Arrival

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Got off the boat in the winedark earlymorning, sleepy backpackers lounging around on the ground in front of the ship, waiting for their ship to come in, no doubt, since they were going upriver, my boat, another 8 hours downriver to iquitos.....we all jumped ship in this town called Nauta, which has this nifty invention called a 'paved highway', and so the eight hours of hammocky boat were reduced to 90 minutes.....well worth it, save for all the attendant destruction that an asphalt brings to the jungle....

Well, Iquitos was everything I thought it should be, I can understand now why Werner Herzog was so wowed by this as a location for Fitzcarraldo (which actually apparently happened in Puerto Maldonados, but probably not as scenic as here)....

What we were probably looking at were scenes like this:

oh crap, sorry, I cant figger out this travelblog page, they let me make a gallery, but I have no way to access it from within this editing page.....you'll just have to read the captions below and imagine that you (and Werner Herzog) found the contrast a little bit funny.

Also, I've sorted out the route map thingie

http://www.travelblog.org/gmaps/map_2UZ.html

but unfortunately they just give me little pins to show where I've been, when really it should be like lines and stuff. I've been twice to the cities of Arica, Lima, and Arequipa, and I had to add two pins in their environs.....also, I'm not too sure about the locations of places, because they just gave me a blank map to draw on without place names. Sorry, I hope to figger out all this geek crap at some point.

ALso I promise to fill in the missing days of the diary (an advantage of the auto date function of digital cameras)

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Photos

Luxury
The Waterfront of Iquitos

Not Luxury
A hundred meters from the (Luxury) Waterfront of Iquitos