García is intent on developing gastronomic tourism here. Through La Patarashca they offer day tours to the town, though making a profit isn’t her main concern. There are few jobs in Chazuta, so most young people end up in Tarapoto. It’s like this all over the region. Oil and lumber – destructive occupations – are flush with cash. Yet, culture in Chazuta is strong and there are more tourists coming here every day to experience it. Maybe it can be the better opportunity?

Up a small hill, passing a small, dusty museum of Pre-Inca funerary urns that are one of Chazuta’s claims to fame, we meet with the women of Mishki Cacao. This small chocolate cooperative began in 2009 with 11 women, though some eventually dropped out for financial reasons. Before farming organic cacao, they grew coca. As coca was becoming eradicated, cacao was introduced as an alternative. They started small, even grinding the beans on a batán, a stone mortar. They entered a contest and won a prize of 30,000 soles. Everything was invested right back into the business and eventually Astrid Gustche and USAID donated some equipment too. They built a small lab laboratory with a grain roaster, peeling machine, and cooling table. They have the right pieces to make great chocolate and it continues to improve. They add macambo in some bars and also make a syrup from cacao mucilage that can be used as a glaze for meats.

“The biggest obstacle now is just getting the word out,” Luz Maria, one of the women, told me.

Back down by the river we go to the house of Blanca Vela, who runs a small restaurant dedicated to preserving the recipes of her ancestors. She makes timbuche, a river water broth where finger-sized fish are slow cooked in a clay pot for hours with sacha culantro, an Amazonian herb related to cilantro. She serves it with singinguiri, roasted plantain, which goes with every meal. She knows a lot about macambo and what to do with it. More than anyone, García says. She boils it. Toasts it. Makes it into a paste like peanut butter. She tells me of the frejoles Amazonicos, the colorful jungle legumes of which there are many varieties.

“When the river drops and you can see the ancient writing on the rocks, they can be picked in the shallows,” she says.

The more time I spend with García the more I realize that traditional Amazonian cuisine is as diverse as the area’s ecology, which is the opposite of what many in the South American culinary community think. It’s just not easy to find. Indigenous recipes and cooking techniques, like how the communities of Cocamas and Chayahuitas cook the hualo (giant frog) inside bamboo, aren’t what you find in Tarapoto restaurants that serve regional cuisine. Instead, there’s tacacho, plantains that are mashed with a wooden mortar and formed into a ball with bits of pork. Tacacho is usually served with a slab of cecina, dried and salted pork.

At Suchiche, a café and cultural center run by Cindy Reategui, García’s daughter, there’s Amazonian sushi and a mix of Amazonian and national comfort foods, as well as cocktails using local fruits. There are a few restaurants with some recipes similar to La Patarashca too, like Doña Zully, with cecina, juanes, and grilled fish, though half of their menus are pork and beef. There are ice cream shops like Heladería Fruta y Café, which has ice creams made with 40 or so different local flavors, you’ll find ingredients like shica shica, umarí, ungurahui, taperiba, pijuayo, humarí, and pomarrosa. At a small park on the outskirts of town, a handful of open-air grills light up the nights. It’s crude and rustic, everything goes over the flame: regional chorizos, piraña, gamitana, cecina, juanes, chicken hearts, chicken feet, bananas. It’s all crowded together and set on tables lined with bijao leaves.

In Tarapoto’s market you get a better sense of what is actually being eaten in Amazonian kitchens.  There are piles of local ají, bars of pure cacao, and stalls full of regional liquors infused with herbs and roots. Old women peel the maroon scales off of aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa), a palm fruit high in vitamin A and beta carotene, putting the orange pulp in plastic bags to be used at home for juice or sauces. Much of the fish at the market has come from long distances without refrigeration, so it has been salted and dried, either the entire fish or slabs of flesh that have been rolled and piled on top of each other. There are purple jars of pickled onions and ají charapita, a fragrant, spicy relish to be used with grilled fish or meats.

I spend the following days exploring Tarapoto and visiting nearby communities. On the Río Huallaga, there was a fishing village where half of the community was stranded in a makeshift tent camp on the other side of the river. They had to just wait it out. It would probably be days. Some tried tossing nets in the water but the current was too fast to catch anything. Usually the river didn’t get this high, but climate patterns have been difficult to predict in recent years. Overall the region is drying out, though periods of intense rains still occur.

With García’s husband, César Reategui del Aguila, I go to Lamas, a town founded by a group of Chanka warriors from the Andes who were defeated by Inca ruler Pachacútec and fled with their leader, Ankoallo. They still speak a dialect of Quechua and their dress is more Andean than Amazonian. After stops along Tarapoto’s newly created Ruta del Cacao, like a processing facility and Finca Ecoperlacha, an experimental farm where Hidérico Bocangel is testing 15 varieties of cacao, we go to the native community of El Huayco. There’s a small plaza with craft shops, but no one is around. Not far away we see a line of women carrying ceramic pots of water on their head along the road. César asks what is going on and we learn that one of the elders had died. They invite us in.

The women are mostly in the kitchen. Dozens of chickens are killed and old women are plucking the feathers and cutting them into pieces. Some parts are grilled alongside fish, while and others are tossed into large pots set directly into wood fires. Other women are grinding yuca in a wooden tray, while others wrap it with chicken in bijao leaves to make juanes. The man’s son approaches and tells us of his father and that he’s happy we came. More than a funeral, it is a celebration of life. We’re poured glasses of chicha de jora, fermented maize beer, and toast to a man we never knew.