There may not be a volcano over South America but there is a cloud of dust spewing from the DAS (immigration) office. Dutch is a really smart guy, but he's also really fucking dumb. One of the Brits even called him Autistic, but I think it's more of a semi-savant thing.
The first or second day we tooled around Cartagena he shared his experience with a shaman in Tena, Ecuador. He made the entire experience sound quite awful.
Cliffs of the conversation from my fuzzy memory:
"So, before you drink the ayahuasca a Shaman cleanses you, which basically means spitting water in your face and beating you in the head with a branch. The translator said my spirit was far away, so he had to do it for over an hour. There are these tribes that base their entire religion around ayahuasca and trip out on it all the time, it' basically a cleansing ritual. And by cleansing, I mean hours of shitting and vomiting in the jungle when you don't know what's going on. Forget about your body man, it's all about the mind".
Yep, he really sold me with that..
A week or two later when we started hanging out with the three Brits he told them the story too, at that moment they planned to do ayahuasca together in Tena whenever they left Colombia (their final destination is Buenos Aires, nothing unusual there). I said ayahuasca didn't appeal to me and that I would stay in Colombia or Venezuela, depending on where I was at the time.
7 weeks of pondering and countless google searches later I decide to man up (a few days ago). Fuck it, you don't get to trip balls in the Amazon with a shaman everyday, let's do it. Some of the comments online about ayahuasca were quite fascinating, someone described it as unlocking a door, walking through it, and turning around to go back only to find that the lock has changed -> meaning that ayahuasca is a one way street; it'll change you forever.
Dutch said his trip lasted nearly 10 hours, and for the next 30+ hours he was basically a zombie. Sitting hunched over thinking and thinking and thinking. He had some major life changing revelations and I was already letting myself imagine what I could possibly think about for my trip as we planned to leave this Sunday, meet the Brits in Quito and then head over to Tena by Wed for the Shaman.
During lunch this afternoon I asked him how long he has been in Colombia, he nearly drops his fork and looks at me with wide eyes as if a strange hand just grabbed his balls from under the table. "Fuck fuck fuck man, how the hell did I forget about that?!"
*few seconds of silence
"So you're over the 60 days then, huh?"
My question actually was directed to his total time in Colombia (because you can only stay 6 months every 12 months, [although I later remembered that the rule is now 6 months every calendar year, so if you timed it right you could actually stay for a straight year]) but it made him realize he's overstaying his tourist visa... by 20 days.. that's going to be quite a large fine.
We quickly polished off the rest of our rice, chicken, and fried plantains then Dutch ran off to figure out how fucked he was. I get a call a few hours later.
"Uh B, I'm not going anywhere on Sunday. I'm really sorry man. I have to come back to the DAS office on Monday to figure out how much my fine will be."
CRASH
My dreams of rolling around on my back in the dirt staring at the sky through the tops of the trees is taken away from me. The Shaman Dutch was going to take us to wasn't just any Shaman, I guess this one is really famous, it wouldn't be right to go without him, I don't even know if we could find the right spot without him. Plus I was going to have to spend about 30 hours on various buses just to get to Quito, only to turn around and reverse the path a few days later.
I can't really be mad, because he didn't have to invite us do it with him, and no one is more pissed off than he is. We still haven't gotten a response from the Brits yet from the Facebook message bearing the bad news, I know they were all looking forward to it for the last month.
But I am definitely disappointed :/ maybe we can find a shaman around here but it won't be the same without the Amazon backdrop and accompanying sounds, but I guess it's better than nothing?
If I ever have the opportunity to give it a go, I'll definitely write a follow-up.
Cheers
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