Feeding Woolly Monkeys, Amazon Jungle, Peru

[Martin Hash]

My family went to the Amazon for New Years. After several hours in a small boat we arrived and immediately went on our first hike through the jungle easy enough to take our 4-year old grandson. Our guide, Flavius, also known as “Jungle King,” was a local who had never been anywhere else because he had a psychogenic dream that made him deathly afraid of airplanes: he did say he wanted to go to Cusco someday though. Our first stop was a rough hut where he explained how guests go to cleanse themselves of toxins, called a kambo experience, by licking the backs of giant tree frogs and getting deathly sick for 24 hours. The hut was remote so other people wouldn’t be bothered by the repeated retching & diarrhea. Apparently, that’s why people came here, because Flavius asked if we wanted to do that? My son, Heath, declined, so instead we got a family pic in front of the Amazon jungle’s giant kapok tree. Flavius explained all the uses of the tree’s bark: fever, cancer, even as a pregnancy aid. I normally ignore such folklore but I noticed my daughter, Heather, was looking a little gravid.

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Family pic in front of pregnancy tree

The jungle was just as you imagine it from the movies: fire ants we weren’t supposed to touch because the bite hurt so much, army ants we weren’t supposed to touch because their bite hurt even worse, and a line of leafcutter ants carrying the body of a large grasshopper to the giant mound next to trail. Flavius told us his grandmother said the leafcutters all served a giant snake that lived in the mound. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the grossly elongated body of the queen termite. On one tree, Flavius brushed away what looked like bark but it was really camouflage that hid a nest of termites. He told us the natives rub the termites between their palms then apply the paste to their skin because the formic acid from their crushed bodies is an effective mosquito repellent, so we tried it too.

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Termite mosquito repellent

Next Flavius held up a rotting seed pod from among a pile on the ground. He chopped it open with his machete, banged on the end with the handle and pulled out a white grub. Pure protein he told us and popped it in his mouth. My son, Haven, thought it looked appetizing, and he had one too. Near the end, a troop of Woolly monkeys came crashing through the canopy to meet us because they knew that tourists meant lunch. They hung precariously from branches above our heads and took pieces of banana out of our hands. That was my family’s introduction to the Amazon jungle.