8degreesoflatitude

If you were sick, I mean really, and happened to be abandoned on a sandbank in the Amazon, would you trust a chain-smoking motorbike mechanic with a fetish for vomit and a blunt machete who turns up out of nowhere, stinking of cigarettes and says, I can be helping you if you drink thess!

Deep in the ancient forests of the Amazon, where healing arts have been honed and practiced for hundreds of thousands of years under strict and secret lineage, a shaman of an unknown tribe blows heavy plumes of Marlboro Red from a rickety stool under a banana tree.

His practice is a jungle garden. His ‘consulting room’ is air conditioned by plants, and his library is living all around him; in blossoms, cloud, roots, shoots, animal visitors and continual dialogues with nature that inform his powers of diagnosis and prescription.

The currandero ,Don Agustin Rivas, was five days late for…