The Amazon - Planning Ahead and Looking Back - Part 2

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The Amazon - Planning Ahead and Looking Back - Part 2

Note: This is part two of a narrative of my 1982 Amazon trip (Amazon 1.0) -- a prologue to the blog I will post during Amazon 3.0, which will begin in mid-June (2008).

Riverboat Life

El Arca’s departure was rescheduled for Monday evening. The hammock deck soon became crowded. You meet people quickly when you are butt-to-butt in swinging hammocks. As the only foreigner on this trip I would have ample opportunity to improve my Spanish. I introduced myself to my new neighbor as she strung her hammock, apologizing for my mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. Beti was a nursing student at a college in Iquitos, heading home for a between-term break. Home was Requena, about a day upriver. She was attractive, flirtatious, and careful to pronounce every syllable distinctly.

This close to the equator there is no great difference in the length of the day between winter and summer. A bit south of the equator, it was technically winter, but people here called it summer as it was the dry season - or the less wet season. Darkness came early and as the lights of Iquitos faded into the distance I could only make out the shadows of trees along the riverbank as El Arca proceeded up the Ucayali. Beti and I chatted. Her flirting was engaging and I didn’t mention being twice divorced, not in Catholic Peru.

About three hours into the trip El Arca made its first stop. Vendors - mostly kids - came onto the boat and Beti bought something rolled in foil. As we put back into the river she opened the foil and, with her fingers, fed me some of the ceviche. Several hours later - a little before midnight - the main hammock deck lights were turned out. In our closely adjoining hammocks Beti and I were soon necking like a couple of teenagers. With no privacy on the boat necking was as far as it would go.

Dawn. Coffee with milk and rolls for breakfast. My attention was split between watching the forest go by and flirting with Beti. The Ucayali meanders with few straight segments of any length. On one bank there was some beach flowing out from the forest, on the other was usually a low cliff with thick forest right up to the edge. We would go around a bend and the banks would reverse - now the beach was on the other side. Every hour or two there was a village on the cliff side of the river. These were not planned stops. El Arca would pull up to the bank if someone wanted to get off. Villagers could wave a towel or teeshirt and El Arca would stop to pick them up. Some new passengers would be delivered by canoe. The river-edge villages were small, but every one had a prominent Peruvian flag and a school. Sometimes we stopped for the crew to cast fishing nets. Or we slowed so the captain could shoot at alligators. Lunch was rice, potatoes and fish - bland but filling. The bar opened and I bought a cold beer - canned beer. Finishing the beer I looked for a trash bin. Finally, after consulting my Spanish-English dictionary, I asked a crewman where the trash basket was. He looked at me like I was nuts. While I was wondering what sort of faux pas I had made in Spanish, he took the empty beer can and tossed it overboard.

“Loreteñas make good wives.” Had I heard that right? Beti had pronounced every syllable and used common words, well within my limited Spanish vocabulary. We were in the large Peruvian state of Loreto, and Loreteña clearly meant a woman from Loreto. Was this a proposal? “You should marry me. You would like living in Requena.” My Spanish really fell apart at that point. “Is there a college in Requena? With an economics department? ” A safe question as Requena was barely a dot on my map.

El Arca arrived in Requena. The riverbank sloped too gradually for the boat to get close to the shore, so cargo and passengers were unloaded into small boats. Beti asked for a recuerdo - something to remember me by. Flustered, I gave her my light windbreaker. She put it on and took the canoe to the shore of Requena, waving.

There are views in the world which are immediately awe-inspiring - the first time you walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon, or drive the coast of Big Sur, for example. Amazon awe is different. There is a ‘wow’ feeling when you first look across it and realize how wide it is, even from Iquitos, two thousand miles from its mouth. But the awe comes on slowly as you boat along miles of forest with a few small clearings; as you see how well five-year-old kids control their canoes; as you get used to the caimans - small gators, basking in the sun on the riverside; as the sun breaks through the downpour and a rainbow appears.

One of the surprises of my first Amazon trip was how busy the river is. Even today the population of Loreto is less than a million, with half of these living in Iquitos. The state is vast - a third of the land area of Peru. But with practically no roads everyone lives along the river or its tributaries. Except for the air travel that only the upper middle class and above can afford, all travel is by river. Freight moves by river. The Amazon - the Rio Ucayali through Loreto - is as much the center of the regional civilization as the Nile was to ancient Egypt. You may see no signs of human settlement on the land for hours at a time, but the river will not lack for human activity.

Some of that human activity is logging. We passed dozens of large log rafts. Large logs made up the raft. Then the raft was piled high with smaller logs and brush and scraps that were probably destined to be firewood. The raftsmen pitched a tent on their unwieldy craft and fashioned two long steering oars. Then they drifted with the current to the nearest sawmill, which could be many days downriver. Logs sold, they boarded a passing riverboat to return to their upriver camp.

As El Arca rounded one of the bends I noticed about a dozen passengers rushing to the port side. They were pointing to what looked like the remains of an older river boat - about the same size as El Arca but a remnant of the steam era. One passenger said it was the “Germans’ boat.” Another explained - after I assured him I was not German. There had recently been a German film crew here. According to the passenger, several Peruvian Indians were killed and others injured hauling the large riverboat over a hill and running it down rapids. The Germans spent a lot of money in and around Iquitos, but no one on El Arca talked favorably of them. Shortly after I returned to Seattle Fitzcarraldo opened and I realized the Germans they were talking about were Werner Herzog and his crew.

The voyage was not without its minor dramas. A navy patrol boat stopped us and sent an inspector aboard. He tugged on the life jackets that were stuffed between the roof rafters. Too stuffed, apparently. Many were embedded in the paint and almost impossible to free. The rumor spread among the passengers that the captain had to pay a fine right on the spot. It must have been a large fine as the captain seemed a jovial fellow when we started the trip but turned grouchy after the inspection.

Late one night my hammock swung violently and I jumped up to see that El Arca had plowed into the riverbank, on the shallow side. Another passenger said there had been an engine fire. Several crewmen and the engineer were pounding a stake into the ground - which was covered with brush but had no trees to tie the boat to. The engineer jumped backward, swearing. He was holding the lantern and the lantern attracted a large bushmaster. Most Amazon snakes aren’t poisonous - they just crush you and swallow you whole - but there are several species of pit viper, including the extremely poisonous bushmaster and fer-de-lance.

And there was that pebble in the rice. I felt my tooth shear off at the gum and stopped chewing, but too late. When would the toothache hit? How bad would it be? How far was I from the nearest town with electricity and a dentist? It was probably still two days to Pucallpa. My mind raced, bracing for the pain. Coca leaves. This was Peru. At our next stop I would rush to the market and buy some coca leaves and press them into the large hole my tongue was mapping. Coca, cocaine, novacaine - they must be related. But the toothache didn’t come. I pulled the top of the tooth from my mouth - it had more silver than tooth. But there was still no toothache - and no problems with the tooth for the rest of the trip.

At each stop - planned stops at the established towns like Requena, Lisboa, Orellana and Contamaná - or the many smaller villages in between where someone wanted to disembark or signaled that they wanted to board the boat, the mix of passengers changed. There were a few Indians who only spoke market Spanish. Salespeople, river dwellers heading for a major shopping trip, a teacher making his monthly trip to a town with a bank - it was possible to meet a cross section of Amazonian Peru from the deck of a riverboat. Very few, however, stayed for the entire Iquitos-Pucallpa trip. And El Arca gradually became less crowded. When we left Iquitos I had to work my way through a sea of hammocks to get across the deck. A day away from Pucallpa there was room to dance - until the captain ordered the bar closed and the music turned off after several other passengers danced with the young woman he had his eye on.

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Comments

[susan schneider]

Hi Kit
Hi Kit Colleen emailed me your blog and I shall follow your trip with much interest. Just read over your earlier trip and you are a wonderful writer..really brings the area alive. I will look on my World Atlas and see what I can find. Best of British Luck on the trip of a life time! Warm Wishes from London Susan