A VISIT TO THE SHAMAN AND THE CANOPY WALKWAYS
That afternoon we hiked to the Shaman’s jungle outpost, which was really like a primitive research facility under a thatched roof supported by stripped tree poles. A homemade table and several crude benches were there, and we sat on the benches while the Shaman talked to us, with our guide interpreting.
There are 245 species of plants studied here. The research is to raise awareness of the importance of the plants.
This Shaman had started to cure people with his father when he was 15 years old. His father was a Curandero and his mother’s tribe were healers with herbs. The Shaman’s 14-year-old daughter is interested in plants and the Shaman hopes she will follow in his footsteps because all the small villages around here use the Shaman’s healing medicine.
We saw an assortment of herbs and plants lying on the table. One by one the Shaman picked them up and explained their healing uses. As he demonstrated some of them, Myrtle took careful notes, and I could just imagine her annoying her family and friends with her new-found capacity as a Shaman.
Here are some of the plants the Shaman talked about: Wild Oregano to make tea for an upset stomach; Lemon Grass for insomnia and to lower cholesterol; Gold Button for toothache and pain; Wild Basil for children’s fevers; Wild garlic to clear sinuses and for asthma; Dragon’s Blood for cuts and bites; Cat’s claw to treat the beginning of cancer; and the Fer de Lance Snake Plant used for all snake bites.
The Fer de Lance Snake Plant is very interesting. It looks just like a Fer de Lance snake, which is, as we have learned, one of most poisonous snakes in the world.
To prepare the snakebite cure you grate the tuber, soak it, make a crosscut on the bite wound, and apply a plaster of this mixture every five hours to draw out the poison. I confess that I did have to wonder, dear reader, what happened if you got bit by a snake that is supposed to kill you in less than an hour. I wanted to ask the Shaman, but he had moved on to the next part of his presentation.
We were invited to receive a personal healing from the shaman, or a plant tattoo. I chose a tattoo of a snake for my upper arm, for wisdom. I figure there is always room for improvement on that front, right?
One person in our group who suffered with insomnia offered to have her healing first.
The Shaman made a smoke of wild garlic on the fire. Then he began whistling, patting her head, smoking pure tobacco and blowing it on her head, tapping her head with an herb fan, all the while continuing to sing and chant.
The Healing Ceremony lasted about 5 minutes. It must be repeated seven nights in a row, said the Shaman, and it is also used for headaches.
When my turn came and I asked for a tattoo of a serpent on my arm, the Shaman pounded a huito fruit to loosen the juice, then pierced it and set about dipping a small stick into it and drawing something on my right arm.
The juice was colorless when applied and remained invisible for the rest of that afternoon, so I was not sure what the Shaman had drawn. To tell you the truth, I wondered if HE knew what he had drawn since it was totally invisible.
By the time we went to bed that night the curves of a snake were starting to show faintly on my arm, and I figured that my snake of wisdom tattoo might indicate that wisdom must be earned in the real world, not drawn on by a Shaman. But hey, I tried.
The next morning, we had to get up at 5:00 again to meet our boat to take us upriver to our next camp, and we were all moving a little sluggishly as we gathered in the rec pavilion for breakfast. I had forgotten about my tattoo, and I had also forgotten that I had not told Myrtle about it.
That oversight was totally not my fault, dear reader. Myrtle was so absorbed in her own scientific experiment that she was literally incommunicado for most of the previous evening. You see, she had asked the Shaman for headache treatment and decided she would compare the effectiveness of the Shaman’s treatment to the effectiveness of the aspirin she usually took.
For the whole evening she was absorbed in monitoring the state of her head and recording her findings in her journal. It made me a little crazy just watching her, because every minute or two she would be making an entry in the journal. Once I peeked at it and found that her notes were a series of times followed by numbers from 1 to 10. Frankly, it made no sense at all to me that her headache could go from a 5 at 7:30 pm to 3 at 7:32 pm to a 7 at 7:34 pm, etc. Boy, she has some really weird, sophisticated
headaches!
Thank heavens mine are only the common garden variety type – just a steady grinding, pounding, squeezing sensation that simply stops when it feels like it and not one minute before. That minute is usually when its host, namely me, is about ready to bash my head against a wall, which probably would have taken all the fun out of things for that headache. So, it just decided to quit.
Anyway, I had not yet put on my long-sleeved safari shirt when I brought my breakfast tray next to Myrtle at the table.
I started to ease my leg over the bench to sit down by her when she happened to glance up and saw my arm.
She leaped up with a scream, knocking me over, of course, and jostling the whole table so severely that all the juice glasses and
teacups toppled over, which, in turn caused an unappreciative roar from our table mates, plus some agile scrambling away from the table to avoid getting food and drinks all over their clothes.
As you may have guessed, dear reader, we had to wash all our clothes by hand in the camp AND carry all our wash water. So we learned early on to be really careful not to spill stuff on our clothes.
While all this mayhem was progressing so well above me, I finally looked down at my arm and I, too, jumped a bit, which, by the way, was sort of a challenge from the sitting position I found myself in.
On my right upper arm was a dark, very clear and visible drawing of a perfect Fer de Lance, and that perfect snake seemed to move when my arm moved. Wow!
And that baby did not wash off in the shower either! It lasted for two whole weeks!
It also put me in the doghouse again with my guide and my group, because the process of cleaning up and getting fresh food delayed our boat trip upriver by a half hour. But you can see it was really not my fault, can’t you? I wore long-sleeved shirts after that.
At our next camp on the Napo River, a tributary of the Amazon, we got up at 5:30 the following morning and hiked through the jungle about two miles inland to reach the Amazon Canopy Walkway.
Are you getting the feeling, dear reader, that we seemed to have had to get up every day at an ungodly hour? Well, you would be correct. That sort of put the kibosh on nighttime revels. But it did make for blessed silence on our early morning walks. On this particular day one of our group must have fallen asleep while walking, and she ran right into that 200-year-old Ceiba tree that our guide had stopped to show us. That tree was over 47 feet in diameter, and it took nearly all our group holding hands to gird it.
Myrtle, bless her little cotton-picking heart, just could not resist singing, “Ring around the rosy,” to the intense annoyance of some of our group, especially when she yelled, “All fall down” and plopped unceremoniously down into the dirt, dragging the nearest and dearest with her. At least we all woke up then, because we had our eyes glued to the ground for bullet ants.
Eventually our 40-minute hike came to an end, and I can report to you that the Amazon Canopy Walkway is totally awesome! This impressive walkway high in the treetops was built by ten people between 1991 and 1993. It has 14 platforms connected by 17 suspension walkways, and the longest suspension walkway is 2640 feet long, one of the longest treetop suspension bridges in the world.
We stopped at the Amazon Conservatory of Tropical Studies deep in the jungle, where we bought sodas from a vending machine and sat listening to our guide’s lecture about the Canopy Walkway. That vending machine was a bit of a jarring note, sort of like watching Shakespeare sit there pounding away on a laptop or maybe throwing his underwear in a washing machine. I just wanted to play, “Which of these things is not like the other” with Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers.
At any rate, there are 540 species of birds in this 25,000-acre jungle preserve and 120 species are hummingbirds alone. Good grief! How is there enough room on that little bitty bird for 120 different iterations?!
We climbed the wooden scaffolding up to the lower platform at 55 feet, then continued up the scaffolding to the second platform at 69 feet, at which point we started out on the first walkway, a relatively short one.
Myrtle was determined she would not be gypped out of a canopy walkway experience by her fear of heights, so she determinedly looked everywhere except down as we ascended the scaffolding and walked out onto the suspension bridges.
The walkways are all enclosed in netting that stretches up to chest-high cables. This allows for unfettered unique views out over the treetops, plus opportunities to see tree-top birds, lizards, and orchids.
Myrtle had been bravely weathering each new bridge by basically walking like a monkey. I couldn’t figure out if it was a chimpanzee or a great ape or an orangutan, but she grasped the right-hand cable with her right hand and then the left hand cable in her left hand, followed by each foot in turn, in a sort of ape-like amble, right, left, right, left with grim determination until she got to the end of each bridge.
You know, upon reflection, I think she looked more like a crab than a monkey – hmmm. But at least she made it across each time.
One tiny problem with treetop suspension bridges is that they can sway when there is a breeze. Even the higher platforms sway with the movement of the trees in which they are built.
This is a bit unnerving if you haven’t been used to living like a monkey or a bird! At its best, it is strange and disorienting, and at its worst, well, you want to just sit right down on that walkway and prepare for your demise.
Myrtle and I were doing great, making it through Tree #2, Lower Platform at 73 feet and Upper Platform at 84 feet, going across bridge after bridge, some short, some a little longer.
We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, if you really want to know, and Myrtle even started looking around with interest at the treetops and plants and birds we were passing.
Then we got to that REALLY LONG bridge. By that time, we were the last in our group. A good breeze had come up by then and the trees and bridges were indeed swaying gently.
Nevertheless, we dutifully waited until our mates had successfully navigated the long bridge, which is proper protocol, of course, and then we started out on it.
Unfortunately, as we got to the middle of it, a smart-aleck kid from the group behind us completely failed to observe basic walkway courtesy and came running in a rambunctious trot onto the walkway Myrtle and I were still navigating. AND, with undisguised glee he started jumping up and down on it!
Now, dear reader, if you have been on a suspension walkway, you know that when that kind of thing happens, the whole walkway starts to buck, sort of like a sheet being shaken out, or maybe more accurately like a bucking bronco, and the longer the bridge, the more pronounced the bucking.
So, our swaying bridge was now bucking up and down under us, like somebody had put a quarter into it and it decided to go berserk.
This was the last straw for dear Myrtle.
First she froze, with a look of absolute horror on her face, I noticed. Then she dropped onto her belly holding on to the side netting for dear life, screaming.
That oafish kid behind us just thought it was all hilarious and started jumping harder until his guide started cursing and roaring at him in such a spectacular fashion that even Myrtle turned her head around to look and temporarily forgot to scream.
Well, the kid finally got off the walkway, the walkway started to calm down, and our guide appeared at the other end and started carefully walking toward us.
He was amazingly gentle with us as he helped Myrtle to the far side of the bridge, and he told us to rest a few minutes on the platform and drink some water. As he turned to go back to the head of our group, Myrtle mumbled, “Where is the rum when you need it?”
But we did continue our Canopy Walkway trek successfully, on through all the trees and platforms until we reached the top of the canopy on Tree 6, lower platform at 112 feet, upper platform at 118 feet.
Only four people are allowed on the upper platform at a time, because the platforms hold 2000 pounds. But we calculated that the five of us were well under that weight, so we all went up together and stayed up there on top of the world for about 20 minutes, swaying, as the platform creaked under us.
We could look down and see the tops of lower trees swaying below us, and I do admit, dear reader, that as our tree swayed one way and the lower trees swayed the other way, I started to feel something that might have been called terror except that I was too busy worrying about Myrtle to correctly label what I was feeling myself. Fortunately, she must have found something fortifying in her purse, because she had a glazed expression on her face and was eerily calm.
When we turned to start back down, I was afraid my feet would stay stuck on that platform in fright, but I pried one loose and used that to kick the other one, and so I got started.
Fortunately, the guide asked Myrtle to descend right after him, and I think that is the only reason she got back down those platforms and bridges successfully. She probably was having wonderful daydreams about losing her footing, falling, and being caught in his strong, virile arms.
All in all, we spent three hours in the canopy, climbing 14 platforms and crossing 17 walkways, a totally awesome day, definitely worth that Amazon rum Myrtle was waiting for.
On the following day when we were to go to our third jungle camp, our departure was delayed a half hour, not because anyone celebrated too much, even though they did, but because two people had such severe chigger bites that they needed extra medical attention.
They had gone off on their own after we returned from the canopy walk, and heaven knows where they got themselves to. I used the opportunity to remind Myrtle that she owed me for being unwilling to go with them when she wanted us to go. I told her primly that I have great respect for this Amazon jungle.
To be continued…