18th – 30th January 2015 Iquitos, Amazon Rainforest – Peru
I spent nearly 2 weeks in the Amazon rainforest with a group of amazing people attending a retreat. People living in the jungle are very loving, they live a simple life where they are able to be happy with very little.
The nature is very much alive, you hear its sound all the time. I liked to fell asleep listening to it. It was safe sleeping in our tambo (wooden based bungalows, the rest is mosquito net -still I got lots of mosquito bites all the time-, all covered with palm leaves on the top); although some nights we heard strange screams.
I was there at the rainy season, so we had some refreshing rain, but in an hour or two hot sun was shining above us again.
The plants of the jungle are exotic, colourful and powerful, many of them are used as medicine, we also tried a few of them and met the healers working and healing with them. The amazing handmade works of local people also impressed me.
After the end of the 2nd week we were transported back to civilization, Iquitos on pequepeques, a small public motorized boat. Iquitos is a crazy, colourful and very alert city, the largest in the Peruvian rainforest. Once it must have been a stylish place looking at their ceramic tiled houses.
Along the Amazon river lies more than half of the planet's rain forests, and today there are about 150,000 species of plants growing there, which are little known by its healing power (so far, only 5% have been identified as a medicinal potential) in the Amazon.
Amazon is one of the world’s new seven natural wonders and is in danger, just as its inhabitants are.
Due to the western models of industrial development the Amazon suffers an environmental crisis and is in great danger, as well as the indigenous people living there. The serious pollution of the river is caused by the oil production and the reckless logging.