November 27, 2010

Getting up at 5am is easier when you have slept 8 hours. It was still pitch dark outside, but by the time I was out at 5:15 it was already possible to see colors. The sun sure rises and sets much faster here than in Norway. We are at 4 degrees south and night and day each lasts roughly 12 hours all year round. That magic in between period, when the sun is not visible but still gives light, a light that makes everything seem different, like a painting with dark colors and sharp contrast, that period lasts a few minutes here. In Norway in summer it lasts several hours.

Ah, morning mood! The jungle woke up around me. This place changes dramatically between night and day. The animals which are active at night were now busy finding a safe shelter, while those on the day shift were slowly getting out of theirs. The birds were taking over for the bats, the butterflies tag-teamed with the moths, who were happy to be able to go to bed. The tarantulas and scorpions let the ants and dragonflies have their turns.

The sun was pretty soon in my eyes and I had to put on my sunglasses. I was so sure of success that I had taken a larger bassin from the kitchen this time. I had after all about double the time at my disposal compared to last night. That should easily give me 20 piranhas. If I worked hard I could reach a hundred before leaving the Amazon. I cast out, pulled in. I did it again, and again. It would probably take some time until the scent of the bait reached the closest school of piranhas? Nope. After 20 minutes it started to dawn on me that it wasn´t me who was exceptional the last two days. It was the fishing conditions. I got a couple of bites but the fish weren´t hungry enough, they just nibbled, never swallowed.

After two hours I had to admit that I was nothing but a mere mortal. No fish wanted to get caught today and I sheepishly returned the plastic basin to the kitchen. The chef tried to motivate me with a “mas tarde, senor.”

Today´s first activity was a visit to the local village, their shaman and then their herbalist.

First Iseline and Viktor needed to say good morning to the pacca:

The two of them have taken up bottle cap collecting the last days. They lurk around in the dining hall of the lodge and grab bottle caps as soon as someone has opened a new bottle. We have severely limited the use of their iPods in the Amazon, telling them that we don´t think it fits in the jungle. It seems the bottle cap collecting and playing with them is a result of the limited access to the games on their iPods. They have been inventing board games they can play with the caps and played one of them on the boat ride to the village:

The shaman was a old woman living in a typical wodden house for the area. There really isn´t much here that hasn´t been fetched from the jungle. Houses are made from wood, and planks are made on location with a chainsaw! Houses do not have windows, you do not need them in this climate. The insides of houses are mostly empty, with very little furniture, except for a few sitting benches and a table. It is a stark contrast to our rich and industrialized world.Here we are outside the Shaman´s house:

A shaman is a sort of healer that supposedly can get in touch with the many spirits people here believe in. She (the shaman we visted was a she, it can just as well be a he) also uses some herbs and other stuff for healing. Here she is, the village shaman:

She performed a sort of ceremony for and on us, I believe to remove bad spirits. She shook a magic stick with leaves on us, put some alcohol with camphor in our face and hair and then made a slurping sound close to our hair before she spit the spirits out in another direction. It felt a little bit strange.

It is fascinating how humans have a need to come up with explanations for things when there is not enough data. Instead of accepting that we don´t know yet, the human race comes up with surrogate explanations. In my view, so called modern religion is only an extension of the human need to believe in greater powers and to try to explain what cannot be explained yet. After having read large parts of the bible myself it is so clear to me that this is stuff invented by humans a long time ago both for consolation and to control groups of people.

Babel? I´m sure linguists agree that story makes sense.

Noah? Of course he had ample and easy access to koala bears, emperor penguins and pygmy marmoset monkeys.

He who has had his male member cut cannot enter heaven? Punishments that bar all descendants for 10 generations to enter heaven (that´s fair to the unborn!)? (That one is a clear indication of a culture where family is more important than individual. Very interesting in an anthropological sense) Jesus kills all the pigs of a poor farmer because he says they have evil spirits in them? And then the disciples don´t understand why the farmer is unhappy afterwards?

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of strange stuff in there.

Sure there could be a creator, but I cannot see how we can know either way. And if there is one, given what we today know about the universe, it is clear as day to me that that deity cannot possibly speak to us through the bible.

For more discussions around this, I recommend “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. He has some bombastic ways of putting things, but his logical arguments and discussions about religion are sound and very well thought through.

What is mind-bogling is that we today know with almost certainty that the universe started from a single point 13.7 billion years ago. The smoking gun is there in the form of background radiation, which is consistent with the theory. Mankind has proven that the universe had a beginning. That is a very significant discovery, and it has been done recently. A hundred years ago mankind did not know this, and it was only first really confirmed in 1964.

Not only did the universe have a beginning, but it is relatively young. The sun is about 5 billion years old and it has an expected total lifetime of about 10 billion years. The universe is only old enough to just span the lifetime of a single star like the sun. Other larger stars, have much shorter lifespans, while really small ones are projected to live a trillion years. In addition, the stuff that we are made of, the atoms in your body, were crated in another star that lived and died. Then the dust from it became part of the molecular cloud which formed our solar system. Life needs heavy elements to exist, and they can only be created in stars. A star has to complete its lifecycle and become dust, and then another one has to form to create planets that can host life.

Isn´t that something? In cosmological time we are here at the beginning.

Oops, sorry.

The herbalist had a really nice garden with lots of different plants and explained many of their uses to us. Here she is:

and here is Weninger showing a plant.

We went back to the lodge for the hot and quiet period of the day. It was a very hot day, and with the constant humidity here we sweat a lot, as you can see in this great photo Adrian took of Viktor:

After lunch we headed back to the village for a house visit.

It was a very modest bare house. A large sack of rice was hanging from a rope in the ceiling, probably to protect it from animals. Otherwise there was not much there.

Only the man was home, he had been hunting and showed us the result of his hunt. The large rodent he had caught probably died instantly when he shot it in the head:

He was drying piranha heads:

He also had puppies and tame parrots:

Afterwards we took a stroll around the village. The main commercial part is a store and a phone house with a solar powered satellite phone system. Weninger told us this was considered a big store for the area. Here you can see pretty much all of it:

This is the village church

The village was organised as a large square common area with grass in the middle and with the houses in a straight line on each of the 4 sides. There was a children´s playing area in one corner of the square  and goal posts set up for playing soccer in the middle of the square. I cannot remember having seen this way of organizing a village anywhere else:

The concrete pathway around the square was built as part of a program done by previous president Alberto Fujimori.

Weninger invited us into a large open house to relax

while the kids played.

The boys threw themselves into a barefoot soccer match in the main square of the village.

Evening fishing was almost a repeat of this morning, but I did manage to land a single piranha. 26.

In the evening, after dinner, Weninger came over to us, as he usually does, to discuss the next days activities. Previously he had been very efficient in his communication. Today was different. Just as we expected him to leave he settled down a little bit more in his chair and started talking abut himself. He had grown up in a village called Diamante which is a village by the Rio Blanco further upstream. He told us about his brothers and sisters and his parents who all now live in Iquitos. The guy was full of surprises. He has a 3 year computer science education from the university of Iquitos! However, he wanted back to the jungle. When he applied for the job as a guide, and they saw his CV, they were wondering what a guy with that background wanted to do in the jungle. He has never regretted his choice and is happy with his life. I always find it great when I meet people who have found the place where they want to be in life. You can feel their positive energy.

Eirik

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