Onomatopoeia:
The formation of a word from the sound associated with the object.
For example: sizzle, cuckoo, splat, oink, peki-peki.
Umm… peki-what??
The city of Pucallpa, Peru sits on the banks of the Ucayali River, serving as a major port. The Ucayali drains a lot of water from the Andes and then meanders northward, becoming one of the major tributaries of the Amazon River. Visually, it’s very reminiscent of the Mighty Mississippi: brown, fast-flowing, seemingly lifeless. But beneath the surface, you’ll find an array of aquatic life that tastes far superior than what its habitat might lead you to believe. (Ask me – I can tell you from experience how good the fish is!!) Above the surface, the river is a life source to the area… from moving timber to bringing bananas to market, and all sorts of things in between.
The Amazon jungle as a whole is dotted with villages of varying sizes; homes to generations of Indian families and the traditions that have been passed down from their ancestors. Isolated from the world, the rivers and streams that connect them to the Ucayali are their lifeline, giving them access to civilization and commerce.
Which brings us back to the peki-peki (pronounced pecky-pecky). A lot of the Indians travel for days on the winding river to get to Pucallpa, simply to sell their homegrown or handmade wares to whoever will buy them. Most of these trips are made in shallow wooden boats with a longshaft motor on the back. There’s an official name for these boats (which I can’t remember at all!!), but everyone refers to them as a peki-peki… because that’s the sound the motors make as they move around on the water. (Personally, I struggled to hear the peki-peki motor sound like it was saying “peki-peki”. Maybe I need to go back and have another listen?!!)
During a free afternoon, a couple of our Peruvian hosts, Miguel and William, took us all down to the river and negotiated a good price on a couple of peki-peki taxis… and we spent an hour or so being peki-peki’d (is that a word??) up and down the Ucayali, taking in the sights and sounds of river life. Here are a bunch of photographs to give you an idea of what we saw…
Strangely, he had a better signal in the middle of the Ucayali River than we get in Memphis!!
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