“Hey you’re the Sapo dude right, who went out with Aukoo?”
Returning to Iquitos after eighteen months felt like I never left. Stepping off a river launch and into the back of a mototaxi to Plaza de Armas, I soon caught up with the same familiar faces and some new ones. Some of whom who had heard of my apparently infamous adventure with the Matse Indians lead by local maverick jungle guide, Richard ‘Aukoo’ Fowler, where I was initiated with Sapo, a toxic frog poison smeared into open wounds as a test of endurance and preparation for hunting. I have returned to Iquitos to again explore the neverworlds of both the Amazon jungle and those of the mysterious power plants used by local Indians and curandros.
I checked in with local medicinal-plant aficionado and psychanaught buccaneer, Alan Shoemaker, whose Ayahuasca drinking buddies include legendary, counter-culture journo Peter Gorman and the McKenna Brothers. Alan gave me the low down on the Ayahuasceros round town, referring me to Percy Garcia for my obligatory existential shake-down and head mechanics ceremony to re-connect me with Ayahuasca’s inner-universe and inter-dimensional wallpaper. But that’s not why I came back to Iquitos, it was some of the more obscure rituals I was interested in documenting, one in particular was the Nu Nu, an Amazonian snuff ‘on steroids,’ mildly psychotropic tobacco used by the Matse and other Indians for hunting magic. Nu Nu is made from roasting and crushing mapacho leaves (jungle tobacco) and inner bark of the macambo tree-(a member of the cacao family) into a fine powder. Unlike like the Yopo snuff, filled with DMT resin and used by Indians in Venezuela and Colombia, the Nu Nu isn't really psychedelic. However Peter Gorman, suggests that in large doses and after the pain subsides, sometimes a television like screen scans images of jungle animals running across the inside of your brain, and that the Matses use this to work out what will be killed in the next hunt. So I was back here on a mission to watch a new channel of jungle TV and risk possibly giving myself a frontal lobotomy by having Nu Nu painfully shot up my nose with a bow-dart.
Alan scrolled through his cell phone address list to find Peter Gorman’s jungle guide, Jonny Babylon, who was supposedly the best Nu Nu man in town and he did home delivery, so my mission seemed fairly straight forward. I called Jonny Babylon, negotiated a price for the Nu Nu and agreed to meet me at Alan’s place ‘manana’. The next day waiting for the Nu Nu on Alan’s couch, his wife asked me who I was expecting, I explained, a Jonny Babylon to perform the Nu Nu ceremony and she rolled her eyes, “Jonny Babylon cleans our fish-tank, you need Jonny Java!”
I looked at Alan, “I think negotiated a Nu Nu ceremony with your fish-tank cleaner!”
Alan smiled, “Oh well it needs to be cleaned.”
In my bad Spanish I must have agreed to have fish tank cleaning fluid blown up my nose, I’m sure Mr. Babylon just thought it was another crazy gringo looking for kicks. Back at Mad Mick’s Bunkhouse the real Nu Nu man, Jonny Java was waiting for me, he said, “No Nu Nu now, manana.”
I sighed, he continued,
“You want Sapo?”
Rumor had spread I was lining up a Nu Nu ceremony and out of the entourage of onlookers, Mark, a wizened, pint-size New Yorker with a five o clock shadow spoke out, “That’s the stuff I read about in that article isn’t it? I’ll try it.”
I looked at him and parroted Aukoo’s words of warning to me eighteen months earlier, “This is no Ayahuasca trip with a warm, fuzzy, group-hug at the end – It’s a full contact experience, a peptide neurotoxin that makes you feel like your dying. You cut out for that?’
Mark grinned, “Well one time in the mountains of Guatemala a met a shaman who told me I had to get drunk with a dead guy, so I did, he pulled him out of a coffin, sat him on a chair and left me to drink a bottle of the local moonshine.”
I figured that was as good a qualification as any, he continued,
“But anyway I live in New York, I’m ready for anything.”
Jonny gave Mark three hits of Sapo into the freshly burnt wounds in his arm, and we all grinned watching him turn red, then green for twenty minutes leaning over a bucket. Disappointedly for the spectators he didn’t throw up.
Manana was my turn, Jonny was happy with the fresh batch of Nu Nu he procured from his jungle suppliers, as he loaded up a quarter inch diameter plastic pipe with a dark powder that looked like ground coffee. Jonny leant my head back, stuck one end of the pipe up my nose and without warning or further ceremony gave it a short, hard blast on the other end of the pipe.
If you could cross a freight train with a tornado of sand, that’s what it felt like when it hit me – excruciatingly painful, as I coughed up a cloud of black dust.
It tasted sharp and bitter on the back of my throat, my temples constricted and heart pounded, Jonny smiled, “Normal is two.”
Blam!, the second dose up the alternate nostril felt no better than the first. The rush that followed was a mix of adrenaline and jungle nicotine that left me feeling strong and energized. Having travelled a week by bus and boat, I figured an extra dose was in order just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, “Better make it four Jonny.”- blam, blam. Two more hits of Nu Nu left me coughing clouds of dust and handfuls of black muck running out my nose. Although no TV screens of prospective jungle animal prey emerged from the recesses of my consciousness – one thought that did cross my mind was, Gee I could murder a beer.
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If you want to see the Nu Nu ceremony at Mad Mick’s Bunkhouse on YouTube, go to;
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