size package tourist. You will not get more than a few minutes to yourself anywhere around on the “lake” as there are hundreds of people all doing the same thing now.
As we left and the plane pulled up out above the runway we were immediately reminded of the vastness of the jungle. Streaks of brown watery flows are prominent for a few minutes but after a quick half turn from the engine it’s just a sea of green. The Amazon forest just goes on forever and as much as you think you might have experienced a part of it, in reality you have not seen anything. It’s hard to imagine man can even make a dent in this ecosystem, even if he is destroying tens of soccer size pitches every day, it is really just a drop in the ocean of trees. To the traveller who thinks he has seen the Amazon, he hasn’t, he has most likely just seen a few half-way house natives and he has perhaps wandered a mile or so from the riverbank. On my last day I met Victor who said he takes people for 5 day treks, so with him you could maybe get 10 or 20 miles into the mainland, that would only leave a few thousand more if you were to traverse even a small part of it; it is impossible to imagine how many days that would take. Ten years ago I did manage to move through about half of the Amazon, on a ramshackle, flat, iron table of a boat that chugged up from Iquitos to Puerto Maldonado (Peru) in around 10 days. Again this isn’t really seeing much as the carpet of green that hugs the riverbank wherever you are is such a small element of the whole place. I did see “real” Amazonians, the naked types that are living the way they have lived for centuries, not dressed in jeans, t-shirts, short skirts and using Chanelesque make up, like those that most tourists will meet on their jungle experiences.
There is for sure a “real” Amazon experience and it is certain in the two visits I have made that I have not come close this. What is now a live theme park experience of thousands of daily tourists looking for dolphins and monkeys with the minimum risk of contact with mosquitos is really what most will come to know as their intrepid adventure. There are literally 1000s of tribes that live independently with little contact with the outside world and there are those that have either not been “discovered” or have no relationship with what we would consider a modern lifestyle. There are only a few people that are really exploring the Amazon, the biologists, the sociologists and I am sure the odd intrepid adventurer who has teamed up with Victor or another native to go a lot further and deeper into the mass of green and pass some time with those natives who rarely see a foreign face; the other reality is in the times of fierce rubber trade many outsiders would have been in the Amazon, deep into forest with the natives. In the museum in Leticia you can read about the abuse and slavery that existed until about 100 years ago. I felt as I was leaving and after hearing from Victor that my experiences were not much different from the madding crowd, that if I was to truly understand more about life, more than just the idea that you can build your own home and replant the timber, I would need to walk for days and days, if not months to gain a deeper comprehension of the Amazon. It is and we hope will forever remain the largest forest on earth, home to millions of people who still live off the land, paint their faces and maintain a lifestyle truly entwined with the habitat in which they dwell – I was left opining if only I had seen more of that instead of the circus act which is the modern day Amazon experience.