You won’t sleep in this gloriously alive jungle, but you won’t care

I can’t blame the mysterious gunshot, the hysterical scream or the prolonged rustling – which, in the pitch-blackness, my true-crime-bingeing brain imagines is a corpse being dragged through the undergrowth – for waking me.

No, even after the four flights required to land in Peru’s remote north-east Amazon from Australia, the jungle decrees that I shall not sleep tonight. Amazonian insomnia is extraordinary, unassailable, sometimes unsettling but, ultimately, absolutely worth the puffy eyes.

Heliconia Amazon River Lodge.

Dressed as nature intended, I’ve been swaddled in a hammock strung across the netted balcony of my jungle-backed room at Heliconia Amazon River Lodge since a scheduled power cut nixed the fan’s soothing draught hours ago. My ear drums feel muscular, absorbing a hullaballoo of unseen frogs croaking rainforest patois, gifting the darkness an almost tactile texture.

My capillaries course with natural sugars of unfamiliar fruit juices and my stomach’s still unsure what to make of the capybara-like-rodent soup I gingerly slurped for lunch at a village (so as to not cause offence). Over four days, the root of the perplexing nocturnal noises will fall into place, simply curious elements of the story about this relatively small frontage of the 6400-kilometre Amazon River.

The scream? An American guest left her door open, letting in an unconfirmed creepy-crawly she assumed in the darkness was a hand-sized tarantula. There are squillions here, including one deadly variety. The gunshot? Probably a hunter filling their larder with a mammal. The rustling? A small-alligator-sized redhead iguana cruising for midnight snacks under my stilted room.

The small central pool is an antidote to brutal humidity and a chilled space to chat with staff.

The adventure begins in Iquitos, capital of Peru’s largest province, Loreto. The isolated, 600,000-strong city, unconnected by roads to the outside world, grew from whatever could be shipped along the river.

The speedboat transfer heads 80 kilometres downriver, pit-stopping at La Isla de los Monos, a 450-hectare sanctuary for monkeys rescued from the clutches of primate traffickers (some animals arrive with bullets in their tiny bodies). We temporarily forgo sunscreen and bug spray; toxic for the woolly monkeys, who like to hitch a human ride, licking the salty sweat beading uncontrollably from travellers’ necks and faces (as horrendously ticklish as it sounds).

Guide Daniel Macedo Torre awaits on Heliconia’s floating jetty. His parents were “born in the jungle” so I heed his advice to wriggle into (Fer-de-lance-viper-resistant) gumboots before our inaugural jungle walk. On Heliconia’s raised walkway, we see a pregnant sloth high in the canopy and a pair of electric-blue butterflies, which make Disney-like love on Daniel’s shoulder.

From the mulchy jungle floor, I rubberneck skywards at an immense ubos tree, futilely jackhammered by a little woodpecker. Jungle pharmacists rave about the tree’s apparently antiviral and antibacterial bark. With splayed-leg-like roots and malicious-looking spikes (used as a “jungle blender”), a cluster of “walking palms” exudes a sci-fi malevolence.

Spotting wildlife on the river.

Next morning, barely, rowdy pre-dawn birdsong awakens me for dawn birdwatching, ironically. The outboard revs argumentatively against the kilometre-wide flow. The river seems stationary, as if it’s dragging the glowing-green, hill-free riverbanks towards us like dual conveyor belts.

In theory, we could see 1000 of Peru’s 1900 bird species today. Several flaps ahead of my camera lens, a white-throated toucan responds to the call of Daniel’s birding app. Turkey vultures circle above a teenager fishing from his pequi pequi, a low-lying canoe nicknamed for its putting motor’s cadence.

A tiger heron swoops into a stream. With serial-killer cunning, it fishes by dropping poisonous tree bark into shallows, waiting for its prey to float. Daniel swears the great kiskadee calls out “Victor Diaz” (it does when he plants that seed in my head). His canny ear isolates an anomaly in the cacophony: parakeets and green ibis screech alarmingly. A storm warning, apparently, even though precipitation feels impossible in this bullying tropical swelter.

An hour later, the avian prophecy haemorrhages from the sky, forcing us to drink local beer and “Jungle Viagra” (a sugar-cane liquor “enhanced” by seven roots) under Heliconia’s irapay-palm roofs. In the coming “winter” (wet season) downpours, the river turns milky-coffee brown, rising 15 metres, lapping at floorboards. (November to May is a superb time to visit).

The river sometimes seems stationary.

Skies dry, we head downriver to the Yagua village of Palmeras. The indigenous people splintered into many communities, driven from tribal lands by the 19th century rubber boom. We turn into their stream/“driveway” at the “riverbus” station.

Today, Palmeras hosts an inter-village soccer grudge match. Fishermen and farmers become hard-challenging forwards and backs. Most of the town’s 300 people are on or around the village-square-cum pitch, which will be suitable only for water polo soon, jokes Daniel.

I sip a welcome cup of chicha (fermented cornflour), scooped from a communal barrel, before entering Sonia’s stilted home; a wooden canoe lazing in the dirt underneath soon to see action again. She tends to a pot of creamy mazamorra soup (wolf-fish, sweet pepper, banana) while her shy pin-balling grandchildren sate sweet tooths with ice-cream beans (pod-like guaba tree fruit).

Palmeras has a modern school but Yagua elders teach the “arts and secrets” of the jungle. Skills such as dyeing palm-twine bags, hammocks and costumes with colours scraped, pounded and boiled from barks, seeds and leaves. The purple extracted from the seed of the (delicious) vitamin-C-rich camu camu fruit emits a teenage-rebellion vibrancy.

Meeting the locals.

Animism dominates Yagua spirituality. “Lucky” red huayruro seeds are worn to ward off spirits and concoctions made from the abundant ayahuasca vine – said to embody a giant anaconda – are integral to shaman-run rituals.

Westerners take the hallucinogen for the wrong reasons and with the wrong people, says Daniel, who claims he met his wife in a ceremony long before he physically met her. “We don’t see ayahuasca as drugs. For jungle people, it’s a medicine, a purge, a ‘laxative’.”

While modernity has blunted some elements of Yagua culture, hunting skills are as sharp as ever. A village chief hits a turtle (painting) at 15 paces with a breathless puff of his three-metre pakuna-wood blowgun. The dart, ordinarily spiked with toxins from the likes of the poison dart frog, is used to hunt a variety of proteins – from green iguanas to two-toed sloths – to feed the family. Unlike non-traditional hunters, says Daniel, who “blast everything in their gun’s sight”, selling the meat in Iquitos markets.

We putt-putt up another side-stream seeking piranha, settling in a pond topped by invasive river lettuce, the endangered Amazonian manatee’s staple. Daniel bates the reinforced hook with beef, agitates the surface with his thin carahuasca-twig pole, red-ragging the feisty fish, then casts. His hook is denuded twice before a deft yank lands a 13-centimetre red-bellied piranha.

A room at Heliconia.

He grasps its gills firmly – lessons learned – to demonstrate the notorious choppers. Despite Hollywood’s narrative, piranhas don’t attack humans and they aren’t even the Amazon’s most dangerous fish, Daniel says. That would be the candiru, a tiny parasitic catfish that supposedly swims straight up your private parts (science might not concur).

Heliconia, named after a red jungle flower, balances creature comforts with genuine immersion. The lodge’s 25-year-old forged-from-the-forest aesthetic is charming in context with its surroundings, if not truly high-end. The small central pool is an antidote to brutal humidity, and a chilled space to chat with staff from villages.

The line between lodge and rainforest is blurry. I see anacondas in common-area rafters (#shutyourdoor) and Pedro the foul-mouthed, white-bread-thieving macaw interrupts my breakfast, lunch and dinner. The mix of local and Western buffet dishes are on point, given Heliconia’s remoteness and its reasonable tariff.

With isolation, however, comes compromise. The lodge’s low-impact energy policy means (generator) power runs only around meals (when the Wi-Fi is great). Its transition to solar power has begun, promising improvements in capacity and eco-credentials.

Ultimately, the Heliconia experience is more gumboot adventure than barefoot luxury. You’ll trek through natural cane forests to see giant water-lilies (Victoria Regia) and catch glimpses of the Amazon’s famed freshwater pink dolphins in uncovered speedboats.

It’s also so much more than simply an animal safari. I learn about the struggles facing the people, from aggressive deforestation to water-poisoning illegal mining. A farmer tells me that the sun is so much stronger now than when he was a boy, affecting his livelihood.

As night descends, I peel off clothes glued on by humidity, starfish on the bed, senses bent and stretched, happy that my haven isn’t hermetically sealed off from the overwhelming biosphere outside, as alive as any place I can imagine.

DETAILS

Fly
LATAM flies from Sydney/Melbourne to Iquitos (via Santiago and Lima). See latamairlines.com/au/en

Stay
Prices for Heliconia Amazon River Lodge start at $US358 ($575), three days/two nights, including transfers, meals and activities (not flights/alcohol). See: heliconialodge.com.pe

The writer travelled as a guest of PromPeru and LATAM.