Bad Medicine (Part one)

I'm off the bus after forty-five minutes driving deep into suitably jungle-like jungle. I've got another crudely drawn Post-It Note. The lady at tourist information has scribbled directions - four squiggly lines representing a river and some roads, the name of my target village and the name of the local shaman.

In the raw midday sun, I'm wandering alone through the jungle, albeit down a tarmac road. There's constant chirping and rustling and rattling from all directions, but I don't see any animals. I'm waiting to stumble across one of the twenty-foot monster pythons. I've seen them on the Horror Channel.

I eventually arrive in a town, Misahualli. It features a town square surrounded by small shops, restaurants, hotels, then farther on is a beach, full of monkeys. From the beach, I've jumped into a forty horse-power canoe taxi to get upstream to Shiripuno, home of the shaman. 

Photo: Gillian Sheppard

On arriving at the bank of Shiripuno, I've walked into a traditional village. There's a five of six huts, largely made from bamboo and straw, but it looks to be a tourist trap. There's a restaurant, a craft shop and up on the hill, a five of six lodge hotel. A few Americans are crowded around an eleven year old local boy with a five-foot python around his neck.

Photo: astours.fr

In broken Spanish, I explain who I'm looking for, and a local man ushers me to follow him down a jungle path. We come out of an opening where the path continues across a field to the actual working village. We arrive at the shaman's house. It's a small two floor house, but the lower floor is simply four pillars that support the top floor. There's no walls on this lower floor. The shaman comes downstairs and guides me past the three dogs who actively guard the home. He doesn't look so much like Papa Shango as I'd hoped. He's just a forty year old pot-bellied Ecuadorian in a blue shirt. The conversation is extremely brief. "Se necesita", he asks. I don't know what that means, but his reply to my blank expression is only to repeat it. On the third repetition, it clicks. It must be "What do you need". I've never heard that phrase before, which tells you all you need to know about South American service culture. "Quiero tocar Ayahuasca" - I want to take Ayahuasca. I confirm that I have eaten only bread and fruit, and we agree on a twenty dollar fee. He tells me to return at half past Six.

Photo: comicvine.com

By way of a bridge, Misahualli can be easily walked to from Shiripuno. I return there to start burning a few hours. Two of the beach monkeys are repeatedly creeping up to a big dog, then scampering away when he gets wind of them and gives chase. Cheeky little turds.

Photo: Karlik, I guess a small dog is more manageable

I don't have any vivid expectation for the experience, probably because I've done less than ten minutes of research. That also means I have little, if any awareness of the risks, so I shoot a note to Dug - just in case.

Hola Dug,

 I´m in Misahualli, an internet-ready Ecuadorian Jungle town. In a couple of hours I´m heading over the river to to Shiripuno to meet my shaman. He´s going to lead me through a tea drinking ritual, during which I´ll probably vomit and hallucinate profusely. It´s a "vision quest" of sorts.

Anyway, I´m alone, and I believe the tea has the odd fatality, so I´m just telling someone where I am.

Obviously, if I don´t resurface in a few days, please avenge my death and release my spirit to the afterworld. If all goes well, I´ll regale you with the details over some lovely ale.

Cheers

Stevie

I'm back amongst the huts in Shiripuno. As the light fades to black, I start to hear flutters and see bat-size shadows flying all about the place. The jungle noises of earlier only get more intense. I'm waiting in the dark for half an hour before my shaman emerges from the darkness, navigating by the screen light of his Nokia. It's funny because his phone is a newer model than mine. I still don't have any specific expectations of what might happen tonight.

With just my torch light, he sits me down and pours a thick brown liquid from an old plastic water bottle into a small half-coconut shaped cup. He tells me to drink all of it and I start throwing it back in continuous gulps. It's about half a mug's worth. It's bitter and has a distinct bad, not terrible, medicine flavour. He asks for the twenty dollars. He says something - I assume in the native language, Kichwa - then proceeds to draw the sign of the cross on me using the twenty buck note. He walks me to behind a large rock and sits me down again.

After a minute or so, he stands up in front of me and begins chanting and whistling. It lasts just a minute or so, after which he sits down opposite me, then lies down and appears to go to sleep. I'm trying to treat this as a spiritual, or at least solemn experience, so much as I am able - because I'm a horrible cynical bastard. I'm sitting, head down, with my eyes closed, trying not to think about anything but the jungle noise. I do take a moment to check that the space immediately between my knees is immediately available for throwing up.

Some ten or fifteen minutes later, the shaman's phone alarm goes off. Once again he stands and begins chanting and whistling. This time, he goes on to kiss the very top of my head, then, in the same action, starts blowing air directly against my head. With more chanting, he picks up a branch with an end of thick leaves, which he begins shaking left and right over my head. I'm dusted with some kind of plant seeds and a eucalyptus scent. All of this is over in three of four minutes and the shaman returns to sleep in front of me.

I'm not feeling anything at all yet - not so much an inclination to throw up.  Every ten minutes, I open my eyes and look up at an overhanging branch and the stars behind it. I shake my head a little to see if there's any visual effect. There's nothing. Every fifteen minutes, my shaman wakes up, but does little more than check I'm there before returning to sleep.

After what seems like an hour, I start to feel my lips inflating or enlarging. It's a very gradual process. I'm mildly concerned, but so long as it stops in the next few minutes, I won't need to worry. It does stop. Aside from that, I'm still not experiencing any visuals and feeling completely lucid. I'm wondering if it will have any effect at all, and hoping that it does.

Looking at a bush behind the sleeping shaman, I start to make out an increasingly vivid human figure, but I'm reckoning that a can of Coke and hour or two in the dark would equal this unimpressive effect. The jungle has hardly come alive to take me.

A final time, my shaman wakes and tells me that it's over. I accept that it's just not hit me and go to stand up. I don't make it to standing the first time. When I do make it up, I find myself utterly disoriented. I'm staggering like a teenage drunk, but still lucid. The shaman's wife or daughter has arrived and hand-holds me down path towards the main village.

The lucid feeling quickly decays. Soon, I'm no better than a teenage drunk. I'm staring down at the torch-lit path, trying to continue one foot after the other in a straight line. It's not working brilliantly well. Somehow, I drop a coin and try to bend over to pick it up. I squeeze my fingers to grab it, only to find that I haven't yet reached the ground. My depth perception is way, way off kilter. On a third attempt, I make it to the ground, only to find the coin has merged into the ground. I'm just clawing at a flat surface. This repeats at least twice more as I drop more coins and fail to recover them.

Before the ceremony, my shaman had asked where I was staying, assuming I had a room in the lodge. One of my few assumptions, given the little advice I had taken or read, was that the shaman would stay with me until morning. I have no room. He knew that beforehand and was happy enough to continue, so I'd not worried about it. I planned, in a worst-case, to sleep on the floor in one of those village huts.

Back at the shaman's house, I have a loose grasp on the last of piece of my mind. I'm not certain, but I think I said that I'll walk back to Misahualli to get a room there.