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Let me tell you this story about our Amazon cruise from Iquitos Peru to Leticia Columbia. I was hired for seven days to guide a family from Poland down the Amazon River as far as the border. My clients were having a real adventure that started in the Andes at one of the so called sources of the Amazon River. To finish their adventure they were to flush out into the Atlantic Ocean nearly 4,000 miles from where they started. They called their adventure The Amazon Challenge and that will be the name of their book.

They gave me special instructions. Make sure there is one bottle of good whiskey…per day. I laid in a case of Jack and we were ready.

We stopped off at a place I know where a guy keeps a 20 foot anaconda . I checked and he said he had fed it a chicken the day before; otherwise it could have eaten the youngest boy. I can not have giant snakes eating my clients if you know what I mean.

We got some good monkey photos at Monkey Island. Saw pink dolphins, lots of hawks, and other birds.

We will all remember our stop in Pevas to visit the artist Francisco Grippa. Our guests turned out to be adventure art speculators. They offered to buy every painting in his studio for half the list price. Grippa said no. After intense negotiating they bought four of Francisco Grippa's largest paintings. One of them was my favorite of a sexy orchid blossom.

Our next stop was with the Ocaina tribe where our adventure art speculators bought most of the jungle jewelry and primitive art the Ocaina had in their village.

We navigated up a small black water stream, caught a few small piranhas, went swimming, bought both of the packs of cigarettes in the little ribereño village nearby, and set out for Leticia.

If Iquitos is the Wild West, believe me, Leticia is the Wild East. Too much cocaine smuggling, money laundering and all the corruption that brings. Once we get to the part of the river that runs along Columbia we have to worry about river pirates, bandits, and worse. It is the only place I make a point of tying up at night in the port of the villages on the Peru side along the way. I almost prefer the river pirates to waking up to the sound of dogs, roosters and peque-peques, but not quite.

Part of our goal was to take part in the Fiesta de la Confraternidad being held in Leticia. Columbia, Brazil and Peru bring the best of their unique cultures to the large festival, including their most beautiful women, and best bands.

We tied our boat up across the river from Leticia and lived on the boat for the next three days, crossing back and forth depending on what was going on. I am not a big party person so I stayed on board on guard duty most of the time, and let my crew go to the festival with our guests.

The day after the festival we helped our new Polish friends cross over into Brazil to arrange a boat for another Amazon cruise on down stream to Manaus, the next stage of their Amazon Challenge.

We resumed our Amazon cruise back upstream to Iquitos. Ten days after we left, we were all happy to be back home with a good story to tell.

Dawn on the Amazon

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