Fighting With My Fruit: Vegan Living in the Amazon

Hellooo everyone and welcome back to the next post about my Ecuador adventures. This time let’s delve into the intricacies of raw vegan living and what it was like for an omnivore to eat like this for 2 weeks while maintaining a very active lifestyle. See my previous post for more information on the calorie-burning stress I endured during this time! I’ll also touch on where I stayed for the duration of my time at Terra Frutis, The Cabin. Is it just me, or do I feel I short horror film coming on?

The festival itself began with a 3-day coconut water fast. This in itself shook me, because 3 DAYS??? That’s a hell of a long time to not eat. Apparently I was wrong, as I discovered during this time that people can fast for 30 days, or even longer! A wake up call for me truly, as I learnt about the benefits of putting your body through such a journey.

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You might be sat there thinking how unhealthy this all sounds, and perhaps even that it seems rather dangerous. Well it can be dangerous if not prepared for, implemented or recovered from properly, so a trained nurse was on hand to oversee proceedings.

For me, as well as you I’m sure, this whole raw vegan lifestyle sounds crazy and a lifestyle that seems to deny too much gastric pleasure to commit to. I thought that to begin with, and to an extent still do, but the festival itself opened my eyes to other ways of living than our own. ‘Our’ being a westernised and highly commercialised lifestyle.

We all know that junk food isn’t healthy, and that we must try (very very hard) to eat at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. I’ve realised that this prescriptive way of thinking is only one way of thinking about it. Of course there are loads of diets and strategies out there, with the sole goal of helping people to lose weight. Surely these in themselves aren’t healthy? I’m sure plenty of people go into these diets knowing nothing about nutrition, putting their faith in some person who claims to be qualified to help them lose some pounds in an unsustainable way.

The people in the vegan community seem to know their nutrition better. Not in all cases of course, hence the festival talks and workshops on things such as fermented food and ensuring a proper diet. Within this small community, I found conflicting beliefs and ideas of what it meant to be a healthy vegan.

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From committed vegans (who eat cooked food, not solely raw) to fruitarians, everyone has their own idea of what it means to be healthy. There’s sense in eating food grown in an organic way in an uncorrupted land, but it can be difficult to do back in a heavily urbanised western society.

Some of the ideas I’ve been exposed to, and have had time to ruminate on, have stuck. I’ve never been a fan of the very vocal vegans who preach and threaten to try and change peoples’ attitudes, but there might just be something in the principles and ideas I’ve learnt about.

My Diet

The way I coped with my 2-week diet-change consisted mainly of the following:

Breakfast – This meal for me consisted of at least 2 Kent mangoes (the best!) and bananas, with perhaps a dragon fruit (don’t eat too many, or you’ll have some bowel issues!) or another type of fruit thrown in. My favourites were the granadilla, passionfruit, although these took a long time to eat and probably burnt more calories than I gained from them. I was always starving in the mornings, and after my trek up from The Cabin to the dining room, I would be famished. I always had to photograph and film the food first, since that’s the most important aspect of marketing a raw vegan fruit festival. By the time I got down to eating, I’d be ready for a full English! Since this option was not available, then fruit it was.

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Because I was usually thinking about the day of filming ahead, I was never too bothered by having only fruit for breakfast, but you do have to eat a lot more than you usually would in order to keep your calorie count up. I don’t think I ever ate enough really, but I was a busy bee! Particularly in the second week when I had more time to think about it, I started to struggle with dreams of my beloved marmite toast (it’s the best: if you disagree, we can’t be friends.)

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Lunch – I can’t actually remember what I would have for lunch, and didn’t note any of it down. This isn’t surprising as by this point I would be well and truly stuck into whatever the day was throwing at me. I have a feeling it was just a less fancy dinner – there were always plentiful bowls of lettuce, shredded or diced vegetables, usually sauces of some variety (although I stayed away from the very spicy stuff… didn’t need to contend with that as well!) and ground nuts and fresh DIY lime juice to tie all the flavours in together.

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Dinner – The best and biggest meal of the day, most likely planned to mimic our westernised lifestyle of having a big dinner. For South Americans, lunch is the main meal of the day, allowing more time to digest and not having to do so before bed. The raw vegan gourmet chef did a fabulous job. My favourite food there was raw vegan garlic bread, (absolutely incredible) the make-your-own pizza, and the fake meat made from walnuts (YUM!). Generally I’d eat about 2 or 3 big bowls full, since you need to eat more than usual to extract enough nutrition and I would be very hungry again by this point! We generally had something for dessert too – vegan cinnamon rolls, energy balls or even vegan ice cream!

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Snacks – When I’m busy I don’t tend to feel hunger, rather I just run out of energy (and turn into a monster). My friend Charlotte was good at keeping an eye on me, particularly in the beginning, and urging me to keep eating. Her advice was to just eat all the time! As the staff were always so busy this was necessary, but time consuming (and kind of boring!)

The snacks I tended to opt for were bananas, which were plentiful and readily available, or mangoes, but these are messier and take longer to eat. There was always food out in the dining room, so you could generally find me musing over fruit that I had no idea what to do with.

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These included cherimoya (tastes exactly like the drumstick lollies you had when you were a kid), peanut butter fruit (self-explanatory), ice cream beans (self-explanatory again, and with the texture of a fibrous marshmallow) and once even the odd jackfruit (incredibly fibrous and actually caused me to gag because my body was like the hell is this?!)  It didn’t have a bad flavour but apparently I need to ease into some things!

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Drinking – If you take a moment to think about how exactly you get clean, fresh drinking water in the bonafide middle of nowhere, then you might be wondering how Terra Frutis managed it. Well funnily enough they had plumbing (don’t ask me about the wheres and the hows). The water from the taps would then be poured into ceramic filtering contraptions, that would purify the water. Perfect! There were also smoothies, juices and plentiful coconut water, but you’d have to be quick to grab a smoothie or juice! I can’t stand coconut water, so couldn’t partake in that.

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And do you know what? I did feel better. It can’t have all been in my mind, since I was eating such a clean diet, free from pesticides and chemicals. (One issue of this was finding a small burrowing bug in a piece of watermelon and being highly shocked and concerned, because eww bugs.)

I lost weight quickly too. I feel it worth mentioning though, that I’ve never been a fan of losing weight too quickly, since it’s dangerous, but I felt like this was a healthier way to do it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run, but 2 weeks was enough for me. Of course I put it all back on relatively quickly when I was let loose back in the world of restaurants and FOOD! My travelling self managed to stay in shape for my journey, but I doubt it was to do with my diet hereafter!

* The things in the photo are ice cream bean seeds – see the middle of the main image at the top of this post for a gander at the flesh of the bean!

The Cabin

Now, let’s talk about The Cabin. I feel that it’s worth mentioning my stay here. I’ve touched on this briefly before, but let me tell you a little bit more about it.

Now, by no means am I a princess when it comes to roughing it. I can bivouac with the best of them if need be. After a childhood’s worth of trips to our beloved little Dartmoor hut/shack/shabby old village hall, and camping whenever wherever, I can deal with spiders and bugs with an attitude of don’t look too closely.

The cabin is in pretty good shape for an old rainforest building, (it was the first structure built at Terra Frutis, right by the “main road”) but it’s not exactly the secure, all-gaps-plugged housing you may have come to expect living in Babylon. (Which the full-timers at Terra Frutis dub the real world, thus making all visitors Babylonians.) There are gaps and it is open to the elements, but since Ecuador, as it’s name suggests, is on the equator there is no need to fear the elements. If it rains, it rains straight down.

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Thank goodness for the compost toilet down there, because there is no way I could have made it up the hill without incident in the morning! Fruit-poop, as we dubbed it, is pretty soft and when you gotta go, you gotta go! Plus it smells funny, kind of sweet. Speaking of toilet business, I discovered through the talks (not personally) that when you’re fasting you flush out the parasites that live in you and can see them in your waste. Some people found that remarkedly more fascinating than me clearly… I wasn’t too interested in checking that out!

I had been most worried about the toileting situation, but it turned out to be completely fine and surprisingly hygienic. Compost toilets are basically buckets with sawdust in; you do your business, then cover it with sawdust. Thank goodness I never had to empty them, which was to be one of my jobs originally. You just chuck them on the compost heaps and then use it all as fertiliser, like farmers using cow poop to nourish crops. Yum.

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I didn’t actually mind staying in The Cabin – it was all part of the adventure – but what I did mind was the walk in the dark when I had to do it by myself. In the morning, when the sun was shining, all was well. Indeed, even when it was raining it was alright walking up to base camp. There were flowers to see, birds to hear and breakfast to get to (I was starving most mornings and the trek uphill seemed like a slog up a mountain for the most part).

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At night, in the dark, it is a terrifying prospect. Turns out all those years convincing myself that I’m not afraid of the dark came to nothing. I am, in fact, afraid of the dark. Most likely you have never known true pitch black, miles from the nearest town, void of light pollution. I know what it’s like. I experienced it truly for the first time on the Welsh Three Peaks challenge, climbing Cadair Idris at night. It was truly magical seeing the far-off town alight with the flickering beacons of tiny streetlamps. I felt like a moth drawn to a flame, though luckily I was with a group of bobbing headtorches to keep me sane.

Jungle pitch black is much louder than Welsh pitch black. That in itself is a comfort – the ever-present sound of the rainforest. You get used to it and it soon becomes a soothing presence, which can never be replicated by those Spotify playlists claiming calm rainforest sounds. Walking down the hill to an old, empty, and not at all secure cabin in the middle of the jungle is not my idea of fun. With nothing but my phone torchlight, which nocturnal creepy crawlies would charge towards, and the odd bug I had to avoid stepping on, my mind raced with the thoughts of every single creepy, spooky and downright terrifying thing I’d ever seen, read or heard of. Let me tell you now, it’s incredibly difficult for me to rationalise any of that when I’m all alone plunging headlong into wild territory.

An 8 or so minute walk down the driveway, and you come to the shortcut, which cuts off a corner and is easily identifiable. What is harder to spot is the trail afterwards, which heads off into jungle proper. It probably takes a couple of minutes at most to get to the cabin, but it feels like forever. That, coupled with the eerie glow of the cabin as your torchlight picks it out from the dense surrounding wilderness, and the awful feeling that you’re being followed (I never was, but it’s that pesky fear of the unknown) and it was all I could do to not give in to that fear and barrel along into the room I was sharing with Charlotte. I know it was all in my mind, because the door didn’t lock, and my mental self figured I was safe in there, even with one of the walls half open to the night. I’m happy to report I didn’t die, thus meaning that my mind was playing tricks on me. Next time I’m requesting the 5-star hotel and private pool. 😉

Well, that’s it for now – that turned out a longer post than I was anticipating! Hopefully it’s keeping you out of boredom and/or mischief for a short time during this global lockdown. Let me tell you, after these adventures, I’m struggling being inside all day!

I want to know if would you ever try a crazy diet or lifestyle change as an experiment? I’ve found myself much more willing and open to ideas, so maybe I’ll try some diet changes in the future to see how they affect me. Would you?

Next time it’s onto the festival proper and all the cool and crazy things myself and the attendees got up to. It’s going to be a good one!

Until next time,

From me to you,

Jenni

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