Day 69 - travels out of my mind.

An unusually unproductive morning. I try to find a city tour that takes in the main archaeological sites, as well as a day tour covering the Sacred Valley. Too late for the latter today, so I try to arrange the former.

Commit to the ayahuasca ceremony even though I’m finding it difficult not eating the whole day. It’s supposed to be no alcohol, no meat, no sex, no spices, no citrus fruit, no fat and no sugar for at least a day before the ceremony. The woman at the Casa de la Gringa tells me that I can get away with eating some plain vegetables. It turns out to be really hard to find an item even on the menu of the strictly veggie El Encuentro that doesn’t involve any of the banned items. I wonder if avocado salad counts as fat.

Miss my city tour. It’s not completely my fault; the woman at Andina Tours tells me that people get collected either from their hotels or from in front of the cathedral. Turns out that you have to sign up in advance. I don’t understand how this is possible, how I can spend over a week in Cusco and somehow not manage to fit everything in.

At 6pm, I’m waiting at the Casa de la Gringa. Since shaman ceremonies are becoming more and more popular, I tell myself that I’m doing this in the name of research, when in fact it’s because I want to know what kind of images my mind will throw out. Ayahuasca is used as a healing plant, and never for recreation. I want to see if it’ll help cure what ails me.

Kush the shaman arrives. It seems he’s in demand; he also does ceremonies for the Shaman Shop. He looks suitably shaman-like – shoulder-length greying hair, slightly outlandish clothes. Myself and two others follow him to the most ancient Volkswagen Beetle I’ve ever seen. It’s part dark blue, part rust, and it chugs precariously down from the San Blas square. There’s myself, Eddie the Mexican New Yorker, Katarina the Ukrainian New Yorker and another Eastern European guy whose name even I struggle with.

We drive up and up. The lights of Cusco spread out before us. It’s Golgotha, the spaceport from the Simon R. Greene books. Trying to take a particularly steep climb, the Volkswagen Beetle gives up the ghost and stalls. Kush leads us up through the dark streets, accompanied by the dog chorus of the neighbourhood canines.

Behind a steel gate, there’s a garden. A stone puma guards the steps down into the ceremonial hut – an adobe building lit by dim reddish bulbs and candles, with a thatched roof and skylights. Inside, it’s carpeted; there are several berths covered with thick woollen blankets and two shrines – a white one, composed of multi-tiered triangles atop a circle, with fresh flowers on top, surrounded by round white cushions – presumably for the San Pedro ceremony – and a more arcane-looking one – a dark low table with candles, crystals, giant dark feathers, mysterious little bottles, rocks spread out on a cloth. We settle down on our berths, overlooked by an aggressive-looking stuffed bird of prey perched on a high windowsill, and are joined by several more latecomers – an Aussie couple, a Spanish girl, an elfin girl wearing a woolly hat who looks like she might be a regular here.

Kush checks that we all have plenty of water and hands out plastic buckets and toilet roll, since ayahuasca often induces vomiting, which is considered to be part of the cleansing process. Since ayahuasca is most effective when you approach it with a particular purpose, we talk to the shaman about what we’re hoping to get out of this. Eddie says that he feels a negative balance within himself, that he suffers from fear of failure, and wishes to shed that negativity. I second that. Kush asks us all whether we’ve ever experimented with anything before, to see how much he should give us to start with. When I tell him that I’ve tried magic mushroom tea and marijuana, he smiles.

Kush lights a candle, then takes a small bottle of liquid, pours it into a stone receptacle filled with ashes, and sets it on fire. It burns with a strong blue light. He lowers his head and says something that sounds like a prayer, in a language that I don’t understand. In the candlelight, something about his face reminds me of Anthony Hopkins. He shakes a bottle filled with pinkish liquid and pours different measures us all. The glasses are handed out by his assistant.

The liquid has a strong, bitter and organic taste, with grit at the bottom. I gulp it down, wrap myself in blankets and wait for something to happen. We talk some more. I go to the bathroom, feel some nausea and am mildly sick. That’s the only effect I feel and I wonder if I’d made a mistake by eating those vegetables; I heard that sometimes food can prevent you from having visions. When I come back to my berth, I suddenly feel very sleepy, lie down and close my eyes. Kush begins to chant.

Immediately, I begin to see kaleidoscopic shapes, psychedelic colours, lime-green snakes moving, changing in time with the chanting. When the chanting changes tempo, so do the shapes. I’m mesmerised. Feel strangely removed from my body; it’s as if something is raising my body up, while another force is pressing down on it; when the feeling gets too intense, I open my eyes for a second and it abates. Close my eyes again. Again, my body seems far away; when I twitch my nose, it feels like my face doesn’t belong to me, like the time dental analgesia numbed my chin and I could feel the texture of my skin, but no feeling inside. I coin a term for this detachment: what I feel is near-farness.

I can’t tell if I’m warm or cold; if I’m a bit cold, I’m too lethargic to move. I think there are shivers running down my spine – not running, but creeping slowly; I see them as lines of light, slow and thick like molasses. The chanting is replaced by the playing of a flute – a repetitive trill that triggers more images, more changing colours. I’m not directing my visions; I’m a passive passenger.

When I open my eyes one time, I see a giant dark figure in the middle of room that looks like half-man, half-animal, possibly a wolf. I wonder if I’m now hallucinating with my eyes open. Then the giant figure moves into the candlelight and turns into Kush again.

Even when the chanting and the music stops, the sounds reverberate inside my head, become voices, building up to a crescendo. When it becomes too much, I open my eyes, see Eddie sitting up, the shaman kneeling in front of him, holding giant feathers in the air, one in each hand, chanting. I sit up for a sip of water. Kush asks me if I’m okay, asks if I want some more ayahuasca. At the time, I don’t think it’s having too much of an effect, so I accept another half-measure.

I lose all sense of time; I don’t know if minutes have passed, or hours, whether I have been dreaming of hallucinating. It seems that the second measure takes hold almost immediately, bringing with it more images – abstract colours, the face of an Andean child, a woman, an old person. Then an undead face covered in cobwebs thrusts itself at me, but it’s not frightening, just startling. Then the images seem to shake, and my body as well, and I think that I’m in an earthquake, yet when I open my eyes, all is silent and still; a star shines through the skylight and the lights are dimmer. Am aware of nausea, discomfort in my belly.

More voices, more faces – tribesmen from the jungle, animals; the jungle green is encroaching on my space, it’s intense; they’re not friendly, nor overly hostile; once again, there’s no fear. The sounds build up in my head, and turn into a ringing in my ears which builds up and up. A wave of nausea overtakes me, I open my eyes and vomit darkly into the bucket next to me. Kush’s chanting, and the ringing in my ears seems to cover up the sound of my being sick, at least to me. Everyone else is lying still, my vision is blurred, the room is spinning. I imagine that I’m purging myself of my negativity, as well as my vegetables.

Then it feels as if I dreamed it. Am not sure if I was even sick; only the slight rasping in my throat makes me sit up and check the bucket. Affirmative. I don’t know if I do that seconds after or hours after; time has no significance. The candle above the door seems to be crackling with purple lightning. Immediate relief after purging, and I sink back down.

More images come, obeying the repetitive chant, the reed flute of the shaman’s assistant, the light drumming. Time and again, I can’t believe that I didn’t believe that ayahuasca would be so intense. Images come even if I’m lying in the foetal position, but they’re easier to receive if I’m on my back.

I don’t know at what point the shaman falls silent. I sleep a dreamless sleep until it’s morning, and I can see the sun through the skylight.