Sachakuna Resort
Sachakuna’s cabins have everything you need for a calming and comfortable stay.
Sachakuna takes wellness, rest and relaxation to a whole new level.
Designed for the mental and physical preparation necessary for ayahuasca ceremonies and other plant medicine, Sachakuna is exactly the beautiful, safe space you need. Conscious travelers who want to leave the smallest carbon footprint possible will also love Schakuna’s design.
Cabin Lofts
Sachakuna’s larger cabins have a loft with two beds, perfect for families traveling together.
The food at Sachakuna is also exceptional. Since many people come here for ayahuasca ceremonies, the chef is used to preparing special diets. He did a great job with my pescatarian/vegetarian diet and also has a lot of experience with gluten-free diets. I loved waking up to breakfast at my cabin, which always included freshly baked bread and a bowl of locally-grown fruit.
In my four days and three nights at Sachakuna, I experienced many of the resort’s wellness options. One of my favorite places was the yoga platform, high on the property with a beautiful view of Sauce Lake below. (Sauce means willow in Spanish). I had a healing yoga session with an experienced practitioner and a massage with a masseuse who really took the time to find out what hurt and fix all my aches and pains. While I’ve done yoga before, and had plenty of massages, Sachakuna’s baño de florecimiento was new to me.
Baño de Florecimiento
This was such a calming and healing experience I can see why it’s part of preparing for ayahuasca.
A baño de florecimiento is one of the steps in preparing for an ayahuasca ceremony, along with a special diet for several days. An experienced practitioner, who works with the shamans who lead ceremonies, prepares a bath in a special wooden tub with flowers and herbs from Sachakuna’s organic gardens. He also prepares a bucket with other herbs to pour over your head with a wooden bowl.
It was soothing, smelled wonderful, and reminded me of the Thai’s New Year’s blessings, pouring or throwing water on each other. Of course, it was a much quieter and calmer ceremony than Thai New Year, but the idea of water as blessing and purification is similar.
Sachakuna’s Maloka
Surrounded by trees on a secluded part of the property, Sachakuna’s maloka is designed for ayahuasca ceremonies.
I wasn’t at Sachakuna to do ayahuasca. I was there to experience all the other wellness treatments, and to see how they are rehabilitating land that was destroyed by coca plantations. In the 80s and 90s, Peru suffered from a Maoist uprising that brought terrorism and powerful narcotraffickers. As a result, huge swaths of rainforest were stolen from Indigenous peoples, clearcut and planted with coca plantations for export as cocaine. Besides destroying native flora & fauna, these plantations poisoned the land with illegal pesticides and herbicides.
One important part of saving the rainforest is supporting companies like Sachakuna that are rehabilitating the land.
In cooperation with experts, Sachakuna is replanting native trees and plants, working to rehabilitate the land to encourage native fauna to return. While there, I saw two kinds of aracari (Lettered and Chestnut-eared), a kind of small toucan and many tanagers, woodpeckers and hummingbirds. I could hear motmots in the nearby trees and there are reports of monkeys coming back as well.
