Shamanistic Ceremonies and Other Interesting Happenings in Colombia
Its 7 am and I’m here in Medellin Colombia with Shreena. I expedited my travel here because of a simple thing she told me. She had the contact info for someone who had done ayahuasca with the tribes people here in this city and would be able to give me that information.
For those of you that may not know Ayahuasca is a traditional drug created by the tribes people in the Amazon for their religious ceremonies. The chemistry behind it is actually quite ingenious. It requires two plants one contains an MAOI and the other contains DMT. The combination of the two drugs produces a hallucinogenic result while either of them separate would result in nothing. The MAOI stops the human body from breaking down the DMT molecule at the speed it normally would. This allows it to be active in the brain for the 6-8 hour duration and have some truly mind blowing results supposedly.
It’s been a dream of mine to try DMT for a while now, and to have the opportunity to do it in the traditional spiritual way with the local people would be a dream come true for me.
On a lighter note, I read at the hostel that they have Pablo Escobar tours of Medellin, sooo stoked on that.
Me and Shreena are going to go grab breakfast right now while the rest of the people we haven’t met yet in our dorm are still sleeping.
I’m always scared about leaving my stuff in a room with people I haven’t met before… ugh.
Ok but so change in plans. Disregard all that other stuff I just said about Ayahuasca because we found out that TONIGHT there is going to be a San Pedro ceremony up in the mountains of Medellin. San Pedro is a mescaline containing cacti that the indiginous people of the Americas have used for centuries in their shamanistic rituals. There is apparently an all night fire ceremony tonight and we are going. I’m pretty sure there will be a pretty long followup to this.
I’m going to go take a nap and rest up.
Here are photos all the way from Panama City… then on the boat through the San Blas Islands… then in the old town of Cartagena. I can’t be bothered to explain which is which, lets say that I know where they are from and that’s all that matters.
It was fun walking around the city taking photos and just experiencing the old town, it was gorgeous there. I also had some close encounters with some friendly hookers and drug dealers. I had fun negotiating for some cocaine and then not buying it despite how low I got the price. The drug dealers in this country are super friendly.
Getting ripped off for 80 bucks or so wasn’t too fun but you live and learn I guess. I should have listened to the damn tourist book about not exchanging money with the people on the street because their very good at magic tricks and will give you a wad of 1000 peso bills instead of the 20000 bills they showed you.
Yeah got fucked on that one. Oh well, all I need is my blackberry and my Mac in life anyway.
