The Jungle

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Iquitos

The view from the plane was spectacular during landing: an endless sea of green jungle with the wide, black Amazonas river snaking through the middle. Iquitos is the largest city unreachable by land, a hot and humid metropolis where you just can't get rid of that layer of sweat.

The extent of poverty became apparent to us as we walked to Belén, the floating slums. Its currently the end of the dry season, so we got to walk around the dirt paths between the bare wooden houses on stilts. In the gigantic Belén market you can find absolutely everything, from chopped up turtle to giant slugs and snails and fish with what seems like crocodile skin as well as any type of fruit, vegetable or herb.

The Amazon

At 6.45am we were ready for the start of our big adventure, not really knowing what to expect. A 1.5hr drive and 3hr boat ride later we were at the entrance to the Pacaya-Samiria national reserve. From here, the jungle gets taller and denser very rapidly, and the river is dark brown from the tannins released by decomposing leaves.

Our first stop was in '20 de Enero', a village of less than 100 inhabitants. It was really hot, so we spent the afternoon swimming and canoeing in the river with the dolphins. In an evening walk to the neighbouring village, Buenos Aires, we saw some big tarantulas and heard lots of animals all around us.

The next day we visited a Shaman's garden, and were shown plants that are claimed to cure almost every disease, from diarrhea to hepatitis and prostate cancer! Then we set off further into the jungle and the day was spent going for a walk with Jose and his machete and fishing for pirañas. Our first night in a tent was pretty disastrous: torrential rain, a broken zip and lots of mosquitos!

The next two days were mainly spent going for walks, where we spotted a caiman's eyes, different types of monkeys and a sloth and learnt about the diffrent trees and plants and their uses. Highlights were eating our self-caught piraña soup and finding a dead tapir in the river (which made our local guide very happy... it would feed his family for 3 weeks!). However, we did have quite a bit of rain, and the mosquitos were so aggressive that our 50% deet was pretty useless. We ended up wearing our mosquito-inpermeable raincoats all the time except when diving into the river, only to be nibbled on by pirañas!

All in all we were happy to be back in Iquitos to have a cold shower and a drink!

Next stop: Lima.

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Comments

[carol]

Nice pictures and interesting trip so far...can\'t wait for more. x