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The Indians of the Amazon: A Wild Encounter with the Bora People of Peru

Peru - Amazon - Travel
Deep inside the Amazon jungle live a completely unique people. Take Ole on a wild adventure he will soon forget.
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The Indians of the Amazon: A Wild Encounter with the Bora People of Peru is written by Ole Balslev.

Peru - Boat, Indians of the Amazon - travel

Iquitos - the entrance to the Indians in the Amazon

Iquitos is a large city with 400.000 inhabitants in the north Peru in the middle Amazon Jungle by the world's water-richest river, the Amazon. It is the largest city in the world from which and to which there are no roads. You have to fly or sail on the rivers to get to Iquitos. For the Indians of the Amazon, Iquitos is the gateway to the world – and vice versa.

But what do these 400.000 inhabitants do for a living? I do not know. I think it's a hideous big city. Second only to Bangkok, it is probably the city in the world with the most tuk-tuks.

It is around 23 degrees at night and over 30 degrees during the day all year round. And it's an uncomfortable humid heat.

Some taxi drivers dare not drive to my hostel or 'hospedaje' - because it is in a dangerous slum area. But the long-haired young man at the hostel told me that the police come once in a while, so I shouldn't fear anything.

And I almost never fear. Otherwise I can't travel the way I do.

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Peru - Sunset, river, Indians in the Amazon - travel

From Rio Napo to Puerto Arica - on the way to the Indians in the Amazon

I went down to the port of Puerto de Productores. It did not look like a port. I had to balance on planks over the water to get to some boats. I sailed downstream the Amazon River on a flat-bottomed cargo boat with outboard motor.

It took a few passengers with too little money. People were dropped off at the beach along the way. After 3 hours I even jumped off the cargo boat down on the beach. Then I rode the tuk-tuk 6 kilometers overland to the village of Mazan on the Rio Napo River.

A beautiful little village on this tributary of the Amazon River. I slept on a small, cheap, dirty lodging without running water. The next morning I sailed upstream of Rio Napo with a ferry. Rio Napo is here 1 kilometer wide. The ferry is filled with hammocks in which people slept or relaxed.

I thought the trip would last 6-8 hours. And when the captain said 'mañana', I thought it was a misunderstanding, But the trip actually lasted 21 hours. Along the way, the ferry stopped over 50 times at the shore under the cliff and unloaded goods. And people jumped off.

My plan was to sail to what I thought was a big city: Puerto Arica. And from there along a gravel road through the jungle north 80 km to Rio Putumaya; the border river between Peru and Colombia.

There is a former 'rubber village'. From there I would try to get to the village of the Huitoto Indians. But as usual on my travels, everything went quite differently.

Arrival in Puerto Arica. Puerto means port, but there was neither a port nor a big city. At At 5 o'clock at night in pitch darkness, the helmsman sailed the ferry to the coast/beach and told me that this is where I had to get off. I said "no".

But the helmsman said "sí". There were neither houses nor cabins nor lights. I jumped off the ferry onto the beach. Then I climbed up an almost vertical, slippery, muddy 8-meter-high slope.

Peru - Snake, Indians of the Amazon - travel

Welcome to the jungle

I imagined inside the darkness of the jungle a boa, an anaconda, a leopard and maybe a caiman in the river. Other wild animals. And all the animals thought: "What does the stupid white man want here with us in the rainforest? But thank you for the offer!”.

But then I saw two flashlights coming towards me. It was the village teacher and his 15-year-old son.

The son sailed me in a hollowed out tree trunk 2 km along a tributary to the village. In the village were 15 cottages on stilts and about 150 inhabitants. It was all a misunderstanding. My card was out of date.

I then lived with the teacher. No one spoke English - only Spanish. We ate fish morning and evening and drank tea. The grass road marked on my map was gone.

Now there was a dam 4 meters high and 12 meters wide across the swamp. The road has not worked for many years. The teacher and I walked 2 km along it. He said that the embankment further out was overgrown with bushes, and midway a river had washed away the embankment.

I could make the trip to Rio Putumayo in 3 days, but then had to spend the night twice, and then the chances of survival were small, the teacher thought.

I decided not to go on that trek to Colombia.

Perhaps 100 years ago the road was built to transport the rubber mined up there to Puerto Arica and from there by boat down the Rio Napo to Iquitos. Or perhaps the road was also used to transport Peru's military through the rainforest to the many border wars between Peru and Colombia.

Instead, I had an amazing experience in this small village. People were nice to me, even though we couldn't really communicate. There lived a single Indian in the village. In the dark at 20 p.m., the teacher's 13-year-old son and I saw from the stilt hut 40 meters away two farmers who had found an anaconda choke snake.

Now they tried to catch it and kill it. I don't know if it worked. Then it was time to continue my journey to the Indians of the Amazon.

I slept on the wooden floor, but with the mosquito net over it. I came back to Iquitos with a 'rápido', a speedboat. It was more expensive than the unpleasant ferry, but much faster. The 13-year-old sailed me in the hollowed-out log to the Rio Napo.

There he went up on an embankment and signaled with his T-shirt to the rápido when he saw and heard it.

Bora Indians - houses - travel

On a journey of discovery in the mystery of the jungle

On Sunday, I met the group of a total of 13 Danes, who were to spend the next two weeks together. Monday we drove in a bus south from Iquitos to the jungle near Nauta. We wandered around the jungle for three days. It was a bit of a disappointment for me because we saw no large animals.

We only saw a small Tamarin monkey, small poisonous frogs and spiders and ants and termites and other insects. On a three-hour botanical walk, we saw various rare trees and shrubs and other plants. We spent two nights in primitive huts on stilts.

Last day we walked many kilometers for five hours through the jungle until we came to the river Rio Mauro.

We then sailed it downstream for a few hours. Every day in the jungle there was heavy rain in the middle of the day. We often walked through 30 cm deep rain puddles and balanced on logs over streams. At a large stream 10 meters wide, we paddled across a hollowed-out log. Where the boat sailed to, there was finally a dirt road again.

Here we rode a tuk-tuk back to Iquitos.

Life of the Bora Indians in the Amazon

We sailed with a ferry five hours downstream the Amazon to Pebas; a large village eight km inside a tributary of the Amazon, Rio Ampiyacu. There are 5.000 inhabitants. Not very many Indians. The next day we sailed in two narrow, long boats with outboard engines upstream of the Rio Ampiyacu. And later upstream a tributary to the Rio Ampiyacu, the Rio Yahusyacu.

In all, we sailed six hours from Pebas to the village of Brillo Nuevo, where some of the Indians of the Amazon, the Bora tribe, live. We stayed here for eight days. There are approximately 60 houses on stilts. We slept in Chief Darwin's house.

Darwin has been elected chief, he is 29 years old and has a matriculation degree. He is very conscious of trying to keep the Bora culture intact now in this day and age where influences from outside the modern world greatly affect the Bora people and all the Indians of the Amazon.

We almost all slept in hammocks. We Danes were divided into three food teams that helped Nestor's wife, Milda, plus a local Bora woman cook. Nestor and Milda are from the village of Pucaurquillo, also at Rio Yahusyacu. This village is special in that it is home to both Huitoto and Bora Indians.

Nestor is huitoto, while Milda is Bora. Nestor was the interpreter and helper for us while his wife Milda was the chef. They are both happy and open people who were a very big help to us. The Bora Indians in the Amazon are named after the boa choke snake, which like the anaconda choke snake can grow many feet long and live in the Amazon.

One day we went to an area in the jungle where the Indians grew coca plants. However, it was not a large area. We helped the Indians from Bora pick a basket full of coca leaves. We did not take the upper leaves nor the yellow ones, but only the large, green leaves. I walked the three km to the coca plantation through the jungle on bare feet. I played 'barefoot Indians'. That was stupid!

The next day I had to go to the village clinic. I was given medication, painkillers, diuretics and antibiotics. The male nurse's tame monkey jumped up on the couch for me. There are generators in the village, which make electricity from kl. 18 to kl. 22.

We visited the old shaman several times. He is the cultural and spiritual leader of the village. He is mostly skeptical of chewing coca leaves… He told a kind of exciting adventure in the form of an adventurous creation story. And he explained that there was a supreme spirit, the 'Creator', and many sub-spirits. He drummed on a large double drum, a female and a male.

Usually there are two shamans; one for peace and one for the aggressive such as war.

Beliefs and traditions

I bathed in the river in the heat every afternoon. Luckily I met no caimans or snakes in the water. In return, there were many ospreys plus other eagles and birds of prey and vultures in the trees and in the air above me.

I visited a small evangelical church where 10 Indians were in church on Sunday morning. The priest was late for the service because he had been hunting in the jungle at night. We went on many family visits, where we showed the Indians in the Amazon photos of our life in Denmark, and the Bora Indians told us about their lives.

Once our group was split up. The Danish men talked to three Native American men of different ages. And the Danish women communicated with Native American women. An Indian woman made a beautiful belt for me from yucca leaf strips.

The Bora Indians made several gifts; a lady made three small bags for my three little daughters, an old Native American made a copy of a breathing tube for my 15-year-old son. In the past, the Indians went hunting with breathing tubes and shot poisonous arrows at the animals. The poison came from frogs or poisonous plants. Today they hunt with rifles.

The food was something special. One day we had for lunch a large jungle rat of eight to nine kilos. Monday we were hunting with some Indians. They set out four small rat traps. When they were checked the next morning, there was a large rat in one of the traps.

We walked in a long line through the jungle. The Native American who was leading the way was bitten by a snake. But it was not toxic; it had round eyes. Poisonous snakes have eyes like small vertical streaks. The snake was small; one centimeter in diameter and one meter long.

The reason why the Indian in front, like us, did not wear rubber boots was that he had a wound, as he had also been bitten by a leech two days before.

We also saw the field of the Indians. It was 'trap and burn' agriculture. A huge job.

Peru - Dance, village, Indians of the Amazon - travel

The feast of the tree with the Bora Indians in the Amazon

On Saturday we sailed for 40 minutes upstream of Rio Yahusyacu to a smaller Bora village called Ancon Colonia. On that day, there happened to be a sacred animist festival, which was held only once a year, in the month of March.

Afterwards we were told that we were the first white people ever to attend that party. The party was for a special tree. All the young male Indians had dressed up as different animals, namely all the animals that lived on the leaves, flowers and fruits of the tree.

The Indians came from five nearby villages and were dressed in palm fronds torn into strips. And the whole head was covered with a mask.

They took turns dancing into the 'malluca', which is the shaman's large sacred hut, which is 30 meters in diameter and 20 meters high. A Bora Indian was dressed as a parrot, and when he came dancing into the malluca, I shouted "Ole", and the "parrot" answered loudly "Ole".

It was a fellowship feast. All the costumed Native American dancers ended the dance by coming to the host shaman and giving him all the animals they had captured in recent times: Lazy animals, frogs, armadillos, hares, rabbits, fish, snakes, monkeys, birds, rats. Then, in return, the Indians were given large, flat, white yucca bread by the shaman's wife.

Later in the day and well into the night there was a round-chain dance. No instruments – just the dancers' unison. The song was monotonous, repetitive and almost hypnotic, so that the dancers entered a kind of trance.

Two men in the middle directed the dance. Beyond them was a large ring of dancing men. And around them a circle of dancing women. Each had her left hand on the right shoulder of the man next to her.

A rabbit-like animal, an armadillo as well as a snake and a monkey ate at the feast. The party lasted 19 hours. Before the party ended, we sailed back to Brillo Nuevo in the dark clique 22 tiredly in the wide long boat. In the dark it took a little longer to get home, because the river was narrow and we couldn't see anything.

One of my fellow passengers came close to getting a serious headache when we grazed a large tree in the dark.

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Peru - Amazon River, Cottage, Indians of the Amazon - Travel

State of emergency – chaotic farewell to the Indians in the Amazon

In Brillo Nuevo, we were cut off from the outside world. No phone or internet. Due to the Corona virus, Peru was declared a state of emergency on Sunday with a curfew. But deep in the jungle of Brillo Nuevo, we knew nothing about this.

Coincidentally, we found out about it on Wednesday afternoon when a boat arrived from Pebas. According to the plan, we should have sailed to Pebas on Thursday. But instead we rented a boat and sailed in the evening from Brillo Nuevo. It had to be done secretly. It turned into a somewhat chaotic parting with the Indians in the Amazon.

When, after five hours of sailing along the small tributaries, we came to Pebas, we had to have fuel on the engine. Without light, slowly and as quietly as possible, we slipped into the shore. In Pebas, the navy has a large base where we got 50 liters of fuel.

Here we also had to pay protection money / corruption to be allowed to continue sailing. This was repeated three or four times along the way. At the back of the boat sat an armed man who was protecting us. We felt like boat people. But all that was not the worst.

Out on the great Amazon River, we sailed at full speed upstream toward Iquitos in the darkness of night.

Suddenly we sailed over two large logs. It gave huge bumps and jumps. I thought there was a hole in the bottom of the boat. I quickly found out where the nearest bank of the river was.

The Amazon is several kilometers wide, and if the boat sank, I had to swim to the nearest shore.

In the river there are caimans, and on the banks anacondas and boas snakes. But luckily it did not go so wrong. We arrived in Iquitos at seven in the morning and had the helmsman sail all the way to our hotel. We went up some stairs to a paved room, over it and into the hotel where we were safe.

Later we found out that someone had taken photos of us and posted on Facebook with the text "Gringos arrive in Iquitos - they have been in contact with Asians". Similar lies about us were also on the local radio. Most of us were trapped in the hotel for 21 days before we were evacuated by various planes.

Apart from a few who were mostly in a hurry to get home quickly, there was a fine and unique unity in the Danish group. We got good help from the Huitoto Indian Nestor and his wife Milda, as well as the Bora Indian who cooked for us.

The worst thing about the confinement in the hotel was our powerlessness. The fact that we could not do anything about our situation ourselves. So therefore it was good that the group kept together until the end. Bertha, a Danish-Peruvian, was present as an interpreter. She also helped to keep our spirits up. Along with Betina, Bertha were the last to be evacuated.

Everyone came home and none of us will forget our adventure in Peru with the Indians of the Amazon.

5 amazing sights in the Amazon, Peru:

  • Manu National Park
  • Iquitos
  • Pacaya-Samiria National Park
  • Amazon River
  • Chachapoyas and Kuelap Fortress

About the author

Ole Balslev

Ole is 75 years old and a trained teacher. Ole has mostly worked in the border area between teaching and social pedagogy. In OBS classes, social pedagogical residences, family care. Mostly with teenagers with various problems. Ole traveled in his youth 3 years around the world as a hippie and vagabond. For the last 18 years he has traveled in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Ole travels to experience foreign cultures and meet people. But also to get to know oneself better - an inner journey.

1 comment

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  • Ole is the most traveled person I know.
    He has been to countless places in the world, He has many entertaining stories from his travel life. We traveled together to the Bora Indians and had a very exciting trip.
    I've known Ole for many years and it's impressive that he still travels like that. Well done.

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