Day 91 Wednesday 21 July – Cutting down ‘rainforest’

When I get up, I roll up the mosquito net and head in to the main room. It’s a wooden house on poles, with basically 3 rooms: Two very small ones to sleep in, and one big one, which is used as a kitchen and everything else. My guest-mom is already cooking breakfast. For me there are some sort of cakes, but I can’t really tell what they are made of; and yuca.

After breakfast, we all go out to mow weed with machetes. But this isn’t the kind of weed that we are used to: everything grows so much faster here, the weed is trees of up to 2,5 metre high and several centimetres thick. We work all morning and somewhere near the end, one of us finds a snake. A strangling type, so not harmful. The son of the family picks it up. Again, I regret not having my camera with me now. But at least I have the memory of seeing and touching it.

When we get back to the house, the father shows me the cabin with all the liquor, he offers me a bit of the strong stuff he calls: “veinticinco” (25), but it’s in a plastic bottle, so I ask him if he brew it himself. No, he buys it in Tena. It tastes good, but one shot is enough if I want to stay sober the rest of the day.

After that, the son takes me to the river again to go for a swim. While I’m relaxing, he hunts fishes underwater, armed with a spear: two sharp spikes, welded onto a steel construction wire. When we go back to the house after a while, he lets me manage the canoe by myself. But it’s hard to manage, to stay in balance and to push the thing in the direction you want to go. But perhaps I was just doing it wrong.

Lunch was a soup of palm heart, some palm heart cooked in a leaf, yuca and a boiled egg. After we finish, the dad takes me on a little tour to the cocoa field and then it is almost time to go. I tell them ‘ashca pagrachu’ and ‘shuk punchakama’ and the son takes me back to the road where the bus will stop. At the river, the canoe is missing, so we have to cross walking. I take off my boots and roll up my pants, but still the water is deeper than I thought. The part that I rolled up gets all wet.

At the house where we are supposed to wait, the son remembers me I’m supposed to pay (though it is very difficult for him to ask me). I don’t have the change, so we head down the road to meet D., who is waiting a little further down. When we get there, he has just crossed the river with his guest parents himself. Then we walk back up and one of us notices a fish in a pond. The get another villager with a machete and they start to hunt the fish. While they may have hurt it, they didn’t catch it.

After this D. and I take the bus, a 45 minute drive back to Tena. Tired, full of bug bites, but content.