by Stafford, Ed
That night we sat in a house in Santa Luz patiently waiting for the chief to tune in his prize possession, a wireless radio. When he finally got a signal with some vaguely recognisable music, I asked him where the signal was being transmitted from.
‘China,’ he replied matter-of-factly.
The following day, Cho and I set off in torrential rain. As we got down to the river we were shivering in our T-shirts and we inflated the rafts and set off into the grey haze towards the island. On the island the skies cleared and we decided not to deflate the rafts. We carried them under our arms or on our heads, being blasted about by a gusty wind. As we reached the end of the island we put them in the water and lowered our packs into them. Cho indicated behind me with a nod.
‘Mira, Ed, atrás.’
The scene I describe in the Prologue now began to unfold. As I looked over my shoulder there were no fewer than five dugout canoes heading in our direction – all full of armed Asheninkas. Many of the men were standing up in these narrow vessels and were armed with either shotguns or bows and arrows. The women among them had machetes. As the boats beached, the men and women swarmed on to the island and approached us furiously.
My diary tells me about my reaction more accurately than my memory does. ‘Here we go again’ was actually the sentiment in my head. I was somewhat vexed by the inconsiderate Indians coming to kill me. Didn’t they realise we were pushed for time?
Clearly it must have been a way for my brain to cope. I knew the gravity of the situation but such apathy seemed to be my natural way of dealing with this extreme stress. I slowly and calmly went through the logical ways of calming the tribesmen down. I held my hands open and looked apologetic and unthreatening. I didn’t force a smile as I considered it could be misinterpreted as an insult to the seriousness of the matter to the Asheninkas. I showed my permit from OIRA and could see that the chief was too worked up to be able to read it – his eyes could not focus on the paper, although I was later to find out he could read Spanish. Cho and I both seemed to be of the opinion that if we were calm, helpful and non-threatening the people would respond accordingly.
The man I took to be the chief was speaking in angry bursts and gesticulating wildly and demanded that we be led back to their community. At arrow point we got into our rafts and tried to follow the lead canoes but the plastic rafts didn’t have the same ability as their canoes to cut through the water and we were inadvertently escaping downriver. We had to use brute strength to stay with the group and were shaking with exhaustion when we arrived at the mud bank that signified the entrance to their community.
All the while with shotguns and arrows pointing at us, we were escorted to a communal thatched hut in the centre of the village and were subjected to a furious lecture from the real chief of the village who had not, after all, been on the island.
The chief was a small, wiry man with a large head housing huge white eyes that were full of what, at the time, I thought was utter evil. With the whole village circling us he ranted on about the insult we had shown the village by trying to pass without permission. They were an autonomous community with their own law which we needed to respect, he scolded us.
At about this time the community’s name, Nuevo Poso, was mentioned and I twigged that we were not in Pensilvania. These were not the people who had threatened to kill us.
We were ordered to empty our packs and to explain each item of equipment. Now a familiar routine, I went about unpacking each item slowly and explaining exactly what it was for. The combination of genuine fascination in what we were carrying and the passing of a lot of time seemed to calm the people considerably. Eventually we plucked up the courage to ask about food as we hadn’t eaten all day and they granted us permission to go and ask a woman who was barbecuing plantain if we could buy some food from her. She also had some chocolate biscuits which we refuelled on in seconds like animals.
It was the first chance that Cho and I had been able to speak to each other alone and we acknowledged that this incident had been serious for a while. While Cho later maintained that he never believed his life was at risk I feel that his grounding in South American machismo might have something to do with his perception of his memory. I have no doubt that the villagers launched their boats with the intent of fighting had we been aggressors. They were ready to defend their land. It’s less far-fetched than it might at first seem when you consider that most of these people had fought violently with the terrorists and had experienced bloodshed and killing first hand.
I was very glad that we were not armed that day. Many people, for the entire trip, told us we were crazy to walk through the forest without at least a shotgun. We reasoned that if people were startled and hostile towards us when we entered a community with just a backpack, how were they going to react to us entering with firearms? We had to look as non-aggressive as we could; a shotgun was out of the question.
The other reason why people usually walked with bows and arrows or shotguns was that they were hunting. We had a non-hunting policy and so the initial reason for carrying a weapon was not there either. We knew we could scare off all but the biggest packs of peccaries (wild pigs) by whooping and screaming at them as soon as we noticed them, and we had a very different opinion to the locals on how real a threat the jaguar was to us. We were much happier to be unarmed.
The village clearly realised that they had to get rid of us somehow and so when we returned they told us that they would write us a temporary permit which would suffice us until we reached the next town downstream. But we had to go by raft – and we could not set foot on the land.
I felt stupid explaining that we couldn’t go by raft – and that we had to go by foot as that was the whole point of the expedition. Amazingly, however, it provoked a very positive response. We could continue walking if we agreed to hire the chief and his brother as guides, and if we returned to Atalaya with them to obtain a further permit, this time from the police.
Diary entry 7 September 2008 – Nuevo Poso:
I’m not enjoying myself. I would go home in an instant if I hadn’t committed to doing this expedition. Today we managed about a kilometre before being stopped by these Asheninkas.
This lot were bad people. Although I found it laughable when I started that people could be categorised so simply – I’ve started doing it myself now. You could tell in their eyes that they didn’t understand or want to understand.
We were escorted back to their village with never less than four shotguns or arrows pointed at me. Grim faces all round and the women were shouting in that Asheninka panic voice that makes my skin crawl.
It turns out this community has no time for the organisation that oversees Asheninkas (OIRA). They don’t trust them so the permit holds little weight.
At the end of the day the chief said he would accompany us to Atalaya to get permits from the police and then guide us to Bolognesi … I suspect he realised he could make some money from us. They are not people I would choose to walk with but it seems the only way to continue.
The next morning we all piled into a dugout canoe with a five-horsepower outboard motor and we started chugging back upriver. After a full day in the boat we arrived stiff-bummed in Atalaya. I offered to take everyone (which was quite an entourage of Asheninkas from the village of Nuevo Poso) out to supper. We went for a Chinese – the first I’d had in Peru – and the guys seemed very happy. The next day we went to the police station with the chief and his brother and, because they were local, I thought that one of the Asheninka brothers would explain to the police what had happened and why we were all here. But they stood around nervously and said nothing. It was incredible to see how different these two men were out of their territory and in a colonial town.
‘Bollocks. I’ll do it, then,’ I thought and explained to the policeman that I was a writer who wished to travel the Ucayali on foot to Pucallpa and that I would like him to write me a letter stating that he had given me authority to do so. He took our details and we had th
e letter in minutes. Not a single question about my motives or method of transport – the permit was granted and the Asheninka brothers were very happy. Now they would walk with me.
The next day we travelled back to their community and the brothers were at once back in their element. They called a village meeting to announce their triumphant return from Atalaya. They proudly told the village that, thanks to their assistance, I now had legal permission to be here and that we would all now publicly discuss their wages for the next few days.
Brilliant.
I reckoned I might be able to outwit them in this bartering considering the Asheninkas don’t actually have numbers in their language. Before the arrival of the Spanish, they had had three words to refer to quantity: none, one and lots. With an A grade in GCSE Maths, and a workable understanding of quadratic equations, I reckoned I might have the upper hand.
I paid Cho twenty-five soles a day and was prepared to give them the same. ‘How much will you pay us?’ they asked. The crowd went silent and waited for my response. ‘I normally pay fifteen soles a day,’ I explained, ‘but you are the chief and you are the chief’s brother so I think I should pay you more. I will pay you twenty soles per day!’
‘Unacceptable!’ the chief said. ‘We are the Dongo brothers. We could never leave our families for less than twenty-five soles a day.’
‘Done.’ I stood up and shook them by the hand to seal the deal. Everyone was a winner. The happy brothers were called Alfonso Dongo and Andreas Dongo. Both spoke basic Spanish (perfect Spanish to me but Cho said it was basic) and so we had a four-man team with which to tackle the River Ucayali.
My Spanish was good enough to understand about 30 per cent of meetings like this when people were speaking to each other and not directly at me. It was like being a bit blind and not really having the whole picture at any time. I felt as if there was a haze around me of blurred understanding which made everything that much more dream-like. I was limited to asking direct questions and understanding basic answers at this stage.
The first community we had to pass through the following day was Pensilvania. ‘How are we going to get permission for me to pass?’ I asked the brothers. ‘They have said they will kill me.’
‘They have already granted you permission,’ said Andreas, the chief, who explained that Pensilvania’s chief had been in Atalaya when we had gone back for the police permit and they had shared a beer together. Andreas had started to earn his twenty-five soles a day.
The Asheninka brothers were, without exaggeration, fantastic people. They were so happy to be out of their community and exploring not only the forest, but the other Asheninka communities that they had rarely visited before. It became the Dongo brothers’ tour and most communities were entered with ease.
‘This is Señor Eduardo – our great friend and famous writer from England,’ they would announce, genuinely happy to introduce me. We were hosted well in the communities but they were keen to remind me that this journey would have been impossible without them. When I toyed with them and asked them what would have happened if Cho and I had been alone they would either mime a throat-slitting action or an arrow entering the back of my head and exploding my brains all over the nearest tree. They thought this was very funny indeed.
I had no doubt how dangerous these people really were. They wanted to protect their land against outsiders and so they lived their lives in a constant state of alertness. With the wrong attitude we wouldn’t have got through.
Some communities, however, were completely closed – to me, anyway.
I never found out the exact reason for not letting us pass, but many people we spoke to genuinely thought that gringos ate babies. When you combine myths such as this with the very real incursions from loggers, coca growers and oil companies it’s not surprising that some communities didn’t want any gringos on their land. The baby-eater myth was ridiculous – but perhaps it was there for a reason. In these instances we were forced to backtrack, cross to the other side of the river and hope the settlements on the far side were more open and understanding.
The current distraction was the manta blanca (white cloak), which is the term for the swarms of sand flies and mosquitoes that enveloped us whenever we were near the water (which was quite often). It was difficult to quantify how many biting insects were buzzing around us and biting at any one time, but it must have been tens of thousands rather than hundreds.
‘They will get much worse when the wet season arrives,’ Cho added cheerfully, ‘then they are really bad.’
PART 3: THE DARK MARCH TO
COLOMBIA
Chapter Seven
‘Look after your gringo or we’ll
cut his head off’
AS WE PROGRESSED, some of my thoughts became dark and then darker. I misinterpreted more and more and my whole character began to alter. It started just south of a sweaty jungle town called Bolognesi.
‘Pela cara!’ someone shouted from the top of an overloaded truck as Cho, the Dongo brothers and I were walking down the logging track into the small town. Literally this means ‘he/it peels face’ or ‘face peeler’ and so I assumed it was one of the many insults that people shout at me for being different here. Perhaps I’d got a little sunburned.
But no. The same insult was hurled at me a couple more times in the town accompanied by open sniggering. I asked Cho what it meant but his answer was vague (as he’d never heard the term before) and so I was left thinking that the people here were making jokes about scalping my face off.
The river was about 500 metres wide now and to cross with just two rafts and four men meant that the time and effort involved in ferrying and returning for the remaining people was unsustainable. The answer was obvious but took us a couple of days to work out: we had to put two men and both their packs in each boat. One man would paddle while the other made polite conversation and tried to stay still and keep his centre of gravity as low as possible. The total weight in my raft with Andreas, who was admittedly tiny, was about 27 stone, but it was the inability to get the weight low down that gave us instability. We were top-heavy and risked capsizing constantly. After sleeping the night on a braided river beach, we inflated the pack rafts, squashed two men into each and precariously paddled across to a community called Nueve de Octubre. It was smiles all round when we arrived with everyone laughing at how four men could fit in two such ridiculous tiny toy vessels. We had called ahead on the HF radio and so this Shipebo community had been expecting us.
Shipebos were the first indigenous tribe that looked different. The women wore their jet-black hair long but with a universal severe fringe. They all wore a blue shapeless blouse that reminded me more of the colonially instigated clothes of the Quechuan mountain people than the simple cushmas of the Ashaninkas, Asheninkas and Machiguengas. Without exception, the men wore shorts and T-shirts.
I was buying farine (pellet-like carbohydrate made from yucca) and sugar in the community shop and, because I had relaxed, I mentioned how nice it was to enter such a friendly community. The Shipebo lady replied that the people’s initial reaction when they had heard the message over the radio had been ‘Kill the pela cara!’ but that they had later agreed to let me pass when they found out my purpose and that I had permits.
‘What?!’ I asked the woman to explain pela cara to me and she told me how there had been human-organ trafficking in the area and bodies found without organs.
‘The culprits are Americans – gringos like you. The people were scared to hear of your arrival.’
I didn’t really know what to make of this – there were many people here who wanted to tell me long stories – but what happened next made things very clear.
As we left the linear village the path linked a row of more separated houses – all occupied by Shipebo families. As we entered the territory of one such family I gave my usual broad smile and waved (to show I’m a non-threatening nice chap) but the owner of the house did not respond – he looked at me, transfixed.
The man then asked Alfonso, my guide, who was walking in front of me, ‘Does he steal this?’ As he said the word ‘this’ he circled his face with his index finger. He was still looking at me and looked petrified.
Alfonso and Andreas laughed out loud and explained that I was a tourist but the man didn’t join in the laughter.
We walked on and in the next house a woman had had a little too much masato and was bordering on drunk. She started shouting at me immediately and it turned out that she had heard that a pela cara was coming to take her children.
Again my guides had to reassure her and explain my cause in the local dialect but because she was drunk she didn’t understand or calm down. We moved on quickly.
There were many people here who thought gringos stole babies and killed people for their organs. Whether there was any truth to the origins of this illegal trafficking I didn’t know, but that was somewhat irrelevant because the Shipebo people believed the stories.
The result was that we were warned several times that if we were found by indigenous people after dark, and they saw that I was white, they would kill me without asking any questions. We managed this risk sensibly by planning the route thoroughly and always having a community within reach at the end of the day.
It was hard not to let this get to me. Cho, Alfonso and Andreas were happy entering communities but they were not the focus of attention. I was. I was also still handicapped at this stage by the amount of Spanish I could understand and obviously the Asheninka brothers spoke to each other in Asheninka and the Shipebo people to each other in Shipebo. The guides enabled me to continue but my lack of understanding and my subsequent anxiety sent me deeper into my own world of sadness. I hated being feared and became emotionally exhausted trying to prove that I was a good person in each community before people would relax and accept me. The fact that we never stayed in one place more than one night meant that all the hard work had to be repeated night after night as the river was packed with these remote communities. To stay outside the settlements was far more dangerous because we would be seen as hiding and therefore give cause for even more unnecessary suspicion in the defensive tribes.