After two hours’ travel through driving rain, Lucio arrived in the village with his two wives and children aboard a raft, all soaked to the skin. Four weeks earlier, they had decided to leave their nomadic life in the high reaches of the River Comerjali, where hundreds of Machiguenga and Mashco-Piro indigenous people live in voluntary isolation, and begin the journey to join the small settled community of Sarigeminiki, located slap in the middle of Peru’s Manu National Park.
Having lived without any contact with other people, they spoke no Spanish and had no idea of their dates of birth. Such details were of no importance in the life they had come from. But life as hunter-gatherers had been becoming increasingly hard, which is why they decided to try their luck in a settlement that for them held the promise of a better quality of life – a school, medical station and neighbours.
