Iquitos is deep in the Amazon and was my pick up and drop off point for my Temple of the way of light experience. Arriving in Iquitos I was struck down by a severe bout of sickness...and the first two days had me in my hotel room, only venturing out to buy the final things needed for my workshop and to find some Ayahuasca dietas food to eat. Funny enough everywhere i went I met people who were either going to the Temple or worked there...It was here I met Sasha, who is the Managing Director of the Temple and who was facilitating our workshop.
Iquitos was hot and sultry and sits on the Amazon river and has the tag of being only accessible by boat or plane. Its people are very different to those in the Cusco area, and I got the impression that the men there were not particularly keen on Gringos. I can understand why, western people historically have come and killed, maimed and imposed their way of life on the traditional culture and also i felt that it was a tough life there.
Every day outside of my hotel there were always up to 10 steeet hustlers, that would get you anything and everything, all for a price though haaa. They knew our itinerary and when they saw a new person they swarmed him or her, usually shouting, "Ayahuasca" to get their attention. Funny enough when i asked around most Iquitons had either not tried Ayahuasca or had only tried it once or twice. Not the 7 times we Gringos did in ceremony. Again a pointer to the destruction of their traditional culture by Spanish missionaries.
After the workshop I was able to go on a tour several hours into the Amazon, up the Amazon river to fish for piranha and take a look at several animals indigenous to the region. I also toured Belen markets which is the local traditional markets, full of everything and lots of pick pocketers, i managed to stop one from taking a look in my pockets. I was also taken to the floating city, which is an area of Iquitos near the markets that is right on the river and built in a way to be floating in the wet season and sitting on the ground in the dry season. Or houses that simply didnt use their ground floor during the wet season due to flooding.
I was due to stay in Iquitos for a few more days, however with the departure of my workshop colleagues to their many and varied homelands and the continual hustling of the hustlers outside, I decided to leave in order to be home a week earlier to assimilate these changes and to recover from the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual emancipation that I had gone through at the temple.
I traveled from Iquitos to Lima to Dallas to London to Dubai and am just about to land in Brisbane.
This is the second last post of this Odyssey 2014, I shall write a final edition once back in a routine and have had time to reflect on the journey that has been life shaping in so many ways.
Take care
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