I've always wanted to go up the AmaZon.
And I knew someone
who was taking people up the AmaZon
to be with this shaman back in the jungle.
I thought, "A-ha! This sounds interesting."
So I pick up my camera,
and say, "Let's go up the AmaZon."
And we did. We go up the AmaZon,
and it was incredible.
You're on this little boat and the motor would cut out every once in a while.
And you're going up into the jungle.
And the monkeys are along the sides.
It's just that perfect dolly, you know?
You're gliding along,
photographing this world.
Then we got off at this little village
and walked through the jungle
to this compound.
We were there for ten days.
That's where these rituals took place
with the Aya Wasi.
Ayahuasca is a... plant. It's a vine.
It's a psychedelic. It's a medicine.
You find it in Peru, Bolivia and all of that area.
It is the major tool of shamans -
who are the local doctors.
When someone is either sick physically or mentally,
they go to the shaman and this ritual is performed.
Unlike doctors here,
the doctor there takes the medicine with you.
So, the shaman takes of this... this ayahuasca.
The ayahuasca is mixed with another plant which activates it,
and it's brewed for about three days.
It's a very hard drink!
You hold your nose and go for it.
It lasts for about six hours.
It's akin to mushrooms,
and that whole world of insight.
Did you do this as a group?
Yeah, we did it there. It was beautiful.
We always did it in the evening.
And we walked even further into the jungle to a little temple that he had built.
Actually, not a temple.
It wasn't even thatched...
You know what I mean... a palm-leafed roof, and things like that.
When it's dark there, it's dark.
You hear the jungle,
and you're high on ayahuasca...
it's quite a journey.
But everyone trusted him so much, and he had some helpers.
You knew that in his hands it was OK.
What was he hoping you would experience?
Oh, no. He had no hopes about it. You come there because...
Like you take mushrooms or any of these insightful things.
Keger - you come there like you'd come to a keger?
- A keger? - You know, a rave?
No, no, no.
You go there like... You come there like you're going to a temple.
That's what you go there for - to see yourself.
To see the god within.
To be silent. That's what you come there for.
To drift in, rather than being involved in the senses so much, and going out.
We were there for about ten days having this experience.
We had the actual ayahuasca experience four times while we were there.
And apart from that,
there was a...
It was also a cleansing, both in and out.
He gave us things that cleansed parasites.
It was coming out of both ends, you know?
The food was very bland at first,
so it was a whole cleansing.
And part of the cleansing was for the skin.
He chopped up some roots one day -
well, his assistants who were there did -
into this big vat, until it became watery.
And then we put it all over our bodies,
and within half an hour, we were...
I don't know, maybe the blue in this...
We were blue, blue, blue. Krishna blue. We were blue!
And we remained that way
all the time we were there.
It was very interesting to see your skin colour totally different.
Really quite amaZing.
So that functioned as a symbolic...
It was a visual representation of the inward transformation you were experiencing.
Well, you have a tendency to take these things to all these marvellous levels.
And I don't doubt that it was true.
- Seeing it now, I like the idea. - OK.
But it was essentially just a cleansing of the skin.
Detoxing and purifying the skin.
Your skin, after a while, was like a baby - it was really soft.
But it didn't wear off for a week.
Now, I did a lot of filming in the jungle with my camera.
And, uh... And I knew I probably wouldn't be back for a while.
So I was a bit strange after these trips anyway.
But when you are in that environment,
you wouldn't even need any drugs after a while.
We bathed in a stream, you're climbing trees,
and half the time we weren't wearing anything.
You get into a whole other mindset.
And one day we had mud...
There was some mud that we put on us.
It was drying and caking, and we were blue underneath.
I decided that I wanted to film this as I walked through the jungle,
With this camera you can... You don't have one of these on your camera, do you?
- I can do this, you see? - Right.
I can do that. So I did a lot of filming myself.
And going through the jungle and trees, doing all this...
Doing all these things, you know?
And if you do it right, it looks like someone else is filming you.
It really does.
I could walk through the jungle...
I'll show you what all this stuff is.
And when I looked at my hand,
you will also see that that is quite remarkable.
It definitely looks like an ape.
There's no doubt about it.
I was fascinated because my fingernails and everything had turned blue.
You didn't see that before, did you? OK.
Well, anyway, all of this was the ayahuasca adventure.