In der Hängematte auf dem Amazonas

South America Tour 2013-15 – Part VI

In a hammock boat from Iquitos to Leticia

At two o'clock in the afternoon, we are at the port and get an ideal place on the ship from Iquitos to Leticia to hang up our hammocks. We spend the rest of the day watching people. Passengers settling in for the trip, vendors selling everything from hammocks to tangerines, the ship's crew working.

At dusk, we are still in port. Everything seems to be on board, people, all kinds of building materials, water, and other beverages which are being delivered to some village communities on the Amazon. We don't know what else is being waited for.

At eleven o'clock at night we are finally on our way, two nights, one and a half days long. I sleep quite well in my hammock. The time passes quickly. We spend it reading, listening to music, talking as we leisurely glide down the Amazon.

Now and then we stop in a village, sometimes you could almost call it a town, in the middle of nowhere, we load up and unload, and get back on the river.

Sometimes it rains in torrents, often the sun shines. We watch gray and pink river dolphins playing, eat rice with meat - two small dishes are included in the trip price - wait, look, are.
At noon on the second day, we arrive in Santa Rosa, Peru. I look at the other side of the wide river. Over there is Tabatinga, Brazil. Next to it is our destination: Leticia, Colombia.

El Yacuruna - a narration (click here to read)

Humans see, hear, feel. They collect many experiences in their lives. Stories emerge, most of them are scary but beautiful and hopeful ones also exist. They are passed on from generation to generation. What was once told to the grandmother by her ancestors, is now again passed on to the youngest. They serve as a root, advice, and help for the future life of each individual. But stories have a hard time in today's modern age, where everything has to be logical and proven. What was once deeply believed and lived is now judged and thus usually condemned.

In Peru, especially in the dense forests of the Amazon, you can still find many legends and mystical figures. Many communities lie hours away from the modern world. They are deeply rooted in their culture, the knowledge for survival, and the legends that show them the way. From there, people once came, joined together, and formed the first villages, soon the cities. Padre Cocha is just 95 years old and counts about 3000 people. We lived in this village for a month and worked with local people. So it happened that we volunteers soon came to the topic of mythologies. We wanted to learn more about the spirits of the Amazon and realized that there was some knowledge to be gained from our work colleagues. However, the first information came hesitantly. We learned about the Chullachaqui, the wretch with one human and one animal leg who lures people deep into the forest and never lets them return. "My wife's grandfather saw him, but luckily escaped," Gilbert tells us. We laugh sheepishly, not knowing whether to believe it or not. But the young jokester looks us seriously in the eyes and we are drawn into the inexplicable, mystical, and yet present. "Every story has some truth," I think, and a shiver creeps down my spine.

So it happens that we keep asking, curious like little children, wanting to know everything. Secundo, Gudrun's employee, and confidant, wants to tell us more. He wants us to come to his house in the evening and he will tell us some experiences. We are there on time and full of eager anticipation. "Are you going to tell us this story?", Secundo becomes serious: "It is not a story, it is the tragic truth, it was a friend of my father who had witnessed this."

In Nauta, a small town near Iquitos, the annual festival is coming up. When Joel comes home to his wife, he instructs her to go ahead and prepare the meal. In the meantime, he wants to go to the river to wash. When he gets there, he sees a man sitting on the dock. "I've been expecting you," he says. Before Joel knows it, he is grabbed by the man and pulled into the depths of the water.
When Joel does not return home after some time, his family begins to worry. They set out to find him. But on the banks of the river, they find only Joel's soap and his clothes. Joel himself remains as if he had disappeared from the face of the earth. They call the Brujo (healer), who takes a close look at the rooms in the family's house. He soon knows what has happened to Joel. Joel can only have met the Yacuruna, the man who lives in the water and has been pulled into the water by him. So he decides to call several strong men to grab Joel the second he appears to pull him out of the water. He is supposed to have developed supernatural powers in the meantime which will make this undertaking more difficult. Three brujos and the helpers gather at the river. They wait patiently for Joel to appear. After some time it happens - Joel comes to the surface of the water. Only he is changed. Leeches are where his nose once was, his eyes are big and round, and his knees are bent inward. Only by the brujos' blowing can Joel be immobilized so the men can pull him out of the water. Joel doesn't know what had happened to him, not even who he is anymore. Through trance, the three brujos find out that he was forced to eat raw fish underwater.
"Either you eat the big fish or it will eat you." He had no choice and ate. With each bite, he transformed himself bit by bit into a Yacuruna. All of this only happened because the Yacuruna wanted to marry his daughter to Joel.
Now, as Joel lies there on dry land, his family takes him to his house. He no longer recognizes it. Only after some time does he feel comfortable in it again. From now on he lives only in the house, the transformation could not be reversed. He no longer goes outdoors or eats a bite.

"Three months after that he died," Secundo ends his narration.

With Secundo (far right), after telling us his story

The three-country corner in the middle of the jungle is popular for travelers who, like us, come from Iquitos. Some continue right away, for four to five days, to Manaus. Or, since there is no real road connection to the interior of Colombia, fly to Bogota.

We reach Leticia by boat from Santa Rosa and, after finding affordable accommodation - Colombia is again a good deal more expensive than Peru - have to drive to the nearby airport; the only way to get an entry stamp here.

Leticia is small and easy to explore on foot. To make sure we were in Brazil for a while, we walk over to Tabatinga. The flag is not the same and they speak Portuguese over here - otherwise, we don't notice any big differences between the two places.

Ill

Back in Leticia Seraina feels feverish, I catch a cold, probably because of the fan and the eternal heat at the same time.
Since we are in the Amazon, where there is a high risk of infection with dengue and malaria, we go to the hospital to be on the safe side.

Seraina undergoes a blood test. After endless waiting we know: Dengue positive. Hell. Tomorrow we want to fly on to Santa Marta. The doctor prescribes Seraina acetaminophen against the high fever and rehydrating salt solutions, which she has to drink daily with liters of water. There is no actual medication against the virus. The main thing is to make sure you drink a lot so you don't get dehydrated.

The next evening we land exhausted on the Caribbean coast and drive to the hostel, where we both freeze and sweat at the same time. In Santa Marta, the nights are unbearably hot.
A day later, Seraina is still seething. Six liters of water are quickly gone in one day.

I call Mauricio in Bogota. He is a specialist in dengue and advises us both to drink a lot and to rest for the next few days. And certainly not to take any medication against flu or headaches. No aspirin, no Neocitran, or anything like that, as this prevents the body from healing.

Every other day Seraina feels better, only to suffer bedridden with a very high fever every day in between. After a week in Santa Marta, where we are treated most caringly by Levi and Ella in the hostel, we have had enough of the heat and the city and drive to Palomino to check on our land.

On the same night, Seraina feels extremely bad. She is feverish, shivering, burning all over her body. I guess a fever of 40 degrees must be the minimum. Somehow the night passes. We drive to the next hospital, which is in Dibulla, a few villages away. After another test and a long wait, she gets her diagnosis: Seraina is not suffering from dengue, which should have disappeared within three to five days, but from malaria!

Free of charge, after eleven days she has finally gotten the right medication, which immediately improves her condition. She has to take them for another ten days so that the parasite in her blood is eradicated one hundred percent.
I don't know what caught me a few days ago, maybe the flu or some other worm, but in any case, I was spared malaria, as a later test proved.

Nat and Palomino

It's World Cup time in Brazil and all over the world. I even get Seraina to watch soccer with me. However, I miss the euphoria very much in Colombia. I can only feel it when their team is playing. Otherwise, it is difficult to find a place where they show other games. On the one hand, because the Colombian national television only broadcasts forty of the sixty-five games, on the other the electricity in Palomino often fails unexpectedly.

But there is also work to be done in Palomino. We think about what is worth doing on our land right now. We plant a few fruit trees with the hope that they will have grown a little by the time we return in a year and a half. We need a barbed wire fence to mark the property boundaries. In the end, we decide to postpone everything else until next time.

We help our Australian neighbor Nat to build a kind of bamboo fence around his land. He is about to start his house building project, for which he has set up a spacious DIY workshop. It's impressive how many tools he's purchased.

He plans to have his cabaña up and running in four to five months. We introduce him to Rowan, another Australian, whom we recently met at our campsite. The two of them seem to make a great team.
Nat's good friend Karina, who lives across the street, must have been impressed by our fence work. She hires us right away to rebuild her fence.

The problem here is that although you can find a lot of local workers - they impose themselves - they are just unreliable and only interested in quick money. The result is expensive bad work and unnecessary loss of time. Above all, you lose your nerves. We have experienced this many times in Padre Cocha and we notice it in Palomino as well.

Nat has the solution to this problem: hire volunteers, mainly travelers like us, who want to do a good job.
Nat is a kind of guinea pig for us. We'll see what's in store for us in a year and a half. Through his experience, we will hopefully be able to avoid some of the mistakes he had to make. In addition, he already knows very well what woods to use for what, where to get them for what prices and can provide us with a lot of helpful information about building in Palomino.

We are very lucky to have found such a good circle of friends who give us a feeling of "being at home". Karina cooks us royally - sometimes we just get tired of the constant local rice with meat - while we, with the help of Argentine friends we met in Santa Marta at the hostel, dig holes, put in posts, lay sore barbed wire, and wire the "caña boa" sticks into a dense fence to establish some privacy from the nosy neighbors. Because they often come over uninvited, sit with you to.... well, to chat or just watch what you're up to. Common in villages like Palomino, this can get a bit exhausting for us "westerners".

June and July pass quickly. Besides Palomino, we also go back to Santa Marta to visit our new good friends in the hostel. We also pay a visit to Miguel in nearby Taganga from time to time.

>>> It was great fun to make the following (slightly shortened) video. For the 30th birthday of our good friend Probst at home in Switzerland, we cobbled together the many congratulations from our friends in Taganga and Palomino to a birthday greeting of a different kind 😀 <<<

Visit from home

Like one of the refreshing gusts in parched Taganga - it hasn't rained in eight months! - time flies, it's the first of August, and Seraina's sister Tabea enjoys a cold beer on the beach with us. For a few weeks, we can give her some impressions of our life on the Colombian coast. And how does she thank us?

With kilos of freshly imported cheese and chocolate from Switzerland! Mmmh, merci very much, Bäse! This brings a big smile not only to our faces but also to those of our Colombian, Argentinian, Australian, Romanian, and Polish friends.

Mit Tabea bei Miguel in Taganga - good times! — With Tabea at Miguel's in Taganga - good times!

In Palomino beim Tuben — Tubing in Palomino

Auf Baru am Geniessen — On Baru enjoying

Onward journey: Via San Gil to Bogotá

Finally, we said goodbye to Tabea and our dear friends in Palomino and Taganga.

On the way to Bogotá, where Mauricio and Vivi were waiting for us, we made a stop in San Gil.

We were happy to see Andrea and Justin again at "La Pacha". They immediately had a few tasks for us. There Seraina could prove her artistic vein once again.