Jungle Fever

Thinking back to my time in Iquitos I'm flooded with so many feelings and so much emotion that it's hard to go back to my thoughts and initial impressions of the city those first few hours and days.

Paloma and I headed toward the Malecon, or Boardwalk, on the river. The city was bigger than we had expected and our hostel was at least a 20 minute walk from the water. Since it was mid morning, the heavy jungle air had already settled in for the day and the streets were fairly quiet. The river was massive! We arrived during the wet season - the six months of the year that the river is high and floods the poorer areas of the city. In fact, an entire neighborhood, called Belen, is built so that it will float. Half of the year, the entire population commutes from one floating house to the next, to floating schools and clubs and churches and convenience stores and to dry land when the need arises to venture to other parts of the city, all of this is done in dugout canoes!

While walking along the Boardwalk, Paloma and I happened across two young people who looked like they might be artisans and we stopped to ask where and what time of day the police allowed us to sell. After chatting with them for a while, one of them - an overly eccentric, self proclaimed Peruvian "artisan", who actually never made or sold anything in his life - offered to take us to the biggest and cheapest market in the city so we could pick up a few things. Later, we found out that this came with a price and we were obligated to buy him lunch, however, we were grateful for a guide who knew the area well. I was in desperate need of a new pair of sandals; the Havianas I had been wearing since I bought them a year earlier in Mexico were falling apart and held together with string. While scouring the market we realized that prices in Iquitos were much higher than anywhere else in Peru - in most cases, almost double that of Lima. Our guide pointed out that everything sold there, apart from bananas and sugar cane, has to be shipped in by boat or plane - hence the elevated prices. It was difficult to understand how anyone survived seeing as how I hadn't seen such extreme poverty anywhere else in Peru as I did in Iquitos. Our greedy guide soon became somewhat of a nuisance and we finally got rid of him when Paloma angrily explained that she's not a bank and he'd have to go find some other 'gringas' to beg for money.

Paloma stayed with me for about a week before heading deeper in the jungle to stay with a Shaman. I spent lazy days on the banks of the river with my new jungle friends and evenings on the boardwalk selling to tourists. About a month into my stay in Iquitos Arturo arrived to join me and give our relationship another try. We moved to a lovely hostel half a block from the main square where the house mascots were three talking parrots. Spoiled with free use of a kitchen, clean beds and hammocks to relax in - we stayed at the hostel for another month.

When we finally decided it was time to move on we took another boat ride - except this time it was to Colombia. This boat wasn't as new or big as the one I had arrived on, but we still had a great time. Our friend Rosanna and John had arrived at about the same time Arturo did and they decided to take the boat ride at the same time as us as well as a couple other friends that were heading in the same direction. Arturo and I bought a family sized hammock and hung it alongside the other hundred or so that were already there. Everyone was so packed in that when it was time to eat, the staff brought the plates to us rather than having everyone up at the same time. After four days of battling rain showers, cold night winds, a steady fall of black soot from the boat, small amounts of sketchy food and no place to shower we arrived exhausted at the border where Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet. We nervously smuggled our bags of tiger and snakeskin through customs and began hunting for a cheap hotel in Leticia, Colombia.

Colombia differs from Peru in that there are many more middle class citizens, much like Mexico. This caused a problem for us arriving with money earned in Peru - cheap hotels or hostels were nowhere to be found. In Leticia we struggled to sell our wares with so few tourists and couldn't move on because the only way out was back the way we came, 21 days up the river by boat (a dangerous journey not recommended even for locals), or an $80 plane ride to Bogota. We spent all day every day and late into the night trying to sell something to make ends meet. In the evenings we would walk several miles across the border of Brazil and sell at the restaurants and night clubs to the more wealthy Brazilians with whom we had a hard time communicating. The cheapest hotel we could find was too much to pay and we were lucky to find a woman who rented us a room in her home for a decent price. But even then, just to make money to eat was a chore. After struggling for a few weeks, for the first time in my southern travels, I pulled out the credit card and bought us two flights to Bogota.