I'm sitting cross-legged on the wood floor of my host's stilted, hand-built house. We're in Buen Peru, a Matsés village deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Alberto, the elder sitting across from me, bears a traditional Matsés facial tattoo that begins at his earlobes and encircles his mouth. A bamboo straw the size of a piccolo protrudes from between his pursed lips.
I close my eyes and hold my breath as Alberto leans forward to insert the other end of his bamboo straw into my left nostril. A sudden puff shoots a powder containing finely ground tobacco leaves up my nasal passage. As I cough and combat the urge to gag, it feels as if fire ants are burrowing beneath my sinuses. I steady myself and force a smile, and then Alberto leans in to blast my right nostril.
Armando, the Matsés elder guiding me and an Australian traveler named Morgan, is lounging nearby in a hammock and laughing at the sight of my inaugural nu-nu ceremony.
Communal nu-nu ceremonies were performed to prepare for hunts back when the Matsés primarily used bow and arrow. The tradition has waned since they established sustained contact with the outside world in 1969.
The Matsés first discovered outsiders navigating the rain forests of present-day Peru and Brazil during the Amazon rubber boom in the late 19th century. When Peruvian cities such as Requena began growing in Matsés territory — fertilized by rubber, logging and commercial hunting industries — attacks and raids volleyed back and forth between Matsés warriors and militias from the frontier towns. Conflict peaked in the mid-1960s when the militias gained the support of the Peruvian Air Force, which tried eradicating the natives from the sky using machine guns and napalm.
In 1969 two female missionaries from the United States who learned to speak Matsés — thanks to a Peruvian woman who was kidnapped by the tribe, lived with them long enough to learn their language and then escaped — used airplane-mounted loudspeakers to broadcast an invitation to trade while flying over a Matsés village. The villagers responded by waving the commonly traded skins of peccaries at the aircraft circling them above.
Developing trade relations with the industrialized world helped end the decadeslong cycle of violence, but it also injected powerful, unfamiliar influences into Matsés society, including new technologies, a new religion and a new currency-based economy.
The knowledge transferred through traditions, however, remained requisite for self-sufficient survival in the jungle. Many Matsés understood that if their people were to successfully adapt to the onslaught of the new, they must do so while preserving the tried-and-true. Or as Armando succinctly put it, "The jungle provides arrows, but it does not provide shotgun shells."
I was naively unaware of this complex historical context before spending two weeks living with the Matsés.
I booked the 15-day trip with Amazon Explorer, an ecotourism company based in Iquitos, because I've daydreamed of journeying into the fabled rain forest since I was a boy. I craved adventure, and the demanding expeditions Amazon Explorer organizes in partnership with indigenous communities seemed more apt to curb that craving than a leisurely stay at an all-inclusive jungle lodge.
So, overeager to earn the respect of my Matsés hosts, I politely ask Alberto for a second round of nu-nu. And then a third. The amused grin beneath Armando's mustache softens and he gives me an approving nod. I force another smile between coughs and nod back.
Learning to walk
"Mr. Armando is saying his grandfather taught him how to walk in the jungle," says our Peruvian interpreter, Jose, translating Armando's Spanish to English.
We're gathered around flickering candlelight, sipping chapo, a sweet plantain beverage the Matsés drink like tea. On the other side of the room, Armando's granddaughter swings back and forth in a hammock as she plays music from a mobile phone.
"He would love to teach you how Matsés walk in the jungle," continues Jose. "To teach you to shoot the bow, to kill the armadillo, to trap the tapir. To teach you to walk for days without getting lost. No watch and no path. Only the sun."
The next morning we're back in the pair of propeller-driven dugout canoes that brought us down the Javary River, motoring southwest into the Matsés National Reserve, a 1 million-acre patch of supposedly government-protected rain forest. After six hours of traveling down tributaries, not once passing another village or canoe, we set up camp and classes commence. We spend the next three days learning to walk in the jungle.
Armando and his two sons, Denis and Hernan, teach us how to make fishing poles and how to catch minnow-like bait, and then they bring us to an unnamed lake, where we catch enough peacock bass and piranha to provide our next three meals. They teach us how to navigate without a compass, to start a fire after rainfall and to climb branchless trees barefoot. Using our machetes, we build shelters from scratch, hack through thick vines that refill our water bottles and construct an elaborate tapir trap, which we then disarm.
At night, when the rain forest awakes, the diverse sounds erupting from the millions of unseen creatures surrounding us blend together to bellow a pulsating, monolithic roar. Beneath a jungle canopy that's so dense it blocks the stars, we wear headlamps and stay close to our guides as they hunt for plump partridge residing above.
Armando carries a single-shot shotgun in case we encounter a jaguar — the majestic cat responsible for his brother's savage death years prior — but Denis' archery skills ensure that no shotgun shells are wasted securing food. On only one occasion do we high-tail it from a hunting spot due to the distant growl of a jaguar.
Once we're finally at rest upon the firm forest floor within the refuge of our thin mosquito nets, I sleep harder than I have in years.
The Maloca
When we arrive at the remote settlement known simply as the Maloca, it looks eerily abandoned, but it's home to six Matsés elders who make up one of the few remaining communities committed to living as they did before sustained contact. There are no headlamps, shotguns, boat motors or mobile phones at the Maloca.
Denis, who approached the settlement before us, says the elders are inside the large thatched hut (a maloca), boiling chapo to welcome their guests. We crouch to step through the dark entrance and are greeted with enthusiastic hugs and handshakes. Then we sit down to pass a pot of chapo and talk.
With Denis translating the Matsés to Spanish for Jose, who translates the Spanish to English for me and Morgan, the elders first ask us what animals we hunt.
I tell them about pheasant hunting, and they are surprised to hear that trees often stand in solitude on the prairies of the Great Plains. My explanation of ice fishing induces even greater surprise: The Land of 10,000 Lakes gets so cold that our water turns solid like the ground, and during winter we walk onto our lakes so we can carve holes through the hard water and catch walleye.
The elders are impressed by this exotic northern tradition, but not nearly as impressed as I am by their encyclopedic knowledge of the jungle, which they dispense for three hours as we playfully interrogate each other with astonished curiosity, mutually fascinated by our differences that all seem to dissipate when we share frequent moments of connection thanks to the universal language of laughter.
The next morning the elders take us fishing with barbasco, a root that paralyzes fish and floats them to the surface where they can be speared. In the afternoon the chief elder, Samul, leads us down a path near the maloca, stopping approximately every 10 paces to point out a different type of plant and teach us its medicinal uses. Then, in the evening, Morgan and I are invited to partake in our first sapo ceremony.
Sapo is Spanish for toad, but when the Matsés say "sapo" they're referring to the giant monkey tree frog. Without harming the frog, they collect the poison secreted from the docile amphibian's skin for use during the ceremonies, which were traditionally performed to sharpen the senses of Matsés hunters.
We gather outside when night falls. I sit down shirtless and Tumi, an elder wearing a necklace of howler monkey teeth, pushes a pencil-thin stick into a smoldering log until its tip glows orange. He presses the hot tip against my left shoulder in three separate spots, then gently peels away the blistered skin to reveal three pink points. After mixing his saliva with the frog's waxy secretions on a flat piece of tree bark, he delicately applies a small bead to each raw speck.
It comes on fast. A scorching full-body flush swells my lips, face and throat. The thumps of my heart crescendo with each pump as sweat pours. My stomach feels as if it's attempting to digest gravel and it becomes alarmingly difficult to speak. I curl up into a ball, eyes shut and forehead resting in the dirt. Armando sits nearby, softly humming a soothing Matsés chant as I suffer.
Twenty minutes later I throw up the excessive amount of water I was instructed to drink before the ceremony.
Another 20 minutes pass and I'm fine, eating smoked eel and boiled yuca, feeling grateful for the respect earned and hopeful for heightened senses the next time I walk in the jungle.
Ryan Benson is a freelance writer and marketing consultant based in Minneapolis. Find him on Instagram: @RyanJBenson.
