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Every evening in San Jose de Payamino I go down to the river for a wash, it’s one of the simple joys of living there, getting rid of the sweat and grime that you pick up over the course of the day, and spending a while mucking about in the water with whoever happens to be about.

You have to have a certain amount of respect for it: if there’s been rain, the river can swell pretty fast, the water turns muddy brown and the current becomes dangerously strong. When the water’s like that, you have to be careful, clinging on to a canoe to prevent yourself from getting washed away. I’ve also developed, ever since I found out that someone got killed by an anaconda there, a bit of a fear of swimming once the light starts to fade and night falls. However, when you get a few days of hot, dry weather in a row, the water level drops, the current becomes gentle enough that you can swim right across, and the water becomes crystal clear. That’s when the river is at its best.

I’d just got back from the river a few days ago, and was sat about reading when Lucio came over for a chat. In typical Lucio fashion, he walked to within about twenty metres of me and shuffled about awkwardly for a bit. I greeted him with an alli chishi, and then continued reading my book, waiting to see what he’d do next. After a further thirty seconds or so of shuffling and kicking pebbles, he finally decided to talk, “Estas leyendo?” – are you reading? “Yes,” I replied, thinking that the answer was actually quite self-evident.

He shuffled some more, “Can we talk?”

Finally, we were in some danger of getting to the heart of the matter. “What can I do for you, Lucio?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to try ayahuasca.”

Now I can’t say as I saw that one coming. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drug that is used in shamanic rituals in the Amazon. It’s concocted from an eponymous woody vine, and brewed for a few hours with any one of a selection of other plants which enable the psychoactive element in the vine to have its effect. Lucio explained that his daughter, Evelyn, was ill with a stomach problem, and he had been advised that maybe this was as a result of a curse, so he was on his way to fetch Berna the shaman to heal her. Normally in Payamino, it is only the shaman who takes the ayahuasca during healing rituals, it allows him to see the maldición, or curse, and remove it from the patient’s body. On this occasion, though, Lucio had decided that he wanted to join him, and was inviting me to partake, as well.

I have to confess to being a little unsure at first. I was certainly curious to experience the shaman getting to work, and to be able to experience the ceremony in full, but ayahuasca is a substance that has an ominous reputation. It is said to be dangerously powerful, and can have quite damaging effects on people who aren’t in the right frame of mind for it. And then there’s the purgative element: tales of uncontrollable vomiting - and sometimes bowel movements - abound. Part of the healing property of the concoction is that it forces you to expel the contents of your digestive system in such a thorough and unforgiving fashion, that there’s no chance of any nasty little gut parasites surviving the experience. In Peru, where there is a thriving tourist industry based around ayahuasca and shamanism, I heard a story of a tourist who drank more ayahuasca than the shaman told him to, and died of dehydration as a result of the vomiting. It sounds somewhat apocryphal to me, but it makes you think, nonetheless.

I told Lucio that I’d need to think about it and I’d let him know once he returned with Berna. As it turned out, in true Payamino fashion, it took Lucio three hours to return from what should have been a half hour trip downriver, which gave me plenty of time to undertake a general mental and emotional assessment of myself. By the time Lucio’s brother-in-law Eddy came to fetch me, night had fallen, and I’d made my mind up that I would give it a go.

The Payamino approach to taking ayahuasca was far from orthodox. Taking ayahuasca is often associated with a ritualised preparation involving fasting or living on a diet defined by extensive food taboos for a few days before starting the ceremony itself. This, however, was Payamino, and in Payamino respect for the ‘correct’ way of doing things has never been high on the agenda, so I guess we’ll just jump straight in then.

I climbed the wooden ladder into the thatch-roofed kitchen and went around exchanging the obligatory light handshakes with the men and a brief slip of palm across palm with the women. Berna was there, greeting me with his usual manic grin, a cry of “waaaaaaaa!”, a quick squeeze round the waist and a stream of unintelligible Kichwa. I looked around to see if anybody could translate, but as is often the case when Berna speaks, everybody else was looking just as baffled as I was. Over by the cooking fire, Lucio’s wife, Rocio was drying shredded tobacco leaves with a hot ember, while Eddy was cutting up banana leaves in which to roll the tobacco. Their mother, Lucia, was decanting a liquid from one bowl into another and back again. Lucio pointed this out to me and explained that this was the ayahuasca.

They brought the bowl over for me to have a look. Inside was a reddish-brown fluid. I asked Lucia about the preparation; she said that she had been simmering it all day, starting off with about two litres of water in the bowl and reducing it down to what was now just enough to fill a small whiskey tumbler. I asked about the plant that has to be mixed in with the vine to make the potion work, and Lucio explained that there were two possible leaves that you can use. The one they put in today makes a fairly mild brew, whereas the other one causes a much more intense borrachera (drunkenness) with strong, vivid hallucinations that he described as being like looking at a computer screen or a television. There was a bottle of cachigua by Berna, which Lucio explained he used to ‘sooth’ himself when the borrachera hits. I asked if they would all be drinking cachigua during the ceremony. “No, cachigua is too strong, but if there’s anything that is weaker, we’ll have that,” he said, clearly hinting at the fact that he knew I had a bottle of rum stashed away. I went to fetch it.

Berna had already drunk his ayahuasca by the time I got back. Lucio went to offer me the bowl, but Lucia muttered something sharply at him in Kichwa, making him stop short and drink a quantity of the fluid himself before once again handing it to me and telling me I could drink what was left. I swigged down about three quarters of the fluid before having to stop: it was incredibly bitter, like tea that had been stewed in hot water overnight. Eddy passed me a bowl full of wayusa tea with which to wash it down, which I gulped at thirstily before bracing myself to drink the rest of the ayahuasca.

Eddy showed me how to roll a cigar with tobacco and a banana leaf, and then invited me to have a go. One of the cigars was lit and passed to Berna, who sat and smoked, cross-legged and uncommonly silent on the floor. We passed the other cigar amongst ourselves. Lucia instructed Lucio and Eddy to blow out all the candles, leaving only the embers of the fire and a faint glow of moonlight shining through the clouds for illumination. Lucio fetched a blanket which he laid on the floor by the door and invited me to sit down. “You’ll know when Berna begins to feel the borrachera, because he’ll start to sing,” he told me.

In the darkness, Berna began to mutter and Rocio sat in front of him with Evelyn, her sick daughter, in her arms. He took a bundle of leaves and began shaking them over the little girl’s head and sweeping them across her body; every now and then he would draw the leaves in a long sweep, from her feet to her head and up until his arm was vertically outstretched, then he would flick the bundle with a sharp motion of the wrist to one side. Lucio explained to me that he was sweeping off the maldición. He began singing nasally, repeating a single verse of what sounded like meaningless syllables, “Nee-na-na-na, duur-nur-nur-nur,” over and over again.

Any sense of depth to the occasion was buffered by Lucio and Eddy, who were chattering and giggling away in Kichwa. At one point, Berna farted loudly, which was followed by five minutes of hysterics from the two of them. Lucia would come by with a banana leaf cigar for him from time to time and every now and again he’d mutter something, which Lucio would translate for me, “He says the floor is littered with maldiciónes – they look just like dolls, and they’re everywhere. When the children walk about they pick them up and get ill. He’s going to have to clean the whole house.”

Eddy took over rum duties, occasionally pouring a measure in a cup and passing it round. After about half an hour or so, he asked me if the borrachera had hit me yet. I was still feeling clear headed, so they passed me another bowl of ayahuasca, followed by more wayusa. Once again, I sat back and listened to Berna chanting and muttering and shaking his leaves. He would pause his leaf-shaking from time to time, sucking on a cigar. Bending down so that his mouth was making contact with Evelyn’s head or belly, he would blow the smoke over her, and then make a loud sucking noise, drawing the illness from her body and into his mouth. After doing this a few times he would hack and choke loudly, “HWECK! FREEURK!” and, drawing up a ball of phlegm, spit the maldición out.

My limbs started to feel heavy, there was a buzzing sensation in my belly, and my head became a helium balloon that would float off if it weren’t attached to my body. Lucio gave me a pillow and I lay down, as the sound of chirping frogs and humming cicadas enveloped me, punctuated by the occasional crack and rumble of thunder from a distant storm. I could feel every single sound individually and with crystal clarity, almost like I could physically reach out and pluck them from the air with my ears. Glowing, coloured patterns formed in front of my eyes. Sometimes these were radially symmetric, whirling round, throbbing and repeating themselves endlessly. Other times, they would be random patternless bunches of colourful texture, like fur or flames. A sensation of absolute peace settled over me; I felt a lightness of spirit, as if released from some kind of personal burden, coupled with an awareness of being somehow protected, safe from harm, like I was enclosed in an invisible shield. In a deeply calm and subdued fashion, I felt very, very happy.

The nocturnal jungle sounds continued, Berna shook his leaves, muttered, inhaled, exhaled, sucked, hacked and flobbed. I watched the silvery-blue glow of the moonlight contrast with the murky thatch of the roof, while shadows of shapes in the darkened room – a sack of rice suspended by a rope from the ceiling, a chair, a bunch of bananas – transformed into people, staring at me as I lay on the floor. I sensed that I was not experiencing the ayahuasca effect in full, more like I was standing at the edge and peering in. What I could see beneath me, what I would fall into if I went over that edge, was a much stranger thing, but I wasn’t scared of it. The sense of protection that I was experiencing let me know that if I did take a strong enough dose to go there, I would be kept safe.  

The wind picked up and the thunder grew louder as the storm approached, and I grew cold. I decided to go and get my fleece. Rising unsteadily to my feet, I felt like gravity had released me and my legs had turned to jelly. Taking great care to hang on to anything within reach, I managed to get out of the house and down the ladder, then half walked, half floated down the path past the football pitch to the national park office, where I had been staying since Christmas. In the torchlight, ripples of different colours would judder out from any object that was directly in my line of vision, drawing ever-expanding echoes of its silhouette in the air. Specks of dust and leaves that were being whipped about in the wind flashed and sparkled as they shot past me. When I got to my room and found my fleece, I made the tactical error of deciding to check the sleeves for spiders: cue 15 minutes of swaying drunkenly as I tried, in the most cautious fashion possible, to roll the sleeves inside out.

Back at the house, Berna finished off his cleansing of Evelyn. Lucio asked me if I wanted Berna to ventar – literally, to wind – me. He said it would cost me a dollar. I didn’t have any change, so I sat down in front of Berna and handed him a fiver instead, which he looked very pleased about. He touched the note to my forehead, and used it to draw a cross from my head to my lap and across my chest. He then took in a mouthful of cachigua. Eddy told me to close my eyes, which I did, and not a second too soon, as a blast of the spirit was sprayed across my face. The leaves rattled and brushed on my head, face and chest and Berna resumed his “Nee-na-na-na, duur-nur-nur-nur” song. At one point, he declared that I had ‘mal viento’ – bad wind. I asked Lucio if that meant someone had cursed me, but he said no, that it was just a disease, which Berna would cure me of. The leaves were put down and tobacco smoke was blown into my face, and across the top of my head. Then Berna pulled my head down with one hand and put his mouth to my crown. He blew tobacco smoke once more, and then sucked. Taking another drag on his cigar, he moved his mouth across the top of my head, pattering the smoke this time, and once again sucked, making a moist, gurgling sound, as he did so.

The storm finally arrived, hitting the thatch, and coming in through the gap between the roof and the wall. Berna continued with the leaves and the smoke and the sucking for about ten minutes, until finally sitting back and declaring, “Tuku rin,” - all done, in Kichwa. I looked at him, and thanked him, “Ashka pagoracho, yachak tiu” - thank you very much, wise uncle - which made Lucio and Eddy descend into giggles once more. As I sat back down next to Eddy, I felt that I had gone past the peak of the ayahuasca’s effect, and was on my way back down to Earth again. Eddy handed me a cup of rum, while Lucio went and sat in front of the shaman for treatment.

Fabian, Eddy’s elder brother, came in. He’d been drinking at a friend’s house and was more than a little tipsy. He sat by the cooking fire, and I went over to join him. Fabian has a funny way of talking, a bit like a hyperactive child telling a story of something that’s really excited him. He gets a bit wide-eyed and breathless, gasping for air when he finally does pause, whilst his huge mop of a fringe shakes uncontrollably over his eyes. He regaled me with his adventures of the evening:

“I was walking up the hill, and I bumped into Byron and he asked me to buy him a drink, so I told him I would, but I wasn’t going to drink and we went to Manuel’s house – GASP! – and I bought him a glass of cachigua and offered it to him, but he said we had to drink the same, so I had to drink too and – GASP! – then he bought two more glasses and they were full to the top and he swallowed his straight down in one – GASP! – just like that, straight down – HA! – and he was fine, but he drank the whole lot – GASP! – and then Victor turned up so we had to drink some more, but I didn’t want to, but they told me I had to, so I didn’t have a choice – GASP!”  

And so he carried on for quite some time, while I listened and the rest of the family took themselves off to bed. The conversation moved on to the subject of datura, another hallucinogenic plant that grows in the Amazon, which the Kichwas call floripondio. Fabian told me how his dad (now deceased) used to take it and not recover for three days. He said when he was borracho on datura he would hear wives calling him, and would go out in search of them. The wives, he explained were the spirit of the datura, and the datura would make him immune to any harm, so he could run around barefoot in the jungle, over thorns and spines, without suffering any harm. He could even climb a chonta – a kind of palm tree with six inch spines that will pierce straight through the sole of a wellington boot – and come back down unscathed. I asked if his dad was a shaman. “No,” he replied, “he just enjoyed taking datura.” Typically Payamino.

By now I was definitely levelling off, but the peaceful feeling remained. We left the fireside and went and sat by Berna while the rain continued to pound on the thatch. There was about half a bottle of rum left, which Fabian proceeded to dish into cups and pass round to Berna and me, while Berna also continued glugging away on his cachigua. By now, Berna was back to his usual self, talking loudly and unintelligibly in an ongoing monologue. He began to speak about the ghost city inside the Armadillo Hill. Fabian translated for me; he spoke about two daughters that he had in there, and how there are huge reserves of gold.  He once tried to smuggle some out, but he got caught. He talked about aeroplanes flying over the ghost city, and said there were gringos, like me, who spoke a strange language, just like I did. I asked if I could go and visit it sometime, but he said it was too dangerous – there was a door to hell in there, and if you got lost, you could wind up going through that door accidentally and never come back.

I played a couple of tunes on my harmonica and when I finished, Berna said something to Fabian. “He says the music you play is bacano (cool), he says for playing like that you can marry his daughter.” I gave him a pat on the shoulders, and called him warmi yaya – father-in-law, which made Fabian spray his rum out with laughter. Berna then lit a torch and shone it into his glass of cachigua, peering and muttering into the drink. I began to crack some joke about him talking to his booze, but Fabian hushed me and listened, then turned to me with a worried look. “He says we are not going to live very long.”

“What do you mean?”

“He can see the future in the cachigua, and he says that we are both going to die before we are old.”

“Does he know how we are going to die?”

Fabian turned to Berna and spoke to him. Berna replied and Fabian faced me once more, “We are going to get into a fight whilst drunk.”

"Are we going to fight against each other?”

“No, you and I are going to be fighting against someone else, and we’ll both be killed.”

Fabian filled a cup with rum and handed it to him. Berna shone the torch into the cup, peered in, and then looked up, eyebrows raised in a look of concern, making an “Ooooooh” sound. “What is it now?” I asked. Fabian and Berna exchanged a few sentences in Kichwa, then Fabian spoke in Spanish, “He says the cup is too full – he’s too drunk to finish it.” Berna passed the cup to me.

If you’ve out-drunk a shaman, you know it’s time to call it a night. I drained the cup, and with an alli tuta, kalla kama, made my excuses and left.