Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIXeZMfau2k
The Joe Rogan Experience so the village that we were staying with the guys informed me that now way up the river 30 miles or so there was an area that I would love to have collected in but I couldn't because it was controlled by a group of Yana Mama that had shot at everybody who'd ever gotten near there and uh you know shot arrows and uh so I was afraid to go up there to do any collecting but then our group of yodomamo informed me that these guys had gone off on a raid to attack another group and probably wouldn't be back for a couple of months so I got Brave and went up into their area where I didn't think they were going to be with a young man in Venezuelan who worked for me and we had just parked our Dugout canoe on the bank and had gone out into the woods to set nets for bats when we hear a hundred or so maybe not a hundred but a goodly number of men coming down the trail and we immediately thought oh my God we're going to be absolutely dead Ducks if they find us and but I did know that they don't usually go after their query they usually wait in Ambush so we hid out in the jungle until about two o'clock in the morning and then tried turning our lights really dim and sneaking along without making any noise to get back to our canoe and hoping they were asleep and we'll never know whether they were asleep or not because we did get shoved off and got away but the very next night we were stupid enough to think we had gone far enough away that they wouldn't find us and we went back and tried to net again and then we heard Jaguar noises and I had a Yana mama and a my katitari Indian working for me and they immediately started worrying me that's that's that's not El Tigre uh that's that's the the Indians that we're trying to avoid and uh making Jaguar noises right commit to communicate among themselves oh wow and fi but I insisted I thought that these guys were just uh trying to get out of work because I'd been working them pretty hard and if they wanted to go to bed early that night so I didn't really take them very seriously and I went off with my shotgun back then we
were collecting everything from Jaguars to mice and um so in in those days it was a big Macho thing to shoot a Jaguar so I go off with my shotgun to hunt the jaguar and it kept moving too fast without noise in between and I finally dawned on me that hey this more like Indians than Jaguars to me even I went back and my guys were just ready to actually abandon me and leave me they were so scared oh no we didn't even take the Nets down we got out of there as fast as we could went back to camp and the next day we came back to get our nets all the main strands of the Nets had been stolen proving that these were Indians that were after address and we probably just got out in time that's the most danger you've ever been in I I don't know I mean there was the time I was crawling into a cave and on my belly in a narrow passage and all of a sudden found that there was a big Cobra coming out and I had to lay perfectly still so the Cobra didn't get upset while he was going by so you had to lay perfectly still where the Cobra slithered by you yeah whoa and there was a time the River Bandits came after us River Bandits where was that was in Venezuela and the cost of Cary canal um we we've I've we're getting into stories that probably ought to be told at another time when we're not distracting from bats but uh now they're fun we could go back to bats to put a long story shorter uh the cost of carry Canal is the longest world's longest natural canal and out in the middle of it they're just no humans around and we were camped out there collecting for the Smithsonian but I carried a lot of small cash to do business when I did come to where there were villages the small cash was hidden in false bottoms of trunks uh the way I got the cash we were funded through a military Grant and anybody knows anything about the military knows they've got every restriction Under the Sun on their money and accounting for it
I had known that their rules weren't going to work very well for collecting and so I had gotten bids from playing Charter companies to fly us out to this remote Savannah and it was they were going to encourage a lot of money because it was risky to the planes and uh so I got the military to send the money to the Bank of America in caucus and then this was time when you had machine guns at the door of every Bank and I mean it was a dangerous time in in uh Venezuela period Well we pretended to change Christmas gifts and that's how we got our money in the small change and took it back to our hotel then we put it in false bottoms of trunks then we go out to the frontier and after a while the word kind of gets around that these guys can always pay for something they must have some secret supply of money so one day we're out of this remote camp and Mike Venezuelan helpers Indians uh came running up saying oh you know in Spanish kidato the the the Vandal not vandals but uh the robbers are coming and uh they were coming up the river in a little motorized Dugout and so that's how my guys heard them in time to know that they were coming and then they saw them and realized who they were and uh so I had just a couple minutes it's kind of interesting because I was reared to be a conscientious objector and uh you know didn't believe in in fighting in war and uh so here we are with the bandits coming armed with shut it was kind of interesting they had old Muzzleloader uh guns that they actually used rocks in rocks and black powder still to shoot and but here they're coming and I'm responsible for eight or ten people their lives and am I going to be a conscientious objector or what am I going to do and so I broke out all the guns we had gave everybody one of the you know everything from an M1 rifle to a couple
double barrel shotguns pistols and uh got everybody positioned behind rocks and logs and then as the bandits approached I yelled down to them in Spanish that we understood who they were and if they touched that rock we're going to kill them and they kept coming and so I finally had everybody show themselves and their guns and yelled one more time and the last time I yelled they were within a meter of hitting the bank and at that point we'd have had to kill them but they finally at the last minute when they saw their outgunned and we had the upper hand they backed up and went off that ought to be hair raising it was but I learned a lot about my conscientious objector are you ready to abandon it well I mean what are you going to do you're going to let good people die just because you don't believe in firing a gun in a human yeah that's a good point right yeah very important lesson to learn right yeah it was an important one for me uh but boy you've had some pretty amazing experiences just studying bats around the world it's been a wild life I bet huh well I've never chosen to get myself into Big Adventures but yeah I just chose you one of my all-time favorite things to do is to go places where almost nobody's ever been like when I went out to see the uh shamatory Indians I had to hike 46 miles across country from the last yanamama Village to get out there and see them and uh I just went out there I mean I knew it was dangerous uh how dangerous I didn't know but uh I just was driven by curiosity here's a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a group of people that have only seen two other Outsiders in their whole existence and it was just so much fun going out there and seeing experiencing that kind of thing but I certainly got into the high adventure while I was out there yeah that sounds amazing so you gotta hike how long did it take you to hike 46 miles to get to them well we did it in a day and a half I had a 40 some pound pack uh we went extra fast because I did not know when we started on the trip that the reason them see these two
shamatory came out to uh visit our our yanamamo group because they were looking for allies in the battle they're expecting to be raided by another tribe whoa and I didn't know this is why they were there but when I asked through my interpreters and and let me point this out too when you watch a movie and they're speaking pigeon English you know there's no such thing as a place where people are really Aboriginal and you're speaking in English to them uh everything I said on that whole trip out there had to be translated by me from English to Spanish and then from Spanish to microtori from Michael Atari to Yana mom one from Yana Mama to shamitari oh my God you can imagine there are a few miscommunications [Laughter] so what year was this this was happening this was 1967. okay so clearly there's no cell phones no other ways of communicating right wow so we did not know that these guys were expecting an attack until we had already left with them to go out to their Village oh boy and what we eventually found was that the reason they welcomed us so strongly was that they thought we'd bring our bang sticks with us needing guns and be good in the battle oh boy and so by the time we got there well we found out that we had to camp out along the trail the first night and we we found out that um they were expecting attack my two guys I had to have a Yana mom on a my cadetari for the translations to go and uh incidentally they knew enough that they wouldn't go it I I had a terrible time getting them to go when I finally convinced him I had to pay him a month's wages for every day they went out there with me [Laughter] so that first night we set up camp by a beautiful stream in the jungle and um then then my guys got really suspicious when our Two shamitari Hosts went off by themselves quite a ways away in in a hidden place in the jungle to put up little shelters for their night and so they got suspicious went and checked and found that they're worried about being attacked and they were
leaving us out on the trail to be the bait and uh so but the next day we we arrived out there in my microt Atari guide had uh experienced he'd been in a yonamama village during an attack once and so he since we knew they were thinking of being attacked anytime he instructed me what to do if we were attacked and he said you know right off you know play dead and we were thinking that the attack might come at night and sure enough the very first night were there I mean talk about scary experiences long before we thought we were being attacked there were people that had malaria and there were guys getting really high on drugs to chase the hakura the Devils out and uh they were going around the Devils out right they mean they believed that everything was attributable to Spirits you mean malaria yeah uh there were good spirits and bad spirits they hadn't evolved to think of God one God and one devil there are just a lot of spirits with good ones and bad ones and they were trying to chase the bad ones out of the village by getting high on dope and then shooting those Cherry tipped arrows at the hallucinated images so what drugs are they getting high on Eben it's a powder that they I'm trying to think what they make it from a Vine I believe and what is the Psychedelic substance they blow it up their noses oh okay if you go to my if you go to my website there's a place on the website where you can I'm trying to remember we can tell you later exactly how to get to it but I've got a place on my website where you can actually see that trip me out there with I had a movie camera with me you can see him blowing the dope up their nose and we I've got it on film right up until the guy tried to attack and kill me