Iquitos

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Well...we finally hit a snag in our plans.

Friday: Flight from Bogota to Leticia (both in Colombia). Leticia is in the very south-east corner of Colombia at the tri-border of Colombia/Brazil/Peru. We crossed into Tabatinga, Brazil (no formal border entry just quite yet) with the intention of heading down the Amazon river on Saturday for 3 days to reach a town called Manaus. Our first surprise: the office that issues Brazilian Visas (in Leticia) closes at 2pm. We didn't get into town until about 4pm so immediately we knew we could not make the Saturday boat because the office isn't open on weekends. These boats only leave on Saturday and Wednesday so this set us back immediately at least 4 days. Our second surprise: about 30mins later we find out the office in Leticia NO LONGER OFFERS VISAS as of 2 months ago. Shit. We now have 2 options: 1) fly back to Bogota and get Visas there before returning- this was squashed immediately when we realised how expensive the flights had gotten 2) take a speed boat to Iquitos (Peru) where there is a consulate that apparently issues Visas. We went with option 2.

Saturday: 11 hr speed boat ride up river on the Amazon to Iquitos (Peru) departing at 3:30am. Not the most enjoyable ride by any means. Very little leg room and not the most comfy seats. Luckily we slept for a good 5 or 6 hours right off the bat. Overall, it ended up being not as bad of a ride as we expected. Once we arrived we checked into a hostel room with A/C which we would enjoy over the next few days.

Sunday: the start of our down time. Basically the thing to do in Iquitos is do jungle tours (multiple days usually). Since we had already done this in Bolivia we opted not to spend the money again. Unfortunately this left us with not much to do. Needless to say we watched quite a bit of TV and wrote 3 blogs.

Monday: The consulate opens. We show up bright and early, fill out some forms and the guy in the office tells us to come back the following day. This was devestating. We had been told at our hostel in Tabatinga that the process would be completed the same day. Because it would now take at least 1 day that ruined our plan to travel back to Tabatinga Tuesday and catch the boat on Wednesday. We now would be stuck for at least 7 days which was not what we needed with only 1 month left in our trip.

Tuesday: Back to the consulate. We pay our Visa fee, go and print bank statements (which for some reason he failed to inform us we needed the day before) only for the guy to tell us to come back on Thursday. 3 days, 3 days he says. To be fair, it says on their info board it takes 3 days. But what does't make any sense is why he printed on our original receipt the 25th. He mearly crossed that out and but the 27th when we came back. Great. At this point we are getting nervous. If things go smooth and we get it Thursday then no problem. We take a boat back to Tabatinga Friday and hop on the Saturday boat. But, with all this confusion our faith on this working out was getting pretty low at this point. With the consulate not open on weekend, not getting the Visa on Thurs means not getting a boat in Tabatinga until at least the 2nd of June.

Wednesday: Nothing (literally) to report. On the bright side, we got ESPN in our room which showed one of the 2 remaining NBA playoff series every other night!

Thursday: We nervously return to the consulate at 9am. After waiting for the guy to show up for 30mins he informs us our bank statements were not sufficient. It didn't have our name or bank name on them. Now to be fair, this was our mistake. The card we use most doesn't show this info when you look at the bank transactions so we just hoped for the best. What bugged us was the fact that the guy didn't look at the statements when we gave them to him on Tuesday! We waited 2 days for him to tell us they were not good enough! Fortunately, he tells us (with the help of 2 Asian people who happened to know English and Spanish that were standing there) that if we went and got the proper statements right away, we could still get the Visa today. Returned to the office at 1:30 and finally we get the Visas- huge relief! We go straight to the ticket office to buy our speed boat ticket to take us back to Tabatinga on Friday so we can catch the Saturday slow boat. We had heard rumours that a slow boat going from Tabatinga to Iquitos had sunk on Wednesday and this was confirmed at the ticket office when we saw 2 guys who had survived in the office with no shoes and their legs were covered in mud. Apparently the boat had rolled over at 2am and many of the passengers who were staying in cabins got stuck in them and died. As of Friday the boat was still on the bottom of the river and we never heard an accurate estimate of the number of people who died (it sounds like it was many though, as there were 160 passengers on board when there should have only been 100). We had heard the slow boats in Peru were much more sketchy than those in Brazil, so we were happy we had the plans that we did. Hearing this story makes our Visa troubles (and this blog) sound pretty minor after all!

Friday: 6am departure on the speed boat headed for Tabatinga. Arrived pretty much on time and with enough time for us to get our entry stamps into Brazil to go along with our Visas. We were now officially allowed into Brazil! Spent the rest of the night buying our hammocks/snacks for the boat ride/exchanging money.

Saturday: Stay tuned for the next blog which is all about our 3 day journey down the Amazon to Manaus!

To ease any worries, we have already safely arrived in Manaus while I write this. No sinking ship for us thankfully.

Take care,
Greg and Laura

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