With my dieta on Manchinga, I would not only not be drinking ayahuasca for a month but I was also supposed to spend this month in isolation in a small hut in the middle of the rain forest. I’ve been in tambo before at another center, with the tambo having a floor, mosquito net walls, a roof, a bed, and a desk. Apart from the noises at night from being deeper in the jungle, it wasn’t all that challenging and it was enjoyable to get away from the hustle and bustle of the main center area. The tambos at this center were a bit different though, and a tambo consisted of a thatch roof perched on four sticks with a raised platform with a mattress on it. No floor to walk on, no desk to write at, and no reprieve from the mosquitoes other than under the mosquito net over the mattress (even then, the suckers managed to find a way in!). Describing it as basic is an understatement for a westerners imagination.

I balked for a few days, pushing off the day when I had to move out to tambo with a variety of excuses until the shaman pretty much moved my belongings out there for me. He told me that he did not want to see me on this side of the river until he came and got me in a month. Begrudgingly like a child being sent to their room, that afternoon I made my way out to my tambo and what was supposed to be my home for the next month. I had been given a crash course in tambo life before heading out, make sure to put all your belongings in bags or be prepared to be cleaning cockroaches out of your clothes and have a bucket to use to go to the bathroom so you don’t have to go out in the bush and get mosquito bites on parts of you that can be rather uncomfortable, were the two main take-aways from that. Though I would not heed the bucket advice as I figured a few mosquito bites in the ass were a small trade off for what other creepy crawlies might be attracked towards my tambo with a bucket, all in all I felt that I would have not much problem handling tambo life but I would be sorely mistaken.

Now I’ve never been to prision and I fully admit any idea I have of prision has come from movies and TV shows, but if those are anything close to reality, living in tambo would rank similar to the Mexcian border city prisions. Firstly, the bed. Now the mattress was pretty decent as Amazonian mattress standards go it being over 4 inches thick, but it turns out that the peruvians who had constructed the bed platform had little to no concept of what level was. My first night was spent sliding to the right and the bottom of the bed, waking up the next morning with sore muscles from bracing myself all night. Not to be deterred after one night in tambo I set out to remedy the problem, collecting some spare pieces of board from a nearby tambo under construction. Though leveling the matress proved impossible, I did manage to make the matress into a sort of taco shape so that rather than rolling off I would sink into the middle. Not the most comforable, but it was an improvement.

Next was the so called “toliet,” if you can refer to a shallow hole in the ground with wooden slats on either side to perch on as a toilet. Having grown up on a farm, I was no stranger to using the great outdoors as my bathroom when in a pinch, what I never had to deal with at home though was the vast plethora of Amazonian insects that would set up shop in my “toilet”. I started to understand a bit more why it had been reccomended to me to use a bucket, it was not just the mosquitos that attacked ones bare ass but the locality of ones bare ass to the community of beetles and other creepy crawlies taking up residence in the shallow hole. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bucke, and just came to terms that the bugs in the hole had no interest in me, only what was coming out of me. I still avoided going to the bathroom the best I could during the night, I never fully trusted those bugs and preferred to be able to keep my eye on them in the daylight.

To make tambo life even more fun, the food served became even more restricted than what I previously described in my blog post “Fun and Games.” Meals were delivered only twice a day and consisted of 2L of white rice and 2 potatos. If you were lucky you might get a piece of fish or a boiled plantain instead of potatos! Prior to leaving the main center to go to tambo I had been buttering up the kitchen staff, resulting in the occasional contraband cucumber included in my tambo breakfast box. Never has cucumber tasted so good!

Now maybe you are reading this thinking, “Come on, the bed, bathroom, and food situtation has nothing on prison!” Maybe so, but combine these factors with the intense heat and bugs associated with residing in a hut in the middle of a dense rainforest and it makes for a very, very uncomfortable day to day life. The mosquitos were relentless, and capabable of biting through the mosquito net if one of your body parts strayed too close. If you decided to go for a stroll in the forest or to bathe in the nearby stream, a black cloud would follow and you would just have to resign yourself to the fact that you were going to loose a pound of blood in the process.

From day one, I started counting down the days I had left in tambo. Breaking the month down into weeks, then down into 3 day blocks somehow made me feel like I could make it until the end. After three days I thought, “Hey! I made it half a week and it wasn’t so bad… Another three days and I’ll almost be at a week, and then its only like 3 more weeks!” Turns out my time in tambo would be cut short (thankfully) after only 10 days. I had a couple physical problems that came to a head while in tambo, including a bout of intense menstration cramps and the pain in my stomach from my surgery continued to get worse. This pain turned out to be an abcess coming to the surface, which two days after returning from tambo would finally pop open (to my horror, the shamans and probably a few of the other guests). I had been harboring fears that some type of amazonian insect had laid eggs and the larvae were now coming to the surface, thankfully it was just alot of puss and dead tissue!

The shaman also told me to come back from tambo early as he could see I was not mentally strong enough to handle the process. Rather than finding the isolation and nature to be calming and healing allowing for self reflection, it was actually causing me to regress significantly. My mind was weak he told me, not to worry though, they had plants that would fix that which I would diet with after I finished Manchinga. They also would give me plants to help heal my stomach and by the end of my stay it would be a joke around the center that I had been given every plant in the rainforest! For the rest of my stay the shaman did not reccomend that I go to tambo again, though I know if I go back it will be something that I should do. Some people at the center were staying in tambo for months at a time, finding the experience healing and transformational. It seemed that nothing during my time in the Amazon was going to be straighforward.

Back to Peru or next blog post.