I went to work in the jungle and learnt lessons that changed my life

We walk 500 metres to the banks of the Tambopata River, the same body of water that Ken grew up on, and perch on a log.

Amid our ravenous slurping of the sour and sweet plums, an oil barrel floats down the river. Another one follows a few hundred metres behind. That’s two more barrels than humans we’ve seen in our 10 minutes by the river.

“Don’t be surprised, amigo,” Ken tells me. It’s more a surprise, he says, that the barrels aren’t accompanied by a black patch of oil or mercury, the main chemical miners in the region use to extract gold from the earth.

Having existed in the Madre de Dios (“Mother of God”) region for about a decade, the practice erupted during the coronavirus pandemic as government authorities reduced their presence. The price of gold also increased about 20 per cent from January 2020 to March 2022, incentivising those from Peru and neighbouring countries to take up illegal mining.

The environmental and social effects have flowed: deforestation, pollution of waterways, invasion of indigenous tribes’ territory, the emergence of shanty towns as centres of crime and sex trafficking. Last August fighting between police and miners left one person dead and 14 injured, triggering local protests that blocked the region’s main highway for days.

That was a separate event that occurred prior to the anti-government unrest that began late last year in southern Peru and the capital, Lima, and led to the national government shutting Machu Picchu on January 22.

In recent years, much international focus has been on the degradation of Brazil’s Amazon jungle. It was a shock for me, at least, to spend those nine days hearing about how Peruvians such as Ken are also witnessing their environment deteriorating around them.

To arrive there, I had wanted to experience Amazon life and practise my university-level Spanish but was reluctant to fork out the subscription fee for volunteering websites such as Workaway (some friends would say I was this stingy even before travelling the world on a budget).

Instead I opened maps, zoomed into the area I wanted to visit, searched terms such as “lodge”, “homestay” and “accommodation” and sent a WhatsApp message to every number I could find. Among a handful of responses, the lodge owned by another man but manned by Ken would offer me a bed for as long as I wanted in return for a few hours of maintenance work each day.

And so every morning, powered by riverside plums, we macheted through hoards of overgrown greenery on walkways that guests use outside rainy season.

Backhand, forehand, slicing from different angles. For those nine days, I was a master of the sword. Just ignore the pus-ridden welts on my palms caused by inadequate technique in session one (I’m not sure I improved, to be honest).

My culinary skills, conversely, did improve. Turns out that if you slice green bananas and cook them in a pan with nothing more than oil and salt, the crispy chips you produce at least feel like a healthier alternative to potato chips. All the better if you’ve turned the avocados dropping from trees around you into guacamole.

Through those sweaty nights and sweatier days, I came to know Ken as a 21-year-old wise beyond his years.

Sat at our plank of a dining table one night, candles illuminate us. Too cloudy this week, no power in the generator. Ken concocts his trademark blend: black coffee in a crusted pot, furnished with enough sugar to make a Coca-Cola executive wince. Like, five large spoons.

“Most of my friends are miners now,” Ken tells me. He understands – the promise of cash in hand for small-town kids straight out of school. It has caused Ken to grow distant from those friends, though, as he pursues the opposite direction: he is studying to work and care for the jungle as a tour guide. By doing so, he is already an outlier for his age.

That doesn’t mean he has nothing in common with his peers. Ken is prisoner to a social media doom scroll like the rest of us. Western music tickles his fancy, from Drake to 80s classics to the early days of rock ‘n’ roll (Chubby Checker’s Let’s Twist Again invariably leads to a dance on the plank of a table).

What he wishes his peers shared more with him is an awareness of how climate change, and the more immediate threat of miners, is affecting them. His dream has always been to open his own lodge in Madre de Dios. Now, aware that maintaining a jungle residence is an increasingly time-consuming and unpredictable task, Ken is reconsidering.

Illegal mining is directly changing his life in other ways already. Ken has stopped fishing in the Tambopata River because he fears anything he catches will be polluted.

Hearing that, and more generally becoming friends with someone so immersed in the environment, has prompted me – a meat-eating fanatic and general lazy environmentalist – to reflect on my daily decisions.

On my final morning, I emerge from my cabin to find Ken stepping carefully around the lodge as he holds a broom aloft. Blue the macaw, named - you guessed it – after her feather colour, was living with us since Ken found her two weeks prior next to a fallen tree, alone and unable to fly due to an injured wing.

“Blue is sad, she’s grieving,” Ken told me one day. “She feels like a prisoner here.”

On this morning, Blue has found her way onto the wooden roof skirting, shuffling determinedly towards where the lodge meets the jungle.

Recognising her prison break attempt as a sign she’s going stir-crazy, Ken helps Blue onto the broom, then into an avocado tree. Her favourite, he says.

At that point, I think about how we’d treat a misbehaving pet at home, amid the rush of daily life.

If I can retain even a pinch of the empathy and patience of jungle life – that sense of what you give is what you get – then my stay won’t have been worthwhile just for those sweet, sweet plums.