The Ayahuasquero
You can’t drink spirituality
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Adventure is ephemerally intoxicating and ultimately selfish. It leaves little for those left behind and almost nothing for you when it’s finished. Too quickly life turns into a mirage – you forget exactly why you set off, until eventually you find yourself clawing for reasons, stuck in a claustrophobic narrative of your own making from which there seems no obvious escape. But you can’t get out because you’re addicted to the high. By contrast, everyday life seems dull and boring. It’s perhaps this that killed Anthony Bourdain.
As the weeks in the Amazon dragged on, I slowly began to unravel. I had for my entire life been a bastion of integrity and emotional stability, but the endless nights of broken sleep, of incessant itching, of fighting the mosquitos off my balls while shitting out food poisoning in some crumby hotel, of arguments with Gavin, of the slow and painful realisation that everything I ever thought was right was actually wrong – all this eventually began to eat into my nervous system and break me. The rare moments I spent at home being a father and a husband were strained and corrupted. My family had settled into circles of friendship that excluded me as I was never around, and because I was becoming more and more self-centred and introspective, I took it as rejection.
Gavin loved documenting my collapse in a foreign land. He interviewed me relentlessly, asking me ever more personal and demanding questions while accusing me of ignorance and arrogance stemming from my privileged upbringing. I had nothing to come back at him with – both my understanding and my conviction had by this stage vanished. In the end I began to cry every time he turned his camera on me. I’d lost control of almost every aspect of my life, which had been thrown into chaos. I was burned out, emotionally wrecked and had handed what was left of my soul over to a film crew. I desperately searched for answers and clarity, but never imagined that I’d find them in a little old forest Indian and his plants.
Don Alberto looked deep into my eyes when I first met him. He took my hands and smiled as he stared into my soul. His face was grizzled, his mouth wonky from a set of disrupted teeth, his eyes dark and black. I immediately fell under his spell.
‘You are full of pain,’ he told me directly.
I nodded meekly. ‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.
He took my hand briefly and offered me a seat beside a smouldering fire. His house was made of wood, with a large open area where a few people sat around on an upturned log. Hammocks hung from decaying thatched walls along with plastic bags full of flotsam. Two scarlet macaws perched on a beam above the fire and squawked quietly in conversation with each other.
Don Alberto chatted to me as he attended a patient, a small and cat-like man. Don Alberto told me that this man now lived in the village after recently arriving with his family from the forest. Like him, they were Wachipiri. His right forearm looked painfully swollen and I watched as Don Alberto inspected it.
‘You must get to work straight away,’ he announced, handing me an enamel bowl, a cheese grater and a pale, starchy-looking tuber. ‘I want you to make that into a paste.’
I grated the tuber into the bowl until I had a small amount of watery, lumpy paste. Don Alberto scooped up a handful and smeared it across the swelling on the man’s arm, explaining that he’d been stung by an ant and the bite had become infected. The man was clearly in a lot of pain and looked sedated by the infection, which clearly went deeper than the surface of his arm. Don Alberto took the grater and made a little more paste himself before applying it and wrapping the man’s arm in a bandage. To me the whole thing looked absurd, putting what was essentially cream on an infection that had clearly gone internal. I suggested to Gavin that I should just give the poor man some antibiotics and he nearly bit my head off. I wasn’t there to have opinion; I was there to learn.
After lunch Don Alberto took me into the forest to have a look at his gardens. On the way he picked out various ordinary-looking plants from the rampant chaos of the undergrowth and showed them to me
‘This plant is called the magnetic herb,’ he said, tearing a leaf and crushing it between his thumb and fingers. As he smelled it he breathed in deeply, with a certain amount of exaggeration. ‘It’s good for mental imbalance.’ He sniffed it again, religiously drawing in air from above his head with his hands. He passed it to me to sniff, explaining that ‘the smell unblocks the mind.’
A few steps along path he lopped another plant with his machete, this time a bright red flower. ‘This one is called the girl’s lips.’ He handed me a flower that did perfectly resemble a set of bright red lips, but I embarrassed him by replying with ‘Boca de puta!’ I’d seen the ‘lips of a whore’ before. ‘This plant is for sexual impotence,’ he continued, as he peeled the lips apart and plucked a few seeds out, placing them in my palm. ‘It is like Viagra, but you might have to chew thirty-two seeds for it to work.’ I swallowed the three in my hand just to be going along with in the meanwhile.
We walked through a well-kept manioc field, where Alberto stopped to show me more plants. ‘This is called lion’s tooth’. He bent over to caress the leaves of the small, innocuous looking weed. ‘It’s used to treat cancer’.
I asked him why the world doesn’t know about it if it can cure cancer.
‘The world ignores nature, which is why they can’t find it. And that’s why there’s no cancer in Amazonian people,’ he said.
I expressed my doubt.
‘It’s why people in the Amazon are not scared of cancer. We can have it but we can treat it with different plants.’
I spent ten days working with Don Alberto and slotting into life in Santa Rosa Huacari, a small Indigenous community an hour or so from my land. It was a period of reflection, a slowdown from the turmoil of the previous months. My days were spent learning about the medicinal plants that Don Alberto nurtured in the forest. The seemingly tangled chaos of his apothecary table was ordered by his extraordinary knowledge of botany, something he impressed on me with such passion that I set my cynicism aside in order to open my mind to his world. Descriptions of the plants would be accompanied by varying explanations of the triad of energies – earth, sky and fire – concepts I could certainly understand but in whose influence I struggled to believe.
In the evenings we’d sit about in his tamba, an open wooden hut in the forest, where he practised his medicine on local people suffering from ailments that doctors had been unable to treat. Some he’d diagnose as physical, others would be the result of spells that he’d attempt to exorcise. He was often brutal and cynical when he discussed Westerners who had lost their spirituality and came to him in the hope of rediscovering it, accusing me of doing the same and sometimes getting quite irritated with me.
We’d see these characters appearing in the community by the van load, often white and dreaded, their uniforms of non-conformism – baggy tie-dyed clothing and all the rest – displaying their spirituality with all the depth of a bumper sticker. Some evenings he’d take their money and escort them off into the forest for the night to help them find what they thought they’d lost but most likely never had in the first place.
‘To us, ayahuasca is the master plant,’ ‘planta maestra’ Don Alberto told me one evening towards the end of my training as we sat in the darkness of the tamba. ‘It’s a plant that teaches us how to use other plants, through visions,’ he continued, gently lecturing me in the darkness while sitting cross-legged in front of me, surrounded by beads, feathers, stones, candles and a few Coke bottles half filled with brown liquid. ‘The practice is thousands of years old.’ He handed me a cigarette and encouraged me to smoke as much as I could, as it would help the ayahuasca enter my body more efficiently.
He and I had spent the previous two days simmering a large pot containing a brew of pounded ayahuasca vines and various leaves that we’d harvested from the forest. I was apparently ready, and although Don Alberto continued to berate me with the disappointment of a master finding shortcomings in his apprentice, he appreciated that I’d remained open and receptive to his teachings.
I was nervous when he finally poured the dark brown reduction from our brew into cups made of cut bamboo segments. We had sat for the last hour in virtual silence and complete darkness listening to the frenzy of insects in the nocturnal forest. Don Alberto spoke a few words as he leant forward and handed me a cup that he instructed me to drink from. I took it to my lips, knowing that my world would probably never be the same again, and swallowed it down. It was fucking disgusting.
Don Alberto had quite firmly told the film crew that they weren’t allowed to shoot anything until he’d finished his first chant as I needed to remain spiritually open to allow the ayahuasca to take effect. We’d assumed the chant would be brief and that Gavin would be able to film me vomiting, which was standard procedure as the body purged itself of the vile liquid. But twenty-five minutes in, Don Alberto was still going strong and I began writhing and retching as I fought to hold it in for Gavin. By the time Don Alberto finally fell silent, my nausea had subsided. Which was nice because I hadn’t had to vomit, but slightly concerning because it meant, of course, that I still had all the liquid inside me.
It was subtle at first – the light outside the tambo began to pixelate into bright colours, like looking at a TV screen through a magnifying glass. I looked at Don Alberto, who remained sitting in front of me, and his figure began to break up, adorning him with lines of technicolour. I looked down at my hands, and the fragmentation and colours were the same.
A faint outline of bottles appeared at my feet. I reached out to touch them but knew they weren’t actually there. Then thick bamboo shoots started growing up from the ground, so I pulled my head back to avoid them growing into me. To kill the vision I shut my eyes but fell into a red-outlined swirl with sheep walking up it, which made me feel nauseous, so I opened my eyes again only to see a snake’s head coming right at me aggressively. It was huge, black and yellow with a bright red tongue, and had the ridged eyebrows of a viper, which made it look sinister.
My first intense vision came a moment later. I shut my eyes and my head popped into a world made up of hundreds of lime green snake eyes arranged geometrically within a sphere. As I looked around I saw the eyes on the left were nasty but the ones on the right were nice. When I emerged from this vision I almost immediately went into another that’s nearly impossible to describe, although I knew exactly what it meant without having to question or even think about it. I was a split yellow cocoon being preyed upon by hundreds of eyes and insects. The insects were mainly ants and wasps, and they were sucking the life out of me. The eyes and creatures were people I knew and worked with, and I understood exactly why they were sucking the life from me. Everything was a visual metaphor of my thoughts and feelings, and nothing needed any further explanation.
The wasps soon began to consume most of my visions; they were large and black, with women’s eyes. They scuttled over my body and my face.
As the trip became more intense it seemed to take over my entire being. I still had occasional conscious thoughts, like realising I should explain what I was seeing to Gavin’s camera, but I was completely incapable of doing so. Instead I was consumed by snakes, wasps, spiders, crocodiles, creatures with sharp teeth and the skeletons of bony fish. All these surrounded me, preying on my head and brain. Even though they were dark and sinister, I wasn’t scared. At one point my brain was being pecked at and preyed upon by green praying mantises.
Sometimes the visions were nice. Patterns of toucan feathers and beaks would form, along with the colours of macaws. I saw beautiful arrays of peacock feathers, but then the wasps would invade and ruin things. I saw a mandrill, then a world of roads and houses and castles, all made of a brown toffee Lego. Beneath it all was inscribed the signature of my son Gus. I smiled when I saw his name, before drifting over my boys’ empty beds, all with their names on. Arthur’s had a snake sprawled down the side, which pretended it didn’t care about me but was grinning. When I opened my eyes I saw a camel and a school of dolphins going into Alberto’s green head, which glowed before it turned into a cave made of fish skulls.
Gavin interrupted my visions to ask me what I was experiencing. I opened my eyes to face him and could just about make out the crew sitting to my right in the darkness.
‘It’s amazing,’ I replied, and tried to say more, but as I spoke I watched my words, electric blue, flow out from my mouth and slither through the air into the lens of the camera, until I couldn’t look at it because I could physically feel it sucking the life out of me. I knew why – it was obvious. Nothing needed any explanation. The visions had an inherent meaning that I understood without question. I was exhausted, burned out, on the edge of depression; everything I did, every word that came out of my mouth, every thought I had, had essentially been committed to the all-devouring camera for the last few months.
I tried to continue talking but the words began to become corrupted as they entered the camera. They eventually peeled off and went behind my head, where they turned into a green pasture that revealed Sumburgh Head in Shetland. I was flying over it, looking down at the road that led up to the lighthouse that stood on top of the giant cliffs. I could see my friend Martin Huebeck perched on the edge watching guillemots through his telescope, as he always did. I said hello to him.
All these visions were vivid, real, full of meaning – and quite incredibly, most featured some sort of coherent narrative. They’d last intensely for a few minutes, then I’d lurch out of them and open my eyes to see Don Alberto, chanting and spewing out energy into me, like a bright, colourful, glowing engine. The greater part of the imagery when I kept my eyes closed was dark and sinister, but among the wasps and ants there were also hummingbirds and heliconia flowers, monkeys, macaws and toucans. They were all the spirits of the forest; there was no question about that. I felt no fear whatsoever and could just observe them in extraordinary morphing detail.
After perhaps four hours the visions came to a spectacular conclusion. I watched Don Alberto swell up into an enormous tree, his body and face transformed into its thick trunk, which grew upwards until it towered across the canopy. The boughs of the tree then grew down to engulf the forest in a vast, thick, protective wall. It was a complete cliché, its meaning glaringly obvious, but despite this, hugely powerful.
The following morning, after a hefty night’s sleep encouraged by 10mg of diazepam, I got up early and walked down the short trail from the tambo to the river, where I swam for a while. I’ve never experienced such a feeling of mental clarity and cleanliness. The ayahuasca had cleared my brain out, unravelled my confusions and recast everything with simple answers. I didn’t have to question, I just knew. I felt clear and in control again, which brought me an enormous sense of calm.
Taking ayahuasca was the most profound experience of my life. It transported me to the spirit word, and although part me realised that I’d done nothing more than take a psychoactive potion, I also completely believed in the reality of what I’d seen and felt. The spirits of the forest had answered the questions I had through visions that I immediately understood, like intense dreams whose meaning is crystal clear upon waking.
The realisation that I couldn’t continue to chalk the world down to science and logic was fundamental to my new understanding of life – and of the forest I was standing in.
Before I left Peru I returned to my land and offered Elias a job. Together with a local NGO called CREES, which specialised in regrowing forests, we worked out a project on the land and a payment scheme that offered him slightly more than he was earning as an illegal logger, while also providing healthcare for young Heidi. During our initial discussions his wife Inez had been very firm with me about allowing them to keep their crops on the land. At first I hadn’t understood why, but I eventually realised their value. I could come and go from their lives, as could any other job Elias got, but if everything else failed they still had their crops. I felt stupid after all the months I’d spent the Amazon for not seeing that something so small to me could be so fundamental to them. We figured out an agroforestry scheme that enabled them to plant native trees among yucca, maize, bananas and plantains. It seemed a perfect solution.
Elias worked hard on the project for two years, funded by me through CREES, until one day he and his brother apparently held up a park ranger with a gun, at which point we had no choice but to end his employment in the scheme. He still lives on the land though, and I hear from him occasionally. He and Inez had another baby girl, Yasmin, and the family are doing well.
I was sitting in my hide photographing bald eagles on the Snake River in Wyoming the following year, when I Bought a Rainforest went out on television. I watched my Twitter feed explode with abuse during the first half hour, with people calling me out for being a rich white colonialist. I was expecting it, because that’s exactly what I was.
By the end of the first episode, however, most of them had apologised. I’d remained honest about who I was throughout. I hadn’t been a hero, I had been the patsy of my own stupid misadventure and had taken the viewers on the journey with me, sharing with them my failures and vulnerabilities. Realising the depth of my ignorance had turned my arrogance into humility and, alongside this, had given me a deep compassion for the people who had allowed me into their lives.
My photography changed significantly after I left the Amazon, with my attempts at mastering my craft now taking a back seat to objectivity. My ego had been humbled, ultimately turning me into a journalist. I returned to Peru a few years later to shoot an assignment for National Geographic on Manu National Park. The story covered the park-dwellers’ way of life, without dichotomy, as I’d learned that whether they’re illegal loggers, slash-and-burn cattle ranchers, shamans or uncontacted tribes, they’re all inextricably linked. They’re people of the forest, for good or for bad, and we ignore that basic premise at our own peril.
Post Script
I have never went back to the land after leaving it back in 2013. However I was passing through the local town of Patria last April on my way back from Manu. I stopped to try and find Elias. He was living alone in a tin hut; Inez had left him and taken the girls to Pucallpa, her home town hundreds of miles away. He’d lost a leg to a shotgun trap he’d set to kill the animals that were eating his crops. He was, as always, quietly stoic. He’d bought a motor taxi and was scratching a living with that. It was tragic, but nice to see him again.
In the next instalment I return to East Africa with Simon Thomsett to cover the industrial scale poisoning of wildlife.
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