Colombia is special to me, firstly because it is my country of origin, and secondly because of its beauty and unmatched biodiversity (the most per square mile worldwide)

My experience living in a village along the bank of the Amazon River began in a port city known as Leticia, a crossroads bordering Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela, all within walking distance of each other, and it stood out among any other community I’ve encountered, since most of the houses stood balanced on tall stilts, since the water level of the river can rise by 40 feet in the rainy season (but the stilts stood about 10-15 feet at the highest), then I got on a boat which took tourists and locals down river, where I slept overnight at a resort catered to foreigners looking to experience the rainforest psychedelic known as Ayahuasca since it was the place with the nicest lodging in town where no more than a thousand people must have lived. 

 The morning after, my father and I went on another boat downstream, to a small community of a few hundred people, and we were guests in one of their houses. They live a very traditional lifestyle, in the sense that the men go out into the river on small boats or in the forest to go hunt and bring back food, and the women mainly do household chores as well as cooking, and in their free time, the locals participate in parties (with music and lots of drinking) among other things to pass the time, and even though they have basic cable TV and wifi, most people don’t own phones or rely on devices for entertainment or stimulation. I quickly adapted to their lifestyle, which was wake up, go to the forest, try to hunt anything big enough to eat, come back, enjoy a nice meal (they cultivated chickens, crops, and turkeys, so some things were familiar)

I did get the chance to eat snake and fish from the river, which are caught by spearfishing them when they’re sleeping. I did not spear fish, but I was taught how to throw one, and I did feel pretty cool doing so, and I managed to hit a target 15 feet away floating on the water. When the locals and I encountered foxes and frogs on a night trip in the forest, we were unsuccessful in hunting them because we missed them. Also worth mentioning is that it was necessary to bring machetes and two homemade rifles, because of the apex predator of the rainforest, the jaguar. I didn’t see a live one at my time there, but one man’s house had a jaguar skin nailed to his wall outside, as well as a skull on the mantlepiece of the place I was staying at and my guide, a man named Christian, had told me he tasted jaguar meat, which aroused my curiosity, and when I asked he told me it tasted like “common meat”, so it’s probably not that interesting. The more you know, I guess.

Though we thankfully didn’t encounter any jaguars, there was a small snake about the length of my palm, which had the color of the brightest red you can imagine, which, according to the locals, could easily kill you if it bit you. One man cut off the head of the snake and left it for the buzzards to come and eat it. Other than that, there were many venomous tarantulas and insects, as well as monkeys and weird massive reptiles that sparkled shades of turquoise and green when you shone a light on them, which you need since its pitch black during the night.

 For the entire time I was there, I felt like I was in a different world filled with danger and many things to discover. I have traveled to every continent minus Oceania and Antarctica, and many of those countries within, but the time I spent in the Amazon Basin made me feel like I was truly alive, and disconnected from modern troubles, and conveniences, which in a way was fulfilling, to live closer to how we as a species once did, where every step demands awareness, and your day is spent trying to fulfill your basic needs. Today, I’m considering homesteading in the United States because of this experience when I’m older. Thankfully, I decided to bring my camera so I could shoot the scenery and some of the beautiful wildlife I saw.