The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook

The Essential Guide to Ayahuasca Journeying

By: Chris Kilham

Narrated by: Steve Wojtas

Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook provides a practical guide to ayahuasca use, aiding seekers in making right - and safe - decisions about where to go, who to drink with, and what to expect.

Ayahuasca, the Amazonian psychoactive plant brew, has become vastly popular. Once the sole purview of shamans and indigenous native people in the great Amazon rainforest, ayahuasca is now becoming well known - and widely used - around the globe. Today, foreigners from all over the world flock in ever-burgeoning numbers to the steamy Amazon, drinking bitter ayahuasca with shamans and curanderos in order to access its potent healing and spirit-enlivening effects. What began as a mere trickle of visitors in the 1980s has become a surging riptide of seekers.

Chris Kilham (Fox News' "Medicine Hunter") has worked closely with South American shamans for two decades and has sat in ayahuasca ceremonies with at least 20 different shamans. Through his "Ayahuasca Test Pilots" program, Kilham has brought numerous people to the Amazon to engage in ceremonies with maestro ayahuasceros. Clear, concise, straightforward, and well informed, The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook is an indispensable guide for anyone curious about this unusual plant medicine.

©2014 Chris Kilham (P)2019 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

“Kilham is the best person today to authentically tell the ayahuasca story because he embodies all things necessary to take us on that journey: he is a botanist, a widely recognized plant-medicine explorer, a close friend of tribal peoples, a historian, a storyteller, and one who has had a great many journeys with the medicine. With a brilliant, open mind and endless spiritual energy, Chris has pulled together the knowledge and stories of ayahuasca in a way that will help guide anyone into and through the wonder of it.” (Linda Sparrow, author, filmmaker, and natural-products marketer)

"Chris Kilham continues to shine the light on nature’s medicines. In this book, he has provided the ayahuasca traveler with an essential and practical guide that is well-informed, personal, and fun. I highly recommend this book to those who want to learn from the wisdom of the plants.” (Joe Tafur, MD)

“Chris Kilham writes convincingly and eloquently about some of his - and my - favorite medicinal plants from the Amazonian rainforest, my ‘second home’ for nearly 25 years. Like Chris, I have a great respect for the ayuahuasca, the entheogen.” (Dr. Jim Duke, author of Herbistatins and The Green Pharmacy)

Excellent information

Very helpful in preparation for a trip to Iquitos. Clear, concise writing and quite comprehensive.

Straight Scoop

This is absolutely 100% straight to the point. Legitimate. Authentic and spiritual. Thank you so much for the education. Much respect!

Great intro into the psychedelic and use of ayahuasca

Good easy understanding of Ayahuasca, recommend you read Fellowship of the River if you enjoy this book

Great listen

Just had my first ceremony in the sacred valley of Peru which was incredible and this book proved very informative and enjoyable. The descriptions of the journeys under ayahuasca were similar to my own which brought back pleasant memories. This author provides a great deal of info about not only ayahuasca itself but the culture surrounding it. Amazing read.

Decent Exploration of Substantive Qualities

Mired with caveats and contradictions, I thought this was overall a good purchase and listen. On one hand the author frames the experience with "must do and must nots" in a very dogmatic fashion, and on the other hand tends to criticize the dogma in the vein of "experience this journey in your own way." I'm not sure he realized he was doing this, but it's like, ok here comes another westerner who spends a great deal of time devoted to the caveats of the folly of western mentalities and stressing how ayahuasca ought only to be done with an Amazonian shaman, and then making great effort to display how we as westerners must be wary of shamans and only pick a "good one"... If you want to take ayahuasca in your living room and tread cautiously into the inner and out realms of spirit and reality, please go ahead.

Terrible Spanish pronunciations

There are a lot of Spanish words in this rather flimsy audiobook, which are right properly mangled by the narrator. Extremely distracting!

It seems like there is quite a bit of filler here like ‘if you feel the need to go to the bathroom go right away’ and the complete recital of a coca ad.

The song at the end? Dear lord can ot get more cheesy.

The book oscillates between a serious reference book, a quasi religious tome and a juvenile handbook for teens. Puke buckets is a term that doesn’t lend itself to the pseudo spiritual paragraph preceding it’s mention.