Amazon Adventure

Well, friends, believe me when I say jungle trekking isn't as easy as it looks. It's taken me awhile to sufficiently recover my strength, and for those pesky back spasms to go away, and even now as I sit down the write this I'm not sure I can. I've been putting off this post because there is just too much to say and no way to adequately describe what the trip was like. But due to my ongoing battle with all things electronic, I find myself stranded in Chiclayo awaiting word from my computer buddy as to whether he can resurrect the contents of my external hard drive. So I've plopped down in the restaurant of the fanciest hotel in town, ordered the cheapest thing on the menu (an S/. 11 grilled cheese) and committed myself to catching up on email, blogs and Facebook stalking.

Semana Santa is big here in Peru and accordingly Peace Corps is kind enough to grant us a few free vacation days around the Easter holiday. Free vacations days? That's all we needed to hear to pack our Chacos and raincoast and head for the jungle. I will spare you the detailed itinerary (if you really want to know everything we did, check out Steph's blog -- she's quite thorough) and jump right to the highlights, with photographic evidence of course.

We spent the first couple days of our trip en route, via a town called Tarapoto, where we took a small side trip to some pretty waterfalls. After 12 hours aboard El Romantic II, we arrived in the town of Lagunas, the jumping off point to enter the National Reserve. From Lagunas we headed off in canoes and spent the better part of three days sprawled out on said canoes admiring the jungle wildlife: monkeys, sloths, anacondas, crocs, dolphins, piranhas and lots of other birds, bugs and trees. It was pretty cool and definitely off the beaten track. The only other tourists we saw were other volunteers. We camped under the stars, protected by mosquito nets smelling of what can only be described as a cross between a moldy boy's locker room and rotten eggs; in a word, awful. We ate fish straight from the river, cooked up by our trusty guides. We went on a nighttime crocodile hunt, where we really did get to lay down in the canoes and marvel at the incredible expanse of starts. It was a great little jaunt, not very relaxing or comfortable but unique and special.

Aboard El Romantic, she's a beaut.

Aboard the canoe, where we spent many an hour.

Nothing but the best for us, four stars all the way.


I didn't think it would happen but I've found my soulmate - the sloth.

We arrived back in Lagunas prepared to board a boat headed for Iquitos, a mere 30 hours away, and interestingly enough, the largest city in the world that is inaccessible by road. Who said this blog wasn't educational? To make an incredibly long story slightly shorter, the boat to Iquitos wasn't coming that day. We waited out the night in Lagunas, which I would not wish on anyone, where we passed the time eating Dutch cheese out of a tin can and dancing with 4-foot-tall Peruvians in the town's only bar, which was really just a store that happened to have a generator and thus could stay open after the lights went out at 9pm. The next morning we found out that there would not be another boat to Iquitos for at least two more days. Our jungle guides promised to work something out for us and ended up arranging for a private boat to transport the 14 of us (my group plus two other volunteer groups). The cost was much, much higher, but they assured us it would only be an eight hour ride to Iquitos. I think the rest of the story is best explained visually.

The boat we thought we were taking. Spacious, no?


It started looking bad when this canoe pulled up and the Peruvians transferred the engine from the big boat to the canoe.



17 people, 18 hours, one canoe. There aren't enough expletives in the world.



Nightfall sets in and we're still on the canoe, faking smiles.

So, eighteen hours later we arrived in Iquitos. I'm not exaggerating when I say those were probably the worst 18 hours of my life. Especially when it started to rain and we were forced to seek shelter under a moldy tarp. Or when we were lost in the middle of the Amazon in the middle of the night and kept turning off the motor to simply float helplessly. Or the time when we asked the "captain" how much longer and he told us we were one hour away from a town from where we were eight to nine hours from Iquitos AFTER we'd already been on the canoe for five hours. All in all it was a horrible, horrible journey and I vow never to ride in a canoe again. Ever. But we did arrive in Iquitos, more or less in one piece and were able to actually relax for the first time all trip, enjoying some surprisingly tasty Texas BBQ and the indescribable pleasure of a real bed on dry land.

A word to the wise when planning your next Peruvian vacation -- the jungle is lacking certain infrastructure that makes for an easy vacation. I wouldn't recommend it if you enjoy things like schedules, reliable information and beds. But all in all, I am glad I made the trip. If nothing else it made for a good blog post, right? There are more pictures on Facebook and on Steph and Kim's blogs if you just can't get enough.