Advertisement
Published: July 14th 2015
Edit Blog Post
New personal record for fastest international border crossing (from Colombia to Brazil): 10 sec
Boat passengers that almost drowned in front of our eyes: 10
Stay at Amazon rainforest lodge in the middle of the Amazon River: awesome experience
Getting lost at Brazilian indigenous village looking for an artisan mask to buy: yes
While we are waiting for the container ship from Panama to arrive in Colombia and get our bike through customs, Zoe and I decided to spend a few days in the Amazon rain forest. We traveled to Leticia, which is one of the main ports in the inner Amazon River upstream towards the Andes. Leticia is located at the point where Colombia, Brazil and Peru come together in an area which is called Tres Fronteras in Spanish, i.e. three borders. Leticia is now part of Colombia, but before that, it was caught up in an armed conflict between Colombia and Peru. The dispute was settled in 1934, and the majority of the area belongs to Colombia ever since. However, a fair amount of military presence is still visible on either side of the border, something which is a bit weird to
see at this very remote and inaccessible area of the Amazon rain forest.
Once out of the plane at the Leticia airport, we were instantly hit by the high tropical and very sticky humidity. Our first adventure started when the taxi driver tried to find the hotel I had booked online. I knew that it had been unusually tricky to book the hotel, because I had to go through the whole booking process no less than 6 times, before I could get a digital confirmation. For some reason, the very last step of the payment confirmation kept returning an error. After many stops at various hotels with similar name to the hotel we had a booking with, our driver dropped us at the port, letting us know that our hotel was actually located a bit outside the city. To be a bit more precise, I had apparently booked us at a river lodge, half an hour away with water taxi, at a very remote place.
We had to hire a private water taxi, which took us half an hour upstream on the Amazon River. Our hotel ended up being an exclusive lodge, built in the middle of nowhere
at the bank of the river. The whole lodge is floating on piles driven into the soft and muddy banks of the river bank, because there is no firm soil along the banks of the Amazon River to build upon. Zoe and I really liked our exotic lodge, though we were completely ‘trapped’ there, since there was no place we could go, because the entire lodge was surrounded by the dense rain forest. The only two things we could do while staying at the lodge was to hang out at the small pier on the river, and to take a walk along the suspended boardwalk that went about half a mile straight into the rain forest. The board walk into the forest was truly magical, with endless species of trees, mangroves, vines and vegetation along its sides. As for the animals and inspects, we could hear them loud and clear, but it was impossible to actually see them due to the dense vegetation!
In the afternoon we spent a few hours sitting at the pier of the lodge watching the mighty Amazon River flow by. Its water is dark brown and muddy, and it is clear that the massive
and rapid flow brings quite a few things with it from upstream. Indeed, the Amazon River is the largest river by flow of water in the world. We were told by locals that, by the time it reaches the Atlantic Ocean it discharges no less than 209 million liters or 55 million gallons,
per second. To put that into perspective, that’s greater than the next seven largest rivers combined! That’s one of the many reasons why the Amazon River is called the Mighty River by many locals. A long standing scientific dispute over which river in the world is the longest one, was finally settled in 2013, determining that the Amazon River is indeed longer than the Nile River in Africa.
After our stay for a few nights at the river lodge, it was time to return to Leticia to fly back to Cartagena. We had been told by the lodge management that their first river boat back to Leticia was leaving at 8am. Naïve as we were, Zoe and I were standing at the pier in front of the lodge at 8am. After 20min of waiting we were told that the boat actually left at 9am! When no
boat had showed up at 9:30am we started to get a bit irritated. The same thing was true for a number of Colombian tourists that needed to get back to Leticia to catch the noon flight to Bogota. Finally, at 9:50am a smaller boat, seating about 20-25 people approached the pier. It quickly became evident to us that all the people hoping to take the boat wouldn’t fit in it. But before anybody had time to figure out the logistics, the front of the boat had already reached the pier, and anxious Colombian tourists started boarding, carrying on their heavy luggage.
After 10 or people had quickly boarded, hoping to be the ones that made it back to Leticia, the boat started suddenly to tilt and within seconds we saw it overturn. As the boat had a metal canopy, all passengers become trapped between the upside-down canopy, the boat itself and the muddy bottom of the river. Just like that, in 2-3 seconds, 10 people vanished in front of our eyes, and panic broke out on the pier. While Zoe and I quickly pulled back, lots of people jumped in to the dark waters trying to rescue the passengers.
Luckily nobody drowned, though it was evidently very close that several people got caught under the weight of the boat and the tar-like mud at the bottom of the river. While chaos broke out among the survivors about who was to blame, Zoe, me and a few other passengers managed to find a local boat that we hired to take us back to Leticia.
Once on firm soil in Leticia, Zoe and I rented a three wheeler rickshaw and asked the driver to take us to the Brazil border. By the time he had stopped and we gotten off, we had apparently already crossed the border! It was by far, the fastest border crossing we have ever completed. No passport control, no police inspection, or customs forms were required. We had crossed from Colombia into Brazil in under 10 sec.! Stunned be the easy of this border crossing, we then quickly hired a new rickshaw and asked the driver to take us to the closest indigenous village, to look for Brazilian artisan masks. The extremely helpful driver drove us for about an hour on some pretty remote roads, which become smaller and rougher by the minute, while asking locals
for directions every 5 minutes. Turns out that, barely even the locals knew were we should go, and what direction to take. After another half hour of driving we were practically lost, barely 10km/6miles into Brazilian soil... With the help of our resourceful rickshaw driver, we eventually found our way back to the Brazilian border village of Tabatinga, and crossed the border back to Leticia in Colombia without ever having found any artisan indigenous mask in the closest Brazilian village.
All in all, it is fair to say that our few days in Leticia and the surrounding places we visited, turned out to be very adventurous, in more way that we had expected. Zoe and I now have lots of Amazon River stories to tell for sure.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.115s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0641s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb