One afternoon, we walked through the jungle to an ethno-botanic garden or home of the local shaman or medicine man. A shaman is sort of a religious holy man that solves problems of people in the community and functions where the spiritual world meets the human world to keep people in balance and eliminate ailments, be the ailments spirits or diseases.

The shaman’s garden was perhaps an acre of land where he grows 250 different plants and he knows and uses all of them. The plants cure every illness. The shaman demonstrated many of the plants for us. One, gold-button, had little gold flowers that worked like Novocain, numbing our mouths. Other plants were smelled or touched, some he made into pastes or crèmes and many of them smelled quite good. His presentation went on for quite some time. I noticed that I have some of the same plants in my garden such as basil, garlic, lemon grass, and marigolds. His garden also contained cocoa (chocolate), coca (as in cocaine), and one super-hallucinogenic that the shaman counsels a person on before taking it and the ceremony for that only happens on certain nights and takes about four hours. I passed on that one. We did drink and eat cocona fruits. You can see the shaman (standing) and some of his demonstration materials. The guy sitting down is our guide, Basilio.

After his plant demonstration, the shaman asked for volunteers for “a ritual blessing or getting rid of the negatives”. He used a handful of Coca plants in giving us his blessing. Vicky and I both volunteered for the blessing. In taking the shaman’s blessing, I mostly wished to avoid getting any more jungle fever. I pass his blessing on to all who read this blog page.

Afterwards, the junior shaman offered to give us tattoos. Vicky and our friend Patty Weber volunteered to get tattoos. Vicky got a blue hummingbird tattooed on her ankle. The junior shaman did it with a hard pointed stick and the juice of some unripe fruit. I passed on the tattoo but Vicky’s was very nice.

Shortly after arriving at the shaman’s garden, we got a rainfall that was more like a deluge. We all agreed that back home, we would call it a gully-washer. To give you some idea, the creeks in the area rose about twelve inches in about two hours, it was that much rain. The surface dirt in the Amazon is clay soil and can get very slippery. I was trying to save a fellow traveler from falling in the rain, and the result was that I fell down myself. So in the end, the Amazon evidently wanted me to get a tattoo – and I got one.