Amazon on a Whim

About 15 min after arriving in the Lima airport all of the symptoms of my altitude sickness had left. Now that I was thinking a little more clearly I was of course very upset because I thought that I had ruined our vacation. I was also not enjoying the prospect of returning to the family Thanksgiving that was already promising to be disastrous before our departure.

Luckily, as we sat miserable in the Lima airport, we noticed the back of our Lonely Planet (http://www.lonelyplanet.com/) It said “Glide past manatees, dolphins, monkeys, and macaws in the Reserva Nacional Pacaya-Samira” so, after taking a quick glance at page 482 as indicated on the back cover, we walked over to the ticket counter and said “2 tickets on your next flight to Iquitos please.” The next thing we know we are in a moto-taxi flying down the streets to a hostel in the colonial rubber town.

The moto-taxis are typical of Iquitos which can only be reached by airplane or by boat in the Amazon River. They are small motorcycles with a surrey-like cart on the back large enough to fit 2-3 people comfortably.

City of Iquotos is very unusual in appearance. Iquitos was a major rubber export town because of the easy access provided by the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean. The rubber was harvested from jungle trees along the river and transported to the US and England. When model T Fords first started being widely produced, the rubber for their tires came from Iquitos. As such an important colonial trade hub, Iquitos was built into a grand city. The huge colonial buildings with their Portuguese tile outsides are still everywhere. Monsieur Eiffel, of the Eiffel Tower, even built a building on the corner of the main square. When somebody illegally smuggled some rubber tree seeds and planted them in easy to harvest rows, Iquitos was abandoned by the wealthy Rubber Barons. Without the incredible amount of resources pouring into the city, over the years the buildings, which are still used for local business and homes, have fallen into a state of moderate disrepair.

We know all of this rich history of Iquitos now, but because we had arrived at night we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. We could not see the tile buildings, or the view of the river. We had checked into a hostel at the recommendation of our moto-taxi driver who made $ from the hostel off of his recommendation. After a restless night in the muggy room we awoke to all kinds of ruckus. People were screaming and cheering at what seemed to be regular intervals. We lay on the bed for a while, reading our travel book and making plans of what we were going to do that day, and how we were going to get the heck out if the spur of the moment decision to go to Iquitos turned out to be a bad one.

We finally left the hostel and were relived to find that the ruckus was coming from the high school that was directly outside of the hostel door, and that we were in a perfectly safe riverside city.