Buen Peru Village, July 7, 2017
The Matses people live in primitive houses with thatched roofs on stilts. They don’t have bathrooms and kitchens, sofas and dining tables and they cook over an open fire that is inside. They sleep in hammocks! As we motored upstream the previous day for 12 hours, we passed 3 other small villages that don’t associate with outsiders. No arrows were fired at us!
They all live high on the river, probably to avoid flooding and also snakes. The Indians keep chickens and as the houses are on stilts they roam underneath to feed on scraps. It’s very simple and effective and meant we were woken up to the rooster at 4:30am wandering about under the tent. Every family has a dog and if one barks (normally at a predator) they all start squawking.
Our first day in a Matses village was about learning to grow crops in the Amazon. Armando and his family farm was a 30 minute trek through the jungle, meaning they have to carry their produce each time they harvest. I complain when I have to drive down to the supermarket. They grow banana, plantain, sweet potato and papaya in this field, which they rotate and only remove enough forest trees to sustain their crops. The men and women carry their harvest in a bag made of palm leaves that they place over their head and they prefer this method to the backpack.
I spent the rest of the day filming people around the village, kids playing volleyball and bow and arrows. This was a perfect opportunity to fly the drone again, the weather was perfect so I shot some aerials of the village and wowed the kids. They were totally amazed by this flying object which I was controlling from a little remote, most would not have even seen an aeroplane!
Buen Peru Village
I captured some more great sunset time lapses and photos and it was approaching full moon which turned the dark forest into a glowing paradise.
