Inexplicable illness, indescribable experience

(22 December, 2010, lying in hammock, lakeside cabanas, Sauce, outside Tarapoto, Peru) Someone was bound to get sick. I had one night, only a few hours, when a sudden urgling burgling feeling in the belly left me with the digestion of a new born infant once or twice, but it was nothing like the fevers fought during 20 minute intervals between bathroom visits, or the three or four sleepless nights and largely useless days suffered by two of my fellow travellers.

It wasn’t the food. The symptoms came too long after the the boat’s transvestite kitchen staff served into our tupperwares the last of our thrice daily simple rations, of rice and chicken, or rice and meat, or rice made into a warm beverage/porridge for breakfast.

It wasn’t the water. Sure, it was river water which came out of the taps and each of the four shower-over-the-toilets in their perpetually mud-puddly cubicles downstairs. Similarly, it was river water which hissed a narrow spray out of a rusty hole in the side of the tank on the upper deck, which could be patiently collected for washing tupperwares and cooling faces when the idea of ducking and dodging the gauntlet of hammocks on the lower level to queue for the bathroom was just too much. But whilst I used the river water for everything but to drink, including brushing my teeth, one of the girls who got so sick had barely touched the water, preferring to remain in the dirt of her own making rather than the unknowns and unimaginables of the River Maranon.

It may have been the sun. While not as wet as our first such boat trip, the journey from Iquitos had its daily rainstorms, when despite the tarps being pulled down around the upper deck hammock area, and manually held to the ground in places, water splashed in through every gap, and through little puctures in the roof, and blew in along the floor, reducing our sitting room even more. However, the clouds had scarcely finished reminding us that it isn’t called rainforest for nothing before the sun boomed out powerfully from between them, and all the damp evidence of their statement was quickly forgotten. Since I had gotten myself “bien rosada” (well pinked) from nothing but the glare on our first boat, I retreated to my hammock by daylight hours or stretched out on a rice sack when there was shady floorspace available. Both girls who got sick, however, were out on the empty part of the upper deck with towels and sarongs covering their heads, or crouched under makeshift awnings for lack of shadows. Out there, in the open, the heat was inescapable and intense, blasting down relentlessly and then radiating back up from the exposed metal deck. It definitely could have been the sun.

Of course, if it was anything contagious it may simply have been the fact that for four nights we slept within inches of the next person. I had hoisted my hammock up so high that I had to use my little bongo drum as a stair to get it, and still my bum hung less than a metre from three separate people. Luckily they were all little girls; twin sisters and their cousin, so when they sat up they were still short enough to dodge my suspended body. But they did like to swing which of course created a chain reaction down our side of the upper deck hammock tent. They were on their way to see their grandparents for Christmas, along with their mom and other sisters, and their youngish uncle (with whom I shared no more than a few words and yet we shared the embarrassment of regular kissy-kissy jokes about our pairing up). I chatted with them, translating hundreds of random words to English, answering their many little girls’ questions and even tried to coax them into singing with me as we sat drumming to Christmas songs, with a crowd-circumference like those incited by most of our curious and fascinating gringo activities of playing cards or braiding hair. By the end I referred to these people as “my family”. The German-Austrian couple and the Canadian woman I was travelling with each had their own “families” made up of the people strung up around them or camped on matresses underneath them.

The upper deck was chock-a-block, but the lower deck was ridiculous. The Christmas overload had us going back and forward three times between the dock and the security checkpoint. After hours of travelling the same short stretch of river along the edges of the curious city of Iquitos, the order was eventually given for all men to disembark back onto the dock, which the majority did, lightening the load enough, it seemed, to get the nod… before we went back to fetch them again. The boat’s normal maximum capacity is 220. We estimated there were about 350 passengers in total, of every shape and size – from tiny teething babies to toothless old grandfathers who wove their crooked way through to the bathrooms or kitchen at the back of the boat almost meticulously, pre-considering every slow step, every bend or turn with the care and patience of age.

Right to the end passengers still stared when we queued for food or bobbed to the bathroom, even though by then we moved like locals, guaging how long the one appointed to queue would wait before someone needed to go down and help carry the food, aquainted with each duck and dive required to make the shortest route to the back. After the total six days and seven nights spent on the water, including both legs: Leticia – Iquitos and Iquitos – Yurimaguas, we were more than familiar with the rhythm of life on the boat, paced out by rain and shine, sun and moon, the pages left in the book you’re reading, the rum left in the bottle you’re sharing. We chose to remain on the boat our final night although it was docked in Yurimaguas because we were waiting for our 5am bus to Tarapoto and sleeping in a hammock, dirty bodies, in dirty clothes, surrounded by numerous other forms of dirt, had become almost second nature. It was only really hours later, on considering what may have caused the symptoms of the two girls who had now begun feeling very sick, that I think we actually realised quite how extreme and incredible our recent experience had been, something which had neared recognition throughout the journey, even to the end.

I had been needing a change of pace for a while, to hypocritically ‘escape the tourists’ and do something to shake up my itinerary. And those couple of days were just that. The four of us gringos were strung up well away from one another under the tarp, and didn’t disrupt one another’s infinite thinking space, often only greeting for the first time after midday, as we sat together on the ground eating our prisoners’ lunches, doused in chilli sauce, from matching plastic containers. When we spent time together we had long philosophical conversations, or played card games by the light of our headlamps, or we sat together, but in the company of own thoughts (or lack of thoughts), watching the surrounding jungle-green turn golden and the river smile brightly and contently in the sun’s most glorious hour. It was on occassions like this, when the only idea to break the silence would be an attempt to voice the inexpressible, which even when in hindsight it really sunk in, along with the mysterious illness, remained as it still is: impossible to explain.

Some photos from both boat journeys and Iquitos itself are up on my facebook, a couple are the work of other photographers, including some by “my family”:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=258867&id=504021698

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