Proper jungly

From Lima once again we flew into Iquitos, and proper Jungly. Iquitos is apparently the largest isolated city in the world: half a million people who can only be reached by plane or boat.  It is as mad as any Peruvian city however, with millions of open tricycle type taxis drawn by Honda 125ccs buzzing around precariously close to each other. But Iquitos has something rather special: the mighty Amazon river. Here in Peru, it is a mere baby: only 60 odd foot deep and less than a kilometer wide. Hey, in Brazil it gets much grander, 4 kms wide, 200 foot deep and with the largest wave in the world as it meets the Atlantic: 12 kilometres long! Now that would be fun for the kids to surf. As with all these things there’s some controversy about which is the biggest, but we were reassured that National Geographic class the Amazon as the world’s longest river. What’s good enough for them …

Before we hit the river however we had one night in Iquitos itself, and would finally get to meet and thank Lilia, our organizer. But the pilots of Star Peru are somewhat notorious for making up and changing schedules as they go along. A great ex firefighting Texan told us later he had once waited about 7 hours for a plane out of Iquitos. “Ah, ” the ground crew explained with a wise nod. “It’s because of the heavy rain and strong winds.” He pressed further, with the knowledge that it hadn’t rained in Iquitos for five days and neither was it raining now. “Well, it must be something else then.” End of story. And our flight, delayed already from 3pm till 5pm, took off about 8pm, with no real explanation. So poor Lilia had gone to bed by the time we arrived, tired, hot, hungry and thirsty into the heat of the jungle. Alas our accommodation in Iquitos was reminiscent of Abu Grabe, a concrete cell with bugs, a feeling of general decay and smelliness. No coffee, no beer, no water, no sense of modern plumbing. We realized with sinking hearts we would not be able to quietly mention to Lilia that the Olympus Hostel in Lima was a bit stinky: this was where her company was based, and it was infinitely worse.

But it was only one night, and early next morning we did indeed meet smiling, lovely Lilia who, according to her colleagues, had been worrying herself stupid about us and hoping that all was OK. Glossing over any problems, we assured her that she was indeed a star. And then it was time to meet up with our guide for the next 3 days, Luis, who packed us into two taxi chollos and we headed to the quay. This was an incredibly hairy, immensely fun ride, clinging on to kids and our luggage behind us as we negotiated lorries sandwiching us, ran junctions and red lights, all over potholed and bumpy cobbled streets. And then we heaved our year long supplies down onto a boat. We hailed the Amazon in glee for the first time, but as it turned out quite incorrectly. This was a mere tributary. After three more couples joined us, we chugged out and made our first excursion, to the floating community of Belen. If the floating Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca are the sublime, then Belen is the ridiculous. Or rather the downright depressing. Here, 30, 000 people live to avoid paying tax on and in the river, in what must be the world’s biggest floating slum. You see kids of 4 or 5 dipping cups in the river to drink, while sewers and dogs spew their contents into it. People wash their clothes, their engines and their drains into this massive waterway. The houses are ramshackle and precarious, and covered in hand painted advertising.