The mud dance party

Based on 23.02, Amazon (Peru).

The bucket of water came without warning, somewhere in the middle of a circle of dancing strangers, ankle-deep in Amazon mud. Nobody apologised. The dancing simply continued, now slightly faster and considerably more slippery, and we kept walking around the palm tree because that seemed to be the rule.

We had not planned any of this. The afternoon’s official program was crafts. In our village, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, a woman had shown us how palm leaves become rope and bracelets, and I had learned that rolling palm fibre down a hairy leg produces no friction at all, so my rope had to be made on Steffi’s leg while the woman quietly made a better one beside us. We each wove a bracelet with a lucky red seed in the middle, and we were quietly pleased with ourselves. Craft afternoon: complete.

Then our guide announced there was dancing at the next village, a short boat ride away, and that a decorated palm tree would be cut down back at our village at three or four o’clock. It was carnival, as far as we understood it. The deal seemed simple enough. Dance a bit, come back, watch the tree ceremony. We should have paid more attention to the way he said “three or four o’clock”.

At the next village a pet macaw, red, blue and yellow, greeted us near the boat. The local bar had two palm trees out the front, dressed up for the festival, and around those trees the whole village was dancing in thick mud. We were pulled straight in. The dance itself was not complicated: you walk around the tree in time to the music, you link arms with whoever is next to you, you keep going. Steffi and I danced together, and we each danced with the locals too, swapping arms as the circle turned. The music came from a stack of battered electric speakers, running off the few generator hours the village gets each day, pumping out rhythmic beats with barely any lyrics. Every so often someone would fling a full bucket of water over the dancers, us very much included, which turned the mud into something like an oiled skating rink. We were extremely glad we had worn shorts. Our guide loved every second of it and laughed constantly.

After twenty or thirty minutes of this we were tired and asked to head back, which felt reasonable, because the tree at our village was surely about to be cut. The moment we stepped off the boat it was pouring with rain, but we were already soaked through, so it hardly mattered. Our own village, it turned out, was mid-festival too, and our guide steered us directly into the second dance before we could even think about our room. We are dancy people, so we went in.

That is where the mud found my face. A man had just smeared mud across the faces of his friends, and then he reached me. There was no explanation, and by then I wasn’t expecting one. I took my shirt off first, purely for logistics, because it was my only shirt with decent mosquito protection and I needed it alive the next day, and then I stood there and accepted a full face of mud. The crowd thought this was excellent, and so did our guide.

There were a couple of other outsiders dancing at this village too, and the locals seemed genuinely delighted that any of us were into it, grabbing our arms and pulling us around the circle again and again. Someone kept offering us mosato, the local brew, a homemade beer fermented with tropical fruit juice. It was served from a shared old paint bucket into thin plastic cups, frothy on top, and it tasted like very fruity beer. It was fine. We drank it in the rain, covered in mud, walking in circles around a decorated palm tree, and at some point I stopped wondering when any of this would make sense.

The tree, though. The tree was still standing, and we still believed in it. “When are they cutting it?” I asked our guide. Twenty minutes, he said. We danced. We asked again, this time another guide. Twenty minutes. We danced. We asked at least four times over the next two hours, of anyone official-looking, and the answer never changed and never came true. Twenty minutes, forever. Somewhere in there I joked with our guide that he would be the one going for the sequined red dress, and he said definitely, that is his goal, and cracked up laughing.

Then the sun set, and the Amazon reminded us where we were. The mosquitos arrived all at once, and we were wet, cold, mud-crusted and being eaten alive, and the dancing, after more than two hours, had finally tipped from joyful into endless. We surrendered. We squelched back to our room, twenty minutes before the tree cutting, according to all available sources.

The de-mudding took longer than the dancing. Our bathroom had cold water only, at a pressure best described as a suggestion, and by then it was dark, so we took turns: one of us shivering under the dribble, the other holding the torch. There was no mirror, so Steffi checked my ears and hairline for missed patches and I checked hers, over and over, before either of us dared touch a towel. By the end the bathroom floor looked like the mud had simply migrated indoors to live with us.

And somewhere out there, while we were shivering in the dark, they cut the tree. We missed it. After a whole afternoon of dancing for it, asking about it, and being twenty minutes away from it, the one thing we had actually been promised happened without us. But we had spent the day dancing arm in arm with a whole village in the mud and the rain, and we enjoyed every minute of it anyway.