Obscure Travel Book - The Yage Letters
April 20th, 2007 Posted in Cheap Latin America Travel, Travel books
Darrin Duford, an author who wrote a Venezuelan wine story for Perceptive Travel a while back, once recommended to me an obscure book called The Yage Letters. It’s an odd series of correspondence between William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In typical Beat Generation style, it’s mostly about slumming around in an ongoing attempt to get high, this time in Latin America with a search for the elusive and hallucinogenic yage plant (Ayahuasca).
It’s highly entertaining, to the point of making me laugh out loud at times. Mr. Burroughs was the kind of cantankerous and self-critical writer than can make even the most mundane parts of the journey enlightening. What’s really striking about it is how accurate some of the aspects are today if you’re a shoestring backpacker in Latin America, even though most of it was written in 1953 and 1960. Here are some choice quotes from when he was in Colombia.
Trying to get a boat up the river:
“Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait ’til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and same hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toes sloth and all night you hear them fiddle-f*%cking with the motor and you can’t sleep hearing the motor start and die all night and then it starts to rain. Tomorrow the river will be higher.”
On the edge of the jungle:
“Macoa has about 2000 inhabitants and sixty national cops. One of them rides around all day through the four streets of the town on a motor bicycle. You can hear him from any place in town. Radios with extra loud speakers in every cantina make a horrible discordant noise. The police have a brass band they bang around three or four times a day starting in the early morning. There is an air of unresolved and unsoluble tension about Macoa, the agencies of control out in force to put down uprising which does not occur. Macoa is THE END OF THE ROAD.”
The original book version pictured above is out of print, but a more recent Yage Letters Redux is available with more commentary.
