With the Waorani

My introduction to jungles came through classic Tarzan movies. Those films may have been black and white, but in my imagination the jungle glowed in Technicolor: thick, green leaves drooping everywhere, steamy jungle vistas shrouded in gray fog, the echoes of multicolored birds ringing through the canopy high overhead—that’s my version of paradise. This time, though, the jungle will be my reality. For the next seven days, I’m going to try to survive alone in the Amazon.

Having never really paid attention to high school geography (after all, they made us study iron ore extraction in Pittsburgh!), I’ve lived with two assumptions about jungles. One: you have to be wealthy to consider going to the jungle. Two: wherever they are, they are a lifetime away. It never occurred to me that so many vast, thick rainforest ecosystems could exist so close to my home in North America. The Amazon basin stretches from the northern part of South America to central Brazil in the south, with the Andes on the west and the Atlantic coast on the east. The Amazon River is the epicenter. I’m headed to the eastern Andes of Ecuador, the headwaters of the Amazon.

It’s a six-hour taxi ride through the eastern Andes from Quito to the small, edge-of-the-jungle air base in Shell. Flying out of Shell is a risky venture. The only safety-conscious and experienced pilots are the missionaries, but they’re not permitted to fly anyone who isn’t associated with their missions. Enter anthropologist and linguist Jim Yost. He lived with the natives in this area for ten years and is one of only half a dozen people in the outside world that can speak their language. He also has connections with the missionaries, so he helps me arrange a flight deep into the headwaters of the Amazon River, where I will be a guest of the Waorani.

The Waorani are considered one of the most violent peoples in the history of civilization. In former times, sixty percent of adult male deaths were homicides, mostly revenge killings. Most of the killings came at the end of a spear, often in the dead of night. The perpetrators will sneak up on a hut, burst through the thatched grass walls, and drive a spear into someone’s chest as he sleeps. In the 1950s, this remote area of the Amazon became infamous when five missionaries were massacred by the Waorani.

What happened after the massacre makes for an even more incredible story. The wife and sister of one of the slain missionaries moved in with their relative’s killers and brought them Christianity. The Waorani were profoundly moved, and the tribe embraced the concept of forgiveness. Since then, that concept has spread and the entire culture has begun to evolve from one of violence to one of understanding. As I contemplate my stay with this tribe, I realize it’s still a relatively new development for them.

It takes only a few minutes in the air to leave what, to me, looks just like northern Ontario: large expanses of untrammeled bush broken up by roads, dwellings, and mines. But we are soon flying over a vast expanse of dark green jungle that stretches quite literally as far as the eye can see. Somewhere down there, I’ll be left alone for a week.

Our destination is the Waorani village of Snake River. From the sky, I can make out a tiny grass airstrip in the middle of the dense forest. Jim Yost, photographer Laura Bombier, and I are about to enter a land lost in time.

The entire village comprises eight huts peppered over two acres of barely tamed rainforest encircled by a chain-link fence that was freed from an abandoned oil company camp and now serves as protection from jaguars. Most of the huts here were made with milled wood, courtesy of the Norwood sawmill shared by this and five other villages in the area. Eight families inhabit the eight buildings. The roofs are made of corrugated tin, also liberated from abandoned oil camps. The ground is a combination of hard-packed mud and rooster and dog droppings. Beyond the chain-link fence lie hundreds of miles of mosquito-filled, snake-slithering, jaguar-prowling, spider-crawling, ant-infested, wasp-buzzing jungle heaven!

Waorani etiquette dictates that, after disembarking the plane, you wait on the edge of the village until you are invited to enter, even though the huts are a mere ninety yards from the airstrip. This tradition could see you standing there for many hours, if not all day, until some elder decides to give you the thumbs-up. Fortunately for us, they are excited to have visitors and to see their old friend Jim, whom they call Warika.

Six Waorani help us with our gear, and we walk across a small wet area where we are cautioned to watch for snakes. Over ninety percent of all adult Waorani have been bitten by snakes—deadly snakes. We look down often.

The only sanitation in the village is a lone outhouse situated right in the middle of the village, the only spot not protected by fences. Unbelievably, it actually has a flush toilet, courtesy of a hose tapped into a distant stream. In anticipation of our arrival, the villagers have built a traditional hut with a thatched roof. Once the mangy dogs and the rooster are kicked out, it becomes our home.

The first order of business is to hang our hammocks. Now, I can totally relate to the comfort and beauty of sleeping in my hammock at the cottage on a lazy weekend afternoon, but the thought of spending more than twenty nights curled up in one makes me wonder if I will get any sleep at all.

After settling in, Jim climbs into his hammock and waits. For what, I’m not really sure, but Laura and I do the same. Perhaps it is hammock practice time? The only activity for the next few hours—other than trying to get comfortable on a thin piece of nylon stretched between poles—is trying to relate to the three little girls who will become our constant companions during our stay in the village. They dare each other to inch closer to me to see if they can poke this odd-looking stranger from behind. They are all under age seven; two of them have never been out of the jungle.

There are 1,700 Waorani living in an area covering more than eight thousand square miles of thick jungle. Most of the villages are slowly becoming modernized. A few of them have electricity from diesel generators; some even have sanitation and running water. Each village is a hard one-to-four-day hike from the next.

But a stay in a fully equipped village doesn’t make for a great survival story, so I’ve elected to go primitive and stay with a splinter group of a few families that, believe it or not, long for the old days. No, they don’t want a return to the violence and killings, but they do want to return to jungle ways, where days are spent hunting for monkeys with a blowgun or wading in the streams with fishnets in hand.

There is yet another splinter group that was somewhat less inviting. Years ago, a group of Waorani natives took off into the jungle, just over a day’s paddle downstream. The Tagaedi, as they are now called, are one of nearly seventy tribes that live deep (much deeper than I currently am) in the Amazon. No one who has tried to contact them has ever come back alive. To make matters even more intimidating for me, only three weeks before our visit, some of the Waorani from another village went down and killed sixteen Tagaedi. Hostility and tension fill the already thick jungle air. I realize I am about to be alone for a week in a territory rife with retribution.

Our village is a much different story. We have a number of hosts, none of whom speak English. Badiana is a thirty-year-old woman with a wonderfully sweet disposition. Kinta and Ippa, both about fifty, are the main organizers of the village. Tomo and his wife, Anna, both over sixty, have come up from their own, even smaller, village farther downstream to be here for Jim. And then there is Duey. He is one of the Waorani who massacred the five missionaries by spear. I could be greatly intimidated, even afraid, but before my time here is finished, I will find it as gut-wrenching to leave these people as I would my own family.

As my guide, Tomo will become like a brother. His appearance is striking. His skin is like leather and his toes are splayed out wide from walking barefoot in the jungle his entire life. In fact, the Waorani only started wearing clothes because outsiders were uncomfortable with their nakedness and they had grown weary of the staring. Clothing in the jungle rots quickly, and not much will last beyond a few weeks. Nakedness wasn’t simply an aesthetic choice, it was a practical matter. For the Waorani, to wear one lone string around the waist is to be considered dressed; the absence of the string is shameful nudity. Men tie the string to their foreskins to pull their penises up and out of the way when tromping through the jungle.

In the jungle, the night closes in quickly. There are no sunsets, no big skies. Some would find it claustrophobic, even creepy. Not me. For me, the night lies heavy, like a thick blanket, and the sounds are amplified, even ear-piercing. Over there, a frog croaks. Behind me, a night bird calls. Not far off, a puma growls. Somewhere out there, probably within a stone’s throw, a jaguar’s large paws tramp the jungle floor.

Jim, Laura, and I are mellowing out as we lie in our hammocks, waiting for the Waorani evening meal to begin. Not many people visit the Waorani. Missionaries, anthropologists, and the odd magazine writer will go to the effort to come this deep into the heart of the Amazon. But we are different. The Waorani know I want to survive a week alone in their jungle, a desire that prompts ongoing jests about what a great meal I’ll be for the jaguar. I tentatively join the laughter, until I am told that the Waorani will do anything to avoid being caught alone in the jungle at night.

Okay, so they consider us crazy. But we also have a woman in our group, something the Waorani find even more fascinating. Few females venture this far into the jungle. Badiana thinks Laura is absolutely beautiful and is so happy to have another woman to connect with, if only through hand signals.

Though we have brought our own food, Anna and Ippa are only too happy to feed us—constantly, it seems. Mostly it’s manioc, a root much like potato, along with whatever is caught that day, usually some kind of fish or bird. But the treasured treat is manioc drink. First, the root is boiled and mashed by hand. Then the mash is chewed by female village elders before being spit back into the bowl. The saliva begins a process of fermentation, and the mixture is left to sit overnight. The next morning, it is mixed with hot water and ready to drink. You are expected to guzzle, not sip, your old-lady-chewed, slightly fermented drink, as sipping is considered an insult. It is also an insult to put down your food bowl once you have picked it up.

My concerns that it would be inconvenient for the Waorani to feed, house, and guide us are quickly put to rest when Jim explains that it is, in fact, their honor. They are thrilled that someone cares enough to want to learn and experience their traditional, and quickly disappearing, way of life. Jim himself is like a legend to them; some of the younger Waorani even come into the hut just to get a glimpse of the famous Warika. During the ten years that Jim and his wife, Kathy, spent living among the Waorani, he became an indispensable part of helping the Waorani achieve ownership of territory in the jungles of Ecuador. Tomo respects and cares for Jim greatly, but when Duey arrives later that evening, the love and friendship is even more evident.

Waorani don’t have words for hello or goodbye, so Duey simply sheds tears as he hugs Jim in greeting. Duey has walked for a day and a half through thick jungle just to see Jim. It was Duey who organized the men and women of the tribe to come into our hut to sing for us this first evening. It is by far the crudest, most rudimentary form of music I have ever heard. There is only the faintest hint of form or melody, and no pitch or tuning at all for the rustic percussion instruments and flutes. Each song is a repetitive chanting of one or two lines of lyric. It is beautiful. I sit in the firelight as seven Waorani treat us to their traditional storytelling songs. I breathe deep and hold back tears. The honor is purely ours. In the middle of the night, I am awakened by Duey chanting and praying in a loud voice. Jim explains that this is a holdover from his days of existing as part of a more violent culture. You stayed awake in shifts and talked and sang so that your enemy knew you were awake and couldn’t attack you by surprise.

The next day, after our breakfast of manioc, we wait patiently in the hut, hanging around, literally, in our hammocks while the rain falls. It rains nearly every day here, usually for many hours, and often as a downpour. Once the rain stops, the sun beats down through any small opening in the jungle canopy like a fiery hammer on your head. Before long, our hosts arrive; my training is about to begin. Kinta and Ippa wear traditional clothing on their upper bodies: leaves and feathers on their heads, woven plant fiber and decorations around their necks.

My first lesson is in the art of hunting by blowgun, a survival priority. If you can’t hunt or fish, you can’t survive. Village kids can point a two-yard-long blowgun heavenward and hit a hummingbird sixty yards away. I practice on coconuts, and Tomo cheers every time I hit my mark. Maybe I’ll survive in the jungle after all!

Tomo has his own near-death story to tell. He once hit a monkey with a dart from his blowgun. As it fell, the monkey got caught on a branch. Tomo climbed seventy feet up the tree to knock the monkey down. High up in the jungle canopy, he grazed a small poisonous caterpillar. The toxic shock was so powerful that his whole body was jolted out of the tree and he fell to the ground. He was taken to the village hospital, where he remained for three weeks. His entire body turned completely black from the caterpillar toxin. Things were looking grim when an entomologist was found in Brazil who not only recognized the poisoning but had developed an antidote. Tomo’s life was saved, and he hadn’t broken a single bone.

The Amazon is home to countless millions of poisonous snakes, spiders, frogs, ants, bees, wasps, fish, and caterpillars. Can I survive here? Many of the survival methods I teach in North America are backward in the jungle. In North America, for example, you never stand on or jump off a log for fear of breaking an ankle. In the jungle, however, you always stand on logs before you cross them, because most poisonous snakebites occur when you step over the log, oblivious to the snakes hiding on the underside. I also learn to tromp heavily, as the vibrations will often cause the snakes to slither out of your way.

My next tutorial involves net fishing in the small, muddy jungle streams. This time, the women take over as my teachers. As Anna shows me how to shove my net deep into the muddy water to corner the fish, Laura, who was busy trying to get some video footage, falls backward into the murky stream. When she surfaces, the first words out of my mouth are “Is the camera okay?” Everything we do, we do as a group, including laughing together.

It is the night before I am to set out on my week-long survival test. Tomorrow, I will be deposited in the heart of the jungle, alone. Before sleeping, I take my satellite phone out to the airstrip to call home. It is my only link to the outside world, and on this night I need to hear familiar voices. Instead, I hear a low growl from about sixty yards away in the pitch-black jungle. I make a beeline back to the hut. The growl belongs to a full-grown puma that has been hanging around the area.

Sleep proves difficult. I’m more anxious about this survival stay than any other, yet I’m also exhilarated; surviving in the Amazon jungle is my personal quest. Bug screening covers my hammock. This is good, given that our hut is filled with annoying, biting gnats. Also, the alternative—sleeping on the floor while thousands of army ants and the odd tarantula crawl over me—is worse. Before we embark in the morning, the elders ceremoniously paint my back and arms with ink made from plant dyes. I am immediately swarmed by bees. They, along with wasps and butterflies, will be my constant companions for the next seven days.

My greatest insect foe, though, is a huge, two-inch-long ant they called the manyi (or bullet) ant. It has a monster-sized set of chompers on the front end and a massive stinger on the rear. A sting from one of these ants is said to feel the same as jamming a pair of red-hot pliers into your skin, twisting it hard, and holding it there. The pain doesn’t diminish for at least five hours. The Waorani fear this bite more than snakebites, yet I’m amazed when one of the kids skillfully catches one for me using a small piece of grass twisted like a noose. In the days to come, I will step barefoot beside at least six of these devils.

I will also plunge my hands deep into muddy riverbanks in search of catfish, praying I don’t instead get a handful of electric eel—or a fresh-water stingray, the most feared creature of all. I will suspend disbelief and do a number of things that go against all my instincts. But this is jungle-style survival, and all bets are off. My crew, including paramedic Barry Clark, will wait for me back in the village, just in case.

On day six of my week alone in the jungle, I go for a short walk to relieve myself at the end of the day while the sun is setting. I look up to see a huge spotted jaguar not more than fifteen yards away. Concentrating on slowing my breathing and keeping the monster cat in sight, I slowly make my way back to my bush camp. I hadn’t planned on following the jungle trail home until tomorrow, but this unexpected visitor is reason enough to cut this adventure short. I don’t mind suffering for my art, but I’m not interested in getting eaten for it.

The sun is setting and darkness falling fast as I start to pick my way home. The trail is small and tangled, and I use the video camera’s night-vision function to guide my way. I set a quick pace, constantly searching for the jaguar. The big cat stalks me all the way back to the village.

After what seems like an eternity, I come to the edge of the airstrip and hastily make my way into the fenced enclosure of the village. I’ve made it. Barely.

Later that night, as I lie exhausted and spent in a hammock that now feels like the ultimate in luxury, Jim wakes me up. “Listen,” he says, and motions to the side of our hut. Clearly audible is the growl of the jaguar; he will continue to circle the village all night. The next day, Kinta hikes out to where I first saw the big cat and tells me that, by the size of the prints scattered all over the equipment I’d left behind, he is a 250-pound male.

Although Survivorman is now part of my past, people always ask what my favorite location was. Suffice it to say that I have never been so profoundly affected and full of awe as I was in the Amazon, the land of Waorani