Drinking the typical fermented drink of the amazon forest (Perú)

bitsviajeros (48)in #travel • 8 years ago

My recent trip in Perú was to the central amazon forest in Perú. It was 4 days in the Ashaninka Communal Reserve. Ashaninka is one of the biggest indigenous people in Perú Rainforest. I traveled with my boyfriend as part of a press tour.

There are many ashaninka communities in the amazon forest. The ones I visited are in remote area with little communication facilities. No cell phone signal and we had to travel like 5 hours by boat and then walked about 10 km.

Once we arrived they welcomed us with the authentic "Masato", the typical fermented drink of the amazon forest indigenous people.

Drinking masato. The girl next to me is the teacher of the town. She is ashaninka too from another community.

Masato is made of yucca root, the main food in the forest. They boil the yucca root and pounding into a paste. Then the women chew that paste to start the fermentation process. That is the original way to do it. Now many people in the amazon make masato without the chewing part (they use sugar instead). But the masato I drank was the original one. I didn't want to drink it but i didn't want to be rude. And I had to drink it all.

The long trip

The first part of the trip was in those boats.

First night camping. Fortunately there weren't too many mosquitoes but many bugs got into our tent

The path was full of mud and was hard to walk (10 km.).

The people

Women and children were very shy. It was difficult to talk to them because they hide or stayed quite, looking at us but mute. They speak ashaninka but also spanish (a little bit). Man were different, they talked to us and were open to answer my questions. We didn't take many pictures of the people because we realized they felt uncomfortable.

Can you see the little girl? I tried to talked to her but she just looked at me. I tried to get closer to her but she walked away. Then i stop trying. I just smiled and I got a smile back.

They let us take them a picture. They were picking up oranges.

Esteiner, the only child who talked to us. He asked to be photographed. He is ashaninka too but from another ashaninka community. He was nephew of the teacher.