Posts Tagged ‘story’

Ayahuasca with the Shipibos, Peru

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Last month I did an Ayahuasca diet with a shaman from the Shipibo tribe near Pucallpa and Yarinacocha in the Peruvian Amazonas. There are many traditions of shamanism and many native people in the Amazonas use this plant since thousands of years but the Shipibos are considered the masters of Ayahuasca. Shipibo shamans use special songs called Icaros to cure people and during the ceremony only songs and sounds are used, no instruments. The shaman or maestro (master of the plant) sings his special songs to all or to an individual person, with certain meanings, for protection and for healing.

Thru coincidences and a lot of good luck I found an older and well-respected shaman called Benjamin Ochavano Mahua in Yarinacocha. He is the curandero (healer) for his tribe, so a lot of native Shipibo people come to his ceremonies when they are sick or posessed by bad spirits. His canadian apprentice, Miguel, who studied with him since 8 years helped me a lot with translating and explaining what was going on, as well as with his infective laugh. I decided to do a dieta with them, which means that I drank Ayahuasca every second day, three times a week, and that I had to follow certain restrictions on food, not eat in a 24h period on the days of the ceremony, no sex, no alcohol and I was not allowed to drink water on the days after the ceremony until noon (which was the hardest part).

Ayahuasca is a thick brown brew of mainly two plants, the vine Ayahuasca, which acts as an MAO-inhibitor, and a leave Chakruna, which contains the psychoactive ingredient DMT. It tastes awful and usually makes people vomit and causes diarrhea, which is not pleasant, but part of the cleaning and healing process. It also gives intense hallucinations, visions, spiritual insights and healing.

We gathered in the wooden house of the shaman in the evening, everyone got a thin mattress and a bucket. I got introduced and the wife of the shaman immediately gave me my Shipibo name: “Yuibuso”. The children, grandchildren and other people went in and out of the hut and the noise of the neighbourhood came in from outside. Ignoring all the chaos around, Benjamin, the maestro, slowly started to whistle and whisper to a plastic bottle full of Ayahuasca. After about half an hour he finished and offered the first cup to Miguel, who tried it.

- “Que tal? (How is it?)”
- “Dulce, mas o menus… (Sweet, more or less…)
- Hahaha (laughing)“.

I got the second cup, then everyone else who wanted to drink in the circle of about 15 to 20 people. After that the light was turned off and a quiet time of about one hour started, where everybody lied back, relaxed and waited for the effect. At some point the maestro started to sing, starting from a whisper or whistling and progressing into all kinds of sounds and pitches, sometimes very soft and melodious, sometimes very rythmical. Other people joined in or started to sing their own songs and it created a harmonious whole. This was the blessing part of the ceremony, and the song was ment to give blessings and protection to everyone present. After singing like this for maybe one or two hours, Miguel went around and blowed Aqua Florida (something like a watery perfume smelling like flowers) on the top of the head and the hands of everyone. This passes the blessing from the maestro and is a form of cleaning. After this the maestro and Miguel went around and sang to each of the participants individually for a long time. He diagnosed a women next to me with cancer, gave her dietary instructions and offered to prepare a plant medicine for her. Some time around 04:00 AM he was finished and everyone fell asleep; at sunrise he waked us up and we left. I did not feel any effect of the Ayahuasca in the first session, except that I got diarrhea but it was very interesting watching the shaman at work. Also I started to have and remember many dreams during the dieta.

All of the following ceremonies were completely different, but followed this basic pattern. Different shipibos joined the ceremonies and at times we had more than 5 people singing different songs to other people at the same time. The effect of the Ayahuasca varied from very intense with powerful visions to very mild and physical.

The last two weeks I stayed in a little village called San Salvador, where Benjamin built a new healing center with a maloka (a round hut for ceremonies) and tambos (little huts to stay in). I camped there alone in a little part of jungle on his land, chilled out a lot in my hammock and helped a little building the huts and clearing the forest. Most of the nature photos are from there.

It’s hard to put into words and explain all that happened in the visions, and during the whole time of my dieta, but I went thru and cleared many things of my past and healed many relationships. I felt the life, this amazing energy, inside me really strong. I saw trees and plants growing out of me. I peeled off the layers of so called everyday consciousness and saw that what really is lying behind everything is energy and the exchange of energy. I felt the special effects of the Icaros (songs) and how they could direct my visions, for example how they put on layers of protections on me and were bathing me in safety. Another song spun a thin thread around me, like a cocoon of peace and yet another induced the vision of an insect:

I was born inside a flower with millions of petals, which slowly opened to reveal a green insect. A beautiful moment of birth, „ghost in a shell“-like… The insect was born inside there and I could see all parts of the flower, the petals and the insect in great detail. Then I had the vision, the view, of the insect, as it walked around. I was seeing thru it’s eyes. Suddenly the insect turned it’s head, or walked upside-down, and made my view also go upside-down. I had this upside-down view for some time, until I got scared, and let it go. The insect walked away.

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Señor de Ccollority, Peru

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Around June every year there is a big traditional festival in the mountains close to Cusco, called Señor de Ccollority (also written as Qoyllorit’i or Qoyllur Rit’i, meaning “snow star”). The communities of the surrounding highlands send delegations of dancers to the base of the glacier of the Ausangate mountain to pay tribute to the apus (mountain gods). Allthough there are a lot of Christian symbols involved and a church has been built, the festival itself is much older than the arrival of Christianity and dates back to pre-Inca times. Now it is an interesting fusion of both, and it has a strange, pagan touch to it which reminds me of the Austrian custom of Kramperl und Berchten. People called Ukukus dress up wild dresses and strange masks and some dancers carry dead baby-llamas around their waist and whip each other with whips. Other groups are dressed in beautiful, colorful clothes and hats to show their dances.

About 15.000 people gather at an altitude of nearly 5000m and the atmosphere is very peaceful – which might have to do with the fact that alcohol is prohibited and that the Ukukus also act as a sort of guards and policemen on the event. Even though temperatures reach below zero at night at this altitude, people camp out on the frozen ground with nothing more than sandals and a plastic tarp. Many people dance and sing for two days and nights straight and then the Ukukus make a procession carrying big wooden crosses on to the glacier. They also used to haul big blocks of ice down from the glacier, as a kind of sacred water to fertilize their fields, but this custom has been forbidden for the first time this year in order to protect the melting glacier.

I was invited to come to the festival with a family from the Q’ero nation, which traditionally live in the mountains at high altitudes and are said to be the last descendants of the Incas. The papa is called Taita and he is a shaman who also does coca-leave ceremonies with the “Casa Ayni” in Cusco, which is how I met him. By the way anyone calls anyone “Papa” and “Mama” around here, even I was addressed as “Papa”. We stayed in the new house of the family for two days, made a San Pedro (Wachuma) ceremony at the hot springs nearby and then made the 8km trek up to Ccollority where we stayed for two freezing cold nights.

We always made plenty of breaks to pick coca leaves, which is an important part of the local culture. It works like this: You always pick three coca leaves, put them together like flowers and then hand them over as a little present to someone else, with the Qechua words “alpei ku sunchis“. The other one replies with “urpi yay, sonko yay“, which means something like “my heart is flying” and then puts the leaves in his mouth. They also blow on the leave as a kind of blessing or prayer. The coca leaves really helped a lot to fight altitude sickness and to give power to keep on walking.

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Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

I was lucky to arrive in Bolivia one week before there was a Psytrance Party in Uyuni, right on the border of the salt-flats. I have actually thought about what a great place this would be for a party before, so I was very happy to be right in time! It was a great party, maybe 100 people, the most amazing landscape – very abstract, and crystal clear – and I have never been so cold while actually enjoying myself. I didn’t bring my camera there, but my friend “Amwo” has some pictures in his blog.

The “Salar de Uyuni” is the worlds largest salt-flat with 12.000 square kilometers at an altitude of 3800m. In the dry season it is a completely flat expanse of dry salt, but in the wet season it is covered 1cm to 1m deep with water. At this time of year it is usually already dry, but there was still a lot of water. So the reflections in the pictures are reflections in the water. Most the white is salt, not snow – but it is also very cold because of the altitude – so you can have mixtures of ice, snow, salt and other minerals. I took a 3-day jeep tour thru the Salar and some other sights further south: high-altitude deserts and lakes, volcanos, the red Laguna Colorada, geysiers, hot-springs and -again- flamingos who live in these freezing temperatures. I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I do…

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Lake Titikaka, Peru

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

I decided to do some “non-linear travelling” as I wanted to see the salt-flats of Uyuni in Bolivia before it got too cold. Yes, it’s insane; yes, it’s far – but I wanted to do it. So I spent the next 5 days in busses, crossing about 2000km of Peru and arrived on Lake Titikaka, already close to Bolivia. Because Lake Titikaka is at an altitude of 3800m and I ascended too fast from Lima, I had pretty strong symptoms of altitude sickness – had I only listened to my body and stayed in Arequipa, where the volcano looks like Mt. Fuji, but no I wanted to move on. Lake Titikaka itself is pretty, but very touristic…

…actually in all those years of travelling, I have never been in such a tourist trap as on Lake Titikaka before: I just wanted to book a boat-ticket to the island Amantani and stay there overnight. The person at the counter ensured me: “no guides, no tour, just transport”. Once on the water a guide showed up and explained that we are soon going to visit Uros Island. Ok, I wanted to visit these islands as well, as they are pretty special because they are made completely of reed (de: “Schilf”) and are movable. Just a few families live on one island and there are about 80 of them in Lake Titikaka. But it seemed as most of these islands exist soley for tourists. Colorfully dressed people waved as our boat arrived and then explained how the island is constructed of reed and that you can actually eat the reed (tastes allright), showed us around their houses and wanted us to buy some souveniers. At the end most of the group took a tour on a reed boat with the locals singing songs (“Amazing Grace”) for them, while I and some french guys wondered what we got into here.

Before we arrived on Amantani island the guide explained that we will be assigend to a local family where we will stay overnight (that’s actually part of their community-based tourism system, which ensures that the whole community benefits equally) get lunch, and after 2 hours of “free-time”(!) we will meet at a certain place to go to the top of the island to see the sunset. So we did as about 50 other tourists that day. After dinner we were invited to dress up like the locals (russian-doll like dresses for the girls and plain ponchos for the boys) and join a party with the locals. Well, the other option was to sit alone in a dark, freezing room, so “vamos”. They sold expensive beer, a bad band played music and traditionally clothed locals showed us a dance and asked us to join. Ouch. Looking around I saw amused/awkward looks in the ponco-dressed gringos and an expression in some faces that said “What the fuck am I doing here?”.

Unexpected came another question:

“What do you want for lunch tomorrow, sir? It’s 20 Soles (expensive)”…

Aehm… “I just want to take the boat back tomorrow.”

“But the boat is going to visit Taquile Island and we will not come back before 5PM. We will have lunch on Taquile.”

“Is there no other boat going back directly?”

“No.”

“Well… I’ll have the trout then…”

At this point resistance was futile and it was better to just play along and try to enjoy it anyways. Taquile turned out to be even more touristic than Amantani, but at least the trout was good. And as you can see in the photos, I liked the wheat and cereal crops on Amantani and the beautiful landscape there. But I definetly underestimated the tourism industry in Peru.

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Galapagos Islands

Friday, March 11th, 2011

I’m on the road again, travelling South-America for the next few month! I arrived in Quito, Ecuador about three weeks ago. Unfortunately I got infected with some kind of hybrid japanese-european-trans-pacific-flight-ninja-virus (others might call it a simple cold). The surprinsingly low temperatures in Quito at 2800m altitude plus the fact that I had to go out, get drunk and try to dance salsa the night I arrived after the 25 hour flight didn’t make that any better, so I was sick for the first week. Quito is quite nice though and I managed to get a few pictures from the colonial buildings in the old town:

I spent the last two weeks on the Galapagos Islands with my friends Matias and Mara. Unfortunately the sneaky virus installed itself in Mara’s immune system just after it was finished with me, so we were forced to take it slowly for most of the time (which is basically what we had planned anyways). The nature on the islands is amazing. From the moment you arrive you encounter the most exotic animals in paradise-like nature surroundings. Pelicans are everywhere, almost like pigeons in most cities, shooting from the sky into the water to catch fish, or standing motionless in the wind in some kind of meditation. I was particularly enchanted by seeing flamingos, which are the most exotic sight for me (Matias thinks flamingos are gay, just because they are pink, but whatever). Then there are iguanas (big lizards which can swim in the sea), the playful sea-lions, about 1m big land tortoises, sea turtles of the same size, white-tip-sharks hiding in the caves below the water, sea-horses hanging on to mangrove branches in muddy mangrove waters and penguins moving fast thru the water or standing on the lava rocks to heat up. It almost feels like in a zoo, only all the animals are free, wild and not very afraid of humans (naive?). One of the most amazing sites we visited were the “Tunneles” on Isabela Island: an area where the lava formed canals with sea-water, bridges and caves with cactus on top and giant turtles, sting-rays and fish swimming thru the water below. It’s one of these magical places which are so beautiful that they seem unreal and you feel like in a dream while you are there. I hope you can catch some of that feeling thru my photos.

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Travelling in Mongolia

Friday, September 17th, 2010

From Beijing I took a really crowded train (one day and one night) to Mongolian border.  In Mongolia travelling is tougher: no transport, no bed, no food, no shower – but people are really friendly and usually invite you to their “Ger” (a round, well-insulated tent) to drink Milk-Tea and eat a kind of cheese which is hard as a rock.

I underestimated the difficulties of travelling in Mongolia, when I made a stop in the small town of “Sainshand” and wanted to try to get directly to the Gobi desert from there. It would just be 400km west from there, but after half a day of asking around, it got clear that there is no public transport going there, the only option is to rent a jeep and a driver for about 700.000 Tugrik (US$700)… I stayed in one of the worst hotels ever. $12 for a twin-room which I shared with a Japanese friend, but as we asked for a shower we just got a “No”. After two days and one night on the train from China and the border, I really wanted to wash, so I tried the tap water: I got electric shocks! Using a cut bottle I was able to avoid most of them and managed to somehow get fairly clean, only to notice that the sink was not working, and the water was instead flowing into our room… After it got clear that there is no public transport going anywhere, except for the evening train to Ulaanbataar, we decided to see the local sight “Hamriin Hiid”, a Tibetan Monestary and “Enerjii”-Center in the desert about 50km away. People go there to drop candy on a heap of stones and to raise their arms and sing a song in a special “power spot”. After that you can lie down on the ground and try to absorb the “Enerjii”, which was difficult because little children were throwing stones and teenagers where talking on their mobile phones.

So instead of going directly to the Gobi, I had to travel 600km up north to Ulaanbataar and then 600km back down again: the next adventure. After checking several bus stations with a japanese-speaking local I was told that a kind of minibus, a russian “Porgon” leaves in the morning at the so-called “Black Market” (or “Narantuul Zach”). Since most buses leave erly morning at 08:00 I went there at this time, but it was pretty empty. Asking around (no english) no-one could tell me anything, but after a while it got clear and confirmed by several people that I should just wait here. Around 10:00 someone woke up in a green Porgon. I asked him and he confirmed that he would go to “Dalanzadgad”, the main town in the Gobi. How to pronounce the word “Dalanzadgad”? Something like “Dachlanzadgad”, but more difficult. A mongolian friend trained me for two hours, but still I could only say it 50% right (as he said). The Mongolian language is incredibly difficult. It’s funny when you try to say “Thank you” in Mongolian (something like “Beirch-la-la”) and the locals just start to laugh, because it sounds so wrong to them. Anyhow – the driver said, he would leave between 12:00 and 14:00, depending on the number of people. So I went back to the guesthouse, had some breakfast and came back at 12:00. He told me we would now leave at around 16:00, so I spent a lot of time in the “Black Market”, looking at “Nike” Sneakers, clothes, military jackets, local Mongolian Boots and different types of hard cheese. I also got some good home-made fried noodles, which they said I could pick out the meat, if I want it vegetarian. I came back to the minibus at 16:00, and the it looked quite full. It has three rows with three seats each plus the front seats for the driver, but we had already about 4 people each row. Slowly, slowly, the driver started to fix his lights, which made me wonder why he didn’t do that in the last 6 hours where we were just waiting around for more passengers. He also gave his spare tire away. At around 17:00 we started: now we were 5 people each row, making for 15 passengers. The machine got started using a crank, after several attempts and some fiddling in the engine it finally started – promising! After one hour of driving we got just outside of the city and made a stop at a gas station. Again waiting… One more passenger! A fat, older man. Great, squeeze in, we got plenty of space! Money (about $30) got collected for the ride. The local girl was by now actually sitting on the lap of a local boy, and all of us got quite “close”. The guy sitting opposite of me had the great idea to sort our legs: he pulled my leg to here, next leg there, your leg here, etc, which actually created a bit more space for everyone. After 15 minutes of driving we stopped again – a flat tire. Since the driver gave away his spare tire earlier, he had to somehow catch a ride to somewhere to get a new tire. I was actually happy to finally be outside of the cities and to see the amazing landscape, so I didn’t mind it much, and had a dinner of tomatoes, cheese and bread sitting at a nearby hill and watching the endless green scenery. A thunderstorm came up, the sky turned black, wind and rain, and I had to return to the car. A few minutes later, I looked up, and saw that the sky was all pink! I jumped out of the car to see the amazing color of the sky, a rainbow in the east and a sunset under the black clouds in the west – one of the most unbelievable sceneries i have ever seen! Finally the driver came back with another tire and after 1,5 hours we continued to drive until around 23:00 when we stopped for dinner at some shacks along the road. I had my dinner already and didn’t feel like having more salty milk tea. Again they tinkered with the motor. At 01:30 we had another breakdown and another flat tire at 03:30 and 04:30. In the middle of the night, we stopped in the middle of nowhere. The “road” is not one road, but many tracks which run more or less parallel thru the desert/steppe, sometimes joining each other, sometimes running differently, like an untamed river. When you stop, there is nothing around you – just vast emptiness, space and silence. Exactly what I was longing for after being in over-crowded Japan and China. Sometimes you can see the light of another vehicle in the distance or on one of the parallel tracks. At the same time we felt not really alone or lost: other Porgon drivers stopped, they all seemed to know each other, and they helped each other fixing their engines and tires, patching up the worn-out tubes for x-th time and pumping air into them manually. When a tube was finally finished, they just left it on the side of the road. It hardly seems to matter (to them) to leave waste in that vastness, and who k nows, maybe it will be helpful for the next driver, who’s tube is in a worse condition. Finally we had a drive with no further incidents until 11:00, racing thru the more and more arid landscape. After lunch, they messed around with the motor again; at 13:30 we passed a tank-truck which came the opposite way, we stopped it and tanked by filling up water-bottles from his tank. At around 15:00 – more than 24 hours after we started – we arrived at the destination.

Dalanzadgad is not much of a town, it’s just a bunch of gers in the dust, separated by wooden board fences. Quite big actually, but without much infrastructure of any kind. I didn’t have a Guidebook – something I usually enjoy, but really regretted in Mongolia, as it is hard to communicate and get reliable information. From Dalanzadgad the only way to actually get into the Gobi Desert is to hire a jeep and a driver. No public transport whatsoever and hitchiking is not recommended as it’s easy to die if you get stuck in the desert. The jeep/driver prices were too high for me alone, so I needed to meet some people with whom I could share the costs. Luckily there is one nice place for travelers there, the “Mazaalai Ger Camp”, run by a French-Mongolian couple and on the next day in the morning I met three Italian guys who were planning to rent a jeep and driver to go exactly where I wanted to go and they let me join them on the three day trip.

The first place we visited in the desert was a “Yolyn Am”, a green valley with a little river, where ice can be found throughout most of the year. Quite green and unexpected in a desert, but very beautiful. The night we slept in the (tourist) Ger of one of the families close to the the “Singing Dunes” (“Khongoryn Eels”). The next morning I woke up early and climbed up the few hundred meters to the top of the dunes with one of the Italians. It was still nice and cool and we had a great view, but the most amazing thing happened when we were already descending. We were lucky to be at the right place at the right time: suddenly we could hear a soft humming sound, the “singing dunes”, at first I thought I can hear an airplane. It got louder and lying on the sand we could feel that the whole dune was vibrating, sticking the arms into the sand we could feel the vibrations everywhere. After a few minutes the effect started to fade and everything was back to normal. A very amazing demonstration of the theory that everything in the world is made up of nothing else but vibrations.

After the Gobi I went back to Ulaanbataar in the very efficient and nearly luxurious daily bus. It had only one breakdown and a whole seat for every passenger!

Having only a few days left, I went to the nearby area called “Terej”, where I met a really nice family and rode a horse for the first time.

Anyhow, I have no time to write more now – enjoy the pictures.

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