Scars from war, an imperfect peace, and eating worms in the Amazon Jungle
Befriending an indigenous family in the Brazilian borderlands gave me a new perspective on conflict, and myself
This is an installment of the “Ship’s Log” series, more personal entries on the beats we cover for paid subscribers.
If you haven’t signed up for a paid subscription, we urge you to consider doing so. We have plans that start at just $5/month and the resources help us continue bringing you the stories that most big media companies miss.
If you have, thank you, and read on!
I’m eating worms in the heart of the Amazon jungle. They’re not bad. Ok, technically they’re not really worms, they’re smoked beetle larvae, but the man who prepared them calls them worms, and they look like worms. I imagine they probably taste like worms too, but I don’t have comparable experiences to draw from.
I’ve spent the last five days with Yeison López and his family, who are from the Kubeo indigenous community in Vaupés, in the Colombian-Brazilian borderlands. We met because I agreed to accompany and document a self-described “adventurer”, Daniel Eggington, on a trip he has been planning for months along the complex river network that acts as the main transportation corridor in this part of the Amazon jungle— “the Blackwater Expedition”.
Daniel hopes to paddle a canoe to Manaus, Brazil— a voyage 1,234 km as the crow flies, over 2,000 km via the curving waterways he will traverse. Our trip got off to a dubious start. We sank our canoe the first day out. My camera survived the mini-shipwreck however, as did we. One of my shoes and my phone were the only casualties.
But our misadventure also granted us a rare opportunity. In the aftermath, as we scrambled among the floating detritus of our gear (and after I watched my phone escape into the milky-green depths of the Vaupés river), we met Yeison, who in a certain manner adopted us.
After he made sure nothing more than our pride was damaged, he offered us the hospitality of his home for a few days before agreeing to continue southeast with us to the Brazilian border, where I would break off and return home to Bogota while Daniel carried on to Manaus.
For me, the trip wasn’t just an opportunity for a bit of adventure and some photography work, it was a chance to get to know the Amazon region— perhaps the only part of Colombia I haven’t crisscrossed dozens of times for work— as well as the people who live there.
But ultimately, what I’ve experienced here has been much more than that. It is a glimpse into the daily habits of a funny and caring family, the cuisine and customs of some of the Kubeo people, and as is always the case every time I venture into one of the many stateless regions in Colombia: an intersection of history, internal colonialism, and the scars of the country’s more than half-century civil war.