Chacapoyas, the Kuelap ruins, and sailing through the Amazon rainforest to Iquitos

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The overnight bus from Chiclayo to Chachapoyas seemed to fly by, even though it was 2 hours late arriving. Bizarrely we only arrived a few hours after the night bus from the day before had arrived, as landslides had caused the road to be closed for 16 or so hours, so I’m glad I hadn’t left Chiclayo a day earlier as I had originally hoped to. Chacapoyas is the capital of the Amazonas department, despite being high up in the mountains and the Amazon River not going through the department. It felt more like a small town, with very few facilities and not the best transport connections. Most of the roads out of the town were unpaved and really bumpy, so it’s definitely more of the beaten track than previous cities I’ve visited. Like most Peruvian towns, it has a bustling market, but it’s the first place I’ve seen animals in bags - people were selling ducks with their legs tied together and crammed into a netted bag. Someone else had a bag full of live guinea pigs in a sack as well, and they clearly weren’t happy. Outside of Chachapoyas itself, there were quite a few sites to visit around the area, not that I managed to visit them all in the 4 nights I spent in the town. On my first day, I took a colectivo (a shared taxi) to the village of Huancas. I’m not a great fan of these colectivos, which operate specific routes and wait until the car is either full, or over full. Previously I have been in some where there are 4 passengers on the back row and 2 passengers on the front passenger seat - far too cramped and not at all safe! I’ve seen people riding in the boot as well! This colectivo was fortunately not too cramped, but being squished in the back going over bumpy roads meant that I frequently bumped my head on either the door or the roof. Huancas, despite its rather unfortunate name, overlooks a steep gorge and there is a tower to climb to get panoramic views. That’s about all there was to do in Huancas, but it still made for a relaxing afternoon. The hostel I was in was nice enough, and they must have been desperate for customers as I managed to haggle them down to a ¼ of the standard price. The town does seem to have a lot of hostels but I saw few tourists, so it must be off-season for Peruvian tourists here. I booked a few tours with the hotel, the first of which was to a site known as Kuelap, which describes itself as the “Machu Picchu of the North”. It’s not that similar to Machu Picchu in style, as it’s much earlier than Inca - it’s more like a giant castle on top of a hill. It claims to be the largest structure made of stone in the Americas - the construction used three times as much stone as the Great Pyramid in Egypt. It really was an impressive sight too, with some parts restored to give the visitor an idea of what it would have been like 1500 years ago when it was built. It was also nice that it was quiet - it receives only 14000 visitors a year, which is about the number Machu Picchu receives in a week. Trying to get back from Kuelap was a bit of a nightmare. The road was blocked in 3 different places by 3 lorries, the first of which was stuck on a bend and couldn’t move. It took just short of an hour for it, with the help of all the blocked motorists, to be able to move out of the way. One elderly lady on our minibus thought it would be helpful to shout instructions to the lorry driver - mostly things like “don’t do it that way!”, “do you not know what you’re doing?” etc., which I’m sure proved invaluable to those trying to move the stuck vehicle. The other two hold-ups were more frustrating for the Venezuelan on board who had a bus booked that evening, though luckily we made it back to town with 20 minutes to spare for him.
The next day I had a free day, so decided to do some independent travelling. I took a colectivo to a village called Lamud, from where there are 2 trails to archaeological sites. I wanted to go to el Pueblo de los Muertes (The Town of the Dead); an ancient burial sight with large sarcophagi, but the tourist office only had 3 sets of keys and 3 groups had already left that morning. So I ended up following the other trail, to a set of caves called Quiocta, where I wasn’t sure what I would see. The lady in the tourist office first took me to her own house to lend me her torch, and then drew me a map of how to get there. I understood all of her directions, but despite this I ended up getting completely lost, so never made it to the caves. As the village is at the bottom of a valley, there was never any chance of losing site of it, so I made it back easily enough. But this is why tours with agencies are normally better, as there are very rarely signs to most attractions. Luckily I enjoyed the walk in any case.
The next day I went to some waterfalls an hour or so north of the city. I nearly ended up being late as I had put on the television in my room for breakfast and nearly lost track of time with the reports about the Polish plane crash. These waterfalls were substantially different to any I’ve yet been to - even though I went to Angel falls in Venezuela, these falls seemed taller as I could see them all clearly, unlike Angel Falls when there was too much mist. In fact, Gocta, being 770m high, is the 3rd highest waterfall in the world, which was surprising, as they’re not even mentioned in my guidebook. Tourism here is very new, with the trail to the falls only being recently developed. As the 2 other people in my group didn’t speak that much Spanish, I basically talked to the guide for the 2 hour trail to the falls, and he certainly knew plenty of interesting facts about them! Arriving near the base of the falls, we got completely soaked by the spray (unsurprisingly), and the sound was near-deafening. It’s towards the end of the rainy- season, so although the waterfalls are not as full as they would be in January or February, they were much fuller than Angel Falls when I saw them.
In Chachapoyas, the lady who ran the tourist office seemed to know absolutely everything about the whole of Peru, so I went through my itinerary with her for the next week or so to clarify things. I had to get a bus down to the jungle, to a city called Tarapoto, which in my guide book says takes 18 hours. In fact, I did it during the day time, and it took only 9 hours, including stopping for lunch for an hour at a restaurant (courtesy of the bus company). Tarapoto wasn’t what I was expecting for my first sight of a jungle city, as it looked and felt like any other Peruvian city. Some of the trees looked different, but that was about it. I spent the next day in the city and in a town just outside the city which is very touristy, but I didn’t like either that much. So bright and early the next morning I took a minibus to the next city along the road - Yurimaguas, some 140km away. Along the road there were signs quoting distances to the next settlements, and right at the bottom they would say Atlantic Ocean - 4300km, which really emphasises how big the Amazon basin really is. The bus journey from Tarapoto to Yurimaguas was horrible. I was right at the front, next to the driver (with no seat belt), and the roads to start with were really bendy, which, given the speed we were going, didn’t agree too much with my stomach. The driver then decided to put on a film - a rather gory horror film, which only worsened things. Someone a few rows behind was sick everywhere, but I wasn’t that bad. About half way, the crash barriers on one side were marked with green paint, then below we could see a small lorry had gone off. On the road there were a dozen or so people, who it appeared had been riding in the open back. We slowed down but apparently no one was injured. Upon arriving in Yurimaguas, I got a mototaxi and headed straight for the port to book a boat for Iquitos. I had heard conflicting departure times for the company that was recommended by the tourist office, but luckily I arrived at 12:30 and the boat wasn’t scheduled to sail until 5 that afternoon (it actually left at 6). I could have just paid for a hammock for the journey, but I wanted a cabin for security reasons for my bags, and this didn’t end up working out that expensive. Luckily the boat wasn’t too busy (the cabins weren’t at least), so I had a twin cabin all to myself. The boat was bigger than I imagined it would be, and had quite a few passengers as well as a lot of cargo on board. Watching the crew trying to load cattle onto the ship started off to be amusing, but then when a few bulls refused the crew were quite aggressive with them, including when one seemed to slip off the river bank and hurt his legs. I don’t know how many cattle were on board (they were on the cargo level so I couldn’t see them), but you could hear and smell them from most places onboard. I’m not quite sure which river Yurimaguas sits on, but we then sailed from that river onto the Marañon river, which in turn merges with the Ucayalí river to form the Amazon just outside of Iquitos. All of the rivers are so wide, with trees and traditional villages adorning the river banks. We stopped many times along the journey, as the only way to reach most of these villages is by boat. It was interesting to see where rivers met (which happened frequently), as you could see the different coloured waters mixing together. The water is actually quite slow-moving, so I didn’t feel sick really on board. The only thing that came close to making me feel sick was the food on board, which was absolutely horrible, not that there was much that was vegetarian anyway. I saw the contents of a lot of peoples’ plates end up over the side. Also the water in the taps on board didn’t seem clean enough even to brush your teeth in - once I turned on the tap and 2 beetles came out with the water onto my tooth brush. The worst thing about the boat is their estimated time of arrival. Originally we were told that the journey would take only 40 hours, arriving in Iquitos at around 10 in the morning. At around 11 in the morning of the final day we arrived at a port, but this turned out not to be Iquitos, it was a city called Nauta, which by chance has a road connection with Iquitos. Virtually all passengers got off here, as the road to Iquitos only allegedly takes 90 minutes by bus, but our boat would take 7 hours on the river. I had spent most of the journey talking to 2 fellow British travellers who were in the cabin next door, and we decided to stay on board as we had already paid for the ticket to Iquitos and we wanted to see the source of the Amazon. So we continued on board, now the only passengers on the upper deck, and we arrived after an hour or so at the source of the Amazon, which is in fact the union of the already large Maranon and Ucayalí rivers. However, luck was not on our side and pretty soon after that, the boat didn’t seem to be moving anywhere, occasionally round in circles, but certainly not in the direction we were supposed to be going. Some sort of steering fault I believe. It took a good 4 to 5 hours for them to repair this, meaning we didn’t arrive into Iquitos until sometime in the early morning, so I ended up spending another night on the boat. I watched the crew unload the boat in Iquitos and use unnecessary force with the animals, before getting a mototaxi into the centre myself. I’ll write about Iquitos and going into the jungle in the next blog.

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Photos

Huancas
Anyone for a game?

Lamas village
The centre of folklore for the region.