12.26.08

I'm on a flight from Lima to Iquitos, a city at the headwaters of the Amazon in Peru.  We just finished a five-day shoot for an episode in Suriname, a little, relatively unknown country between Guiana and French Guiana.

Right now I'm somewhere over the Peruvian Andes at the beginning of filming another episode centered on the Peruvian Amazon.  Led Zeplin is fading out in the background on my ipod mix, to be followed by something by Coldplay (I don’t know the name of the song, but it's the one that starts with the repeating downward piano chords), the plane is fighting it's way through what I am assuming is the turbulence from the very vertical Andes below us.  We will be on 14 flights on this two-episode trip, and I have to admit I'm on a slump as far as liking flying.  No matter what the logic behind a turbulent ride, instinctively it seems quite wrong at 30+ thousand feet.  I guess as long as the flight attendants aren’t sweating, things are probably ok. That annoying Just For Laughs show is on the drop down video screen, so no matter how you try to avoid watching the one directly in front of you, there is another one and another one all the way down the plane to the cockpit, like looking in a reflection of a mirror in a mirror. 

(Now it’s BB King on the mix – “Every Day I Have the Blues.”)

The clouds just opened up below us to a brief glimpse of the forest covered Andes, all folded up like a crumpled piece of paper, rivers running off somewhere, and then the clouds envelop us again.  It was late last night – actually early this morning that we arrived in Lima, Peru, around 2am, from a long trip out of Suriname, through Port of Spain, Panama, then Lima.  The clouds just broke open below us again to a whole new scene like the next slide in a slide show:  we are now fling over the Peruvian Amazon with it’s thick green rain forest disappearing over the horizon, low lying fluffy clouds slowly floating across the rainforest canopy, their shadows casting themselves over the trees below, rivers from the tiny to giant sized ones (presumably a  major feeder river into the Amazon itself) ox-bowing their way into the distance.

(Stevie Ray Vaughn “Tin Pan Alley” on now, it's a long song, so no interruptions for a little while.)

Flash back to our shoot in Suriname.   Suriname was pretty amazing.  One of the more surprising places I have ever been.  The capital city of Paramaribo is not all that exciting as far as exotic cities go.  There is the center of it that has architectural vestiges of the Dutch colonial days:  two and three story buildings, all in wide clapboard siding, second floors wrap around balconies with their white spindled railings.  Some in really rough shape, some in the process of renovation, some in good shape.  Beyond them are the unpainted wood shanties that - to my understanding - were where the freed slaves lived starting in the late 1800’s, as well as the Hindustani and Javanese that were brought over to pick up where the slaves left off after being freed on the plantations.  That is the colonial history of the country.  People stolen from Africa – mainly West Africa – and brought here to work the sugar cane, cotton and palm oil plantations, then after they were freed, more people brought over from other colonial/under-developed countries to do the same back breaking work the slaves did.  It's this history that brought us here.  Four main elements:  The Creole culture of the freed slaves, the Maroons who were the would be slaves that escaped into the thick jungle the minute they arrived here, the Javanese and the Indians and lastly the Amerindians – the native culture that were here long before any European even considered setting foot on a ship and heading west. All of these people have managed to retain their individual cultures while doing a remarkable job of mixing with each other.  We somehow managed to show up for cereminies in each of these religions/cultures.I'm not going to go into detail about them so you will have a reason to watch the episode.

(Old De La Soul “En Focus” is next on the mix)

First off was a Winti ceremony, part of the Creole tradition here.  The Creole are a mix of different people, all based on specifically having some African decent in their background.  So there are African-Hindustanis, African-Dutch-Javanese, African-Amerindian-Javanese-Dutch – you get the point.  And everyone has a very strong knowledge of their varied cultural background in the Creole community.  The Creoles seem to take parts from all the varied religious traditions in the area – Hindu, Javanese, Amerindian and of course the base of the religion is a mix of Voodoo from West Africa.  They incorporate parts from all of these traditions into their ceremonies.  In this case specifically an African drumming ceremony, but not a tourist thing.  This was a place well out of town, down a dirt road, down another smaller dirt road, into a little shanty area with a group of 30 or so people going through a spirit ceremony to purge someone there of what ails them. 

(The Beatles “Dear Prudence”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
The Beatles “Glass Onion”
I fell behind in writing down songs)

The Javanese ceremony that we went to was a trance ceremony in a tiny little shanty town up a river next to the ghost property of an old sugar cane plantation where you could hear and feel the terrible history the plantation had to tell.  But had you not known where you were, while watching this ceremony in this little shanty village next to the plantation in the middle of the jungle, you could have just as easily been in Java – the costumes, the people, the dances, everything.  I can give you two things from this trance ceremony - ten or twelve men tearing some poor hapless live chicken apart and moments later those same men acting like monkeys hamming it up for the crowd.

(Little Milton “Blues in the Night”)

The word Amerindian basically refers to any Indian in either North or South America.  So they refer to North American Indians on a whole as Amerindians where as we use the term American Indian referring to Indians specifically in North America as far asI understand the term.  Their way is far more accurate as technically the Indians way way back in time made their way across the land bridge that used to conned Russia and Alaska and over the millennia made their way down through North America, Central America and down into South America.  “Amer” of course referring to the Americas, “Indian” referring to . . . you know. . . Indians.  The Amerindian ceremony was with a specific group called the Arawak.  It was a lesson in anthropology.  As I mentioned before about the multi-millennia migration of Indians southward, here we were in the thick of the rain forest outside Paramaribo half an hour down a dirt/sand road in a group of seven or eight ramshackle shanty houses and there in front of me was a group of Indians with the same style of clothing, the same sounding songs, the same rattles, dances forms as the Lakota Sioux tribes up in Minnesota that I have seen.  It was uncanny.  The clear cultural connection between the two was astounding.

The most amazing trip was up to the thick, thick rain forest.  Suriname is 85% untouched rain forest.  There is certainly pressure from both internal and external forces to get hands on her natural resources, gold, bauxite, and of course lumber, but as of today the local groups such as the Amerindians and Creole and Javanese, and in this case the Maroons, have been able to stave things off.  As a result you have one of the greatest forests you will find in the world.  We took a four-seater plane up into the forest, landing on a grass runway cut out of the woods which was about the size of a par three fairway with a wall of jungle on three sides, a river with high rocky boulders on either side at the end of the runway.  Walking out of the plane into the little village, we boarded our 45ft long by 3ft wide boat, loaded up with all of our stuff and proceeded to make our way down the river, through winding rock rapids, every now and then having to jump into the river to push ourselves off the rocks, or to help push the occasional other boat trying to go up the rapids.  Think about it.  A 45ft long wood boat trying to negotiate rocky rapids.  It was incredible, and not lost on me that we would have to do the same thing and make our way back up the rapids just like the people we were now helping in order to get back to the airstrip and out of here.  Then back into our boat and deeper and deeper into the rain forest going down river on our way to meet a tribe of Maroons. The Maroons are very specifically slaves that escaped pretty much right after they arrived off the boat from Africa to Suriname.  They fled into the thick unforgiving jungle to set up remote villages in the most inaccessible places.  They had to stay away from any rivers as that would be a sure bet of capture.  So imagine people disappearing into a deep dark and unfamiliar forest that they were instinctively terrified of, to set up a life in the furthest outreaches of that jungle in order to escape their captors and life as a slave.  Standing there in the jungle trying to imagine their lives such as they were as slaves, that they had to be so remarkable bad that their better option was to disappear into a jungle that they were deathly afraid of.  After the slaves were freed in the late 1800’s, the Maroons moved from their hidden camps and villages to better locations on rivers throughout the jungle, but still very remote.  I realize this phrase is used often to describe a place or a culture, but this was truly like stepping back in time – in a way like Brigadoon.  We were in the jungle staying near their village for a couple days, and even in such a short time, it was magical.  I don’t like using a term like that all that much, but in this case it is more than appropriate.  The things that I got to do and the ceremonies that I was a part of, the access we were given to a people so far off the beaten path was one of the most remarkable travel experiences I have ever had, and I've had a lot of them.  I’ll leave the rest to the air date of the episode, but Suriname was such a big surprise to all of us in the crew.  A completely unknown place only a couple plane rides away from the good old U S of A.

(Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dani California
Joe Cocker “Get by with a little help”
Now Jefferson Airplane “White rabbit” as we are landing in Iquitos)

Peru

Iquitos is in the middle of the headwaters of the Peruvian Amazon.  Picture an area the size of Germany, all rain forest with a city of 500 thousand in the middle of it.  That is Iquitos.  The only way in or out is by plane or boat - there is no road access.  The boat version usually takes 4 to 10 days from any other major city.  It has a frontier town feel to it.  A combination of mainly the original Peruvian Indians and some ex-pat Europeans.  The ex-pats are definitely what you see in other hidden towns around the world, people hiding from something, searching for something, or just trying to live an interesting life as far away as they can from their old ones.  Very few tourists – around 20 thousand a year, which is nothing.  Most of them are people coming down to experience the rain forest in some way or another.  Some go to little resorts and camps set up by other westerners to try rain forest cures for problems ranging from the very serious to the seriously affected. Then there are the more traditional tourists who are there simply to see the rain forest in all of it's majesty in the relative comfort of a remote eco-lodge.  The Peruvians themselves are steadily moving in from the jungle to Iquitos for jobs and money.  There is a huge market in the area called Belen – the real heart of the city where most of these people who have moved fin from the jungle live as documented and un-documented citizens.  It's an area right on the main river (on one of the main tributaries that feeds into/becomes the Amazon barely a mile or two down river) made up of houses on stilts and floating houses as the whole section of town floods for half of the year up to 15ft creating a floating city and market area. You can feel the pressure of a poor people, again like many of these frontier feeling towns you find around the world, trying to survive, abandoning their lives in remote jungle villages for the clatter a clamor of the big city.  The surrounding jungle and the rivers and the city itself shows that pressure well.  The Amazon there is filled with the filth of the market draining into it, people living on the river doing all of their daily things in the river – washing, swimming, transporting things, selling stuff, using their floating outhouses on it, making for a fetid soup that would baffle the CDC for months.  Of course the locals have built up immunities to this water, so the swimming in the filth, the washing of clothes and food, etc, supposedly has no effect on them. The word is that the locals rarely get sick, but when they do, it's usually the end of the road for them.   Anyone not from this area that has the misfortune to fall into this river will at best have all variety of living and dead things coming out of their body in ways that they never envisioned.  Again think of this area as a really large market with it's winding streets, packed stalls and everything for sale under the sun from plastic bowls to sandwiches and cooked food, vegetables, fruit, charcoal made from denuding parts of the forest to sell in the city to cook food with, rare animals killed for food like alligators, rare turtles, monkeys and sloths (really depressing), and then the part of this market that really sets it apart from any other market I can think of in the world – all of the rain forest medicine cures.  Some totally based on superstition and some real ones getting the attention of pharmaceutical companies around the world and everything else in between:  things to cure baldness, rain forest Viagra, cancer cures, psychotropic medicines etc.  The medicine comes in the form and combinations of bark, branches, leaves, fruits, again rare animals and snakes (and again that last part a total bummer to see). 

Our time here is being spent in this market area of Belen, and then out to a village of Indians renowned for their blow gun hunting and still wearing traditional grass skirts.  I later find out that this happy little village has pretty much wiped out any living thing in the surrounding forest by using their blowguns and now rely on selling things to tourists that make their way up to the village by boat.  In talking to them it sounds like they in part wear the grass skirts out of tradition and in part for tourism.  It sounds like the younger generation is liking the look and feel of jeans and t-shirts.  Who can blame them. My dad, being from Inverness in northern Scotland, would probably not want to be wandering around in the highlands in a kilt living in a stone house heated by peat, eating the fetid meat of a sheep he killed a week or two ago just so some tourist can show up from some other country to see him live the same way his ancestors did so they can feel like they saw the “real Scotland.” It was a classic story of the pressure that local indigenous people find themselves under – to assimilate.  The pressure of modernization, overpopulation, their kids getting more and more exposed to the west and all the good and the bad that comes with it, a people struggling to hold on to their culture while at the same time trying to have some of the same benefits that the people who come to buy their crafts do.

For the last two days in Iquitos we found ourselves accompanied along the shoot by a baby sloth that had come into our possession through a relatively convoluted story.  The gist of it was it was for sale -illegally- as food in the market of Belen and ended up with us through our local guide.  They have always been amazingly cool animals to me, and to have a little one with us for two days, rescued from the market was amazing.  Just hanging out in the production van (literally hanging onto a tripod we set up in the van), or clinging to any one of our necks and shoulders with it’s muppet-like head slowly swiveling around with that constant smile and stoned looking eyes that take around 5 seconds to blink, or being carried around with us to the villages and shoots around Iquitos or in the jungle.  We held on to it for the two days so on the last day we could take it to a large jungle reserve and release it.  Had we let it go in the jungle around Iquitos or in the village we visited, it would have been captured and eaten in a matter of days, or would have wound up back in the Belen market being sold for meat, so we had to hold on to it until we could get it to a jungle reserve out of town.  Needless to say we grew quite attached to it.  This poor little slow moving baby sloth, weak, helpless and not understanding what was going on around it and to it - being sold in the market for food, it's siblings and parents gone - really had an affect on me.  It still gets to me as I am writing this.  When it came time to release it in the jungle reserve, I carried it into the rain forest and searched around with the rest of the crew and our guide and one of the reserve people looking for the appropriate tree to put it on.  It was raining a bit and at last we I found a skinny enough tree (remember it’s a baby sloth), and set it on the tree.  We then stood there watching it make it's way slowly up the 50 foot tree.  .

It was a bitter-sweet way to end the trip to Iquitos.  Not only specifically in reference to this specific little sloth (I named it Bill), who has already had a rough life and may likely have a rough life ahead of it.   While the reserve was the best possible scenario for Bill and it has a good reputation, it was still a bit sad, knowing that Bill has a lot of cards stacked against him.  But also the whole sloth thing was bitter sweet on a larger scale. People live in different ways with different customs, different traditions, different ways of getting by day by day all around the world.  That's what makes travel so great and the world so interesting.  But there are also things that happen all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike, very much including the United States, and also including Iquitos, that just plain suck.  Poaching endangered animals to make a quick buck is one of those things that just plain sucks.  I'd use stronger language, but my mom might read this.

So my sense of the Peruvian Amazon jungle was both awe at the majesty and size of the jungle and at the same time a sense of the jungle being at a tipping point, and if some major and meaningful change doesn’t happen on both a local and global scale, it will tip in the wrong direction.  And this sort of change is generational, it doesn’t come in a nice and convenient 24 hour pill.  Not the Disney ending you or I want, but that’s really what it felt like to me.  Sorry about the rambling monologue, but Iquitos has a lot of stuff going on, and not all of it's happy.

Now I am at long last on the way home, the 14th flight over the last 13 days. The queston is:  would I return to either place on vacation?  Easily the answer is yes to Suriname.  A relatively undiscovered and untouched place where my family and friends and I could disappear into the rain forest at some nice eco lodge and make day trips out or overnight some times - or just chill by the pool sipping gin and tonics - or both.  Really friendly people, not too expensive and nice fresh food.  Iquitos?  Maybe.  I am definitely glad I went and I would certainly like my son to see it.  But I would like him to see what I saw - not only what the tourists see.  So that would be the real life of the market and surrounding area of Belen which would mean a night or two in Iquitos itself.  Then we would make like the tourists and head out to some nice and comfy eco lodge and repeat the same thing I mentioned wanting to do in Suriname just a sentence ago.  From what I have heard from fellow travelers, the remote jungle in Peru is quite amazing, and in a way, quite hopeful.  The nature of these eco lodges, when they are done well, creates an environment where travelers are coming to see the Amazon in all its natural glory, locals are making money from employment at these lodges and from the additional money spent in their villages.  The jungle is being well taken care of in the surrounding area as a result, because that is what brings the tourists.  As long as there is good regulation restricting crazy development and developers, this seems like a good thing.  Also if I went back with my family maybe we could stop by the reserve and see if any sloths answer to the name Bill.

As the plane is decending to land in Minneapolis, there is snow on the ground below us, and through the magic of travel, it’s still 90 degrees and rain forest humid in the jungle of Suriname, about the same at the headwaters of the Amazon in Iquitos.  But the thing I have been looking forward to for a while now is the arrival in the Minneapolis airport.  On the last return home from the shoots in Morocco and Turkey, my wife Lisa and son Alex were able to meet me at the airport, and for whatever reason, be it flights coming in too late or during a week day, I have never been able to meet Alex at the airport until that return trip.  He is a few months over two years old, able to talk a little, and fast on his feet.  When I arrived in the baggage claim area I saw Lisa and Alex around 50 feet away.  Lisa had seen me and was crouching down to tell Alex to look for me.  After peering through all the legs between us, he finally saw me and took off running towards me yelling "daddy!"  Now it’s no exaggeration that this was one of the greatest moments of my life.  Truly.  People that he was running through turned to watch the reunion.  I  have had that image in my mind for quite some time now, and I can’t wait for a repeat of it in a few minutes.  I can’t see how that would ever get old: to see the sheer unadulterated joy on your child’s face upon your return.

 A couple photos of Bill the sloth.  First on the tripod, second hanging from one of our shooters, and third climbing up the tree we released him onto in the rain forest reserve - he's the gray dot on the middle tree right after where it bends to the left around half way up.