Three-legged race down the Amazon

Docking at a village between Iquitos and Santa Rosa

The Amazon rainforest. It’s that place where all the undiscovered species are hiding out. The place with the last tribes unaware of the rest of the world. The one McDonalds is or isn’t cutting down. The big dark green blob on the map.

Most travellers only get the opportunity to visit the fringes or dip in briefly with a light aircraft flight and a tour. But we thought, When in Rome. And so we travelled halfway along the Amazon river.

Seven days and seven nights, darkest Peru to deepest Brazil. It was a journey of three legs, the first starting in Yurimaguas just past the Andes in Peru, a low, hot and jungle outpost a four-hour drive from the nearest big town,Tarapoto. Or a six-hour drive if you have to wait two hours for construction workers to clean up after a landslide of comic-book proportions in the road ahead.

We were given the run-around in every town along the route in one way or another, and there’s not too much updated info on the internet, so at the end of the post there’s details of how we did it.

Doing this journey,  you learn to be patient and to amuse yourself. A lot. There is a huge amount of waiting around. We arrived to our first boat seven hours before its scheduled departure time – some people stayed the night before. This sounds like madness – when would you ever choose to be seven hours early for a train? – but not only is it needed for claiming and defending your hammock spot from invaders, but the boat left two hours early. We’d have had to wait days for the next one. So there’s a lot of waiting. A lot of sitting, a lot of looking. Luckily there’s plenty to look at – the brightly coloured hammocks are crammed in and the people-watching is great. The well-defined personal space a hammock provides mean people act quite strangely, almost as if when they are sat in their hammock they are in their living room at home and nobody else can see them.

The sides of the river as we passed could have come straight from the set of Jurassic Park. Dense, bright green foliage crowds the banks and flat-topped, white-barked hardwoods above shelter white cranes. Mini islands of weedy greenery float with the current.

We stopped frequently on the first two legs, calling at almost every tiny settlement along the way, where the buildings were wooden and thatched and quite often on stilts out in the river. Where the water was too shallow for the boat to pull in, a little launch would zoom across to pick up passengers and cargo, usually bananas. One morning, calling at a small village, the captain misjudged his parking and the boat powered sideways into an enormous tree overhanging the water. When it veered away again, someone’s hammock from the lower deck was stuck on a branch, and half the tree was stuck in the side of the boat. It fell off eventually.

Our first pit stop was in Iquitos in Peru, the largest city in the world unreachable by land – you either have to take the boat or fly. It’s a pretty crazy place, full of strange, strange people. One guy we met, from Coventry, had bought a ticket to Iquitos two weeks previously because he read in his local newspaper something which he interpreted as meaning humans were going to be burnt alive at his local cement processing plant. His friend was pondering the safest place to be in South America “when the tidal wave comes” from the Pacific – he chose Tarapoto, 500km from the ocean and sheltered by the Andes. The third friend dismissed global warming entirely because “they take the readings on runways, where it’s a hundred degrees anyway”.

Our hostel, Hostel Camiri, was great. It floated. But the most interesting part of Iquitos was the shanty town of Belen – the whole thing is on stilts in the river, or else floating on it. We paid a boy just over £1 to paddle us around it for twenty minutes. There is electricity there but it is still an extremely poor neighbourhood. Peru had to make special land ownership legislation to get around the inhabitants’ problematic status of not actually living on land – something to do with it being dry (well, just extremely muddy rather than several metres-deep) a couple of months a year. Which explains the half-underwater goalposts we passed.

The other cool part about the Belen area is its market (which is on land). It sells pretty much everything. Among the strangest things we saw were a plucked and opened-out chicken ready for sale, with giblets and egg still in place; and just the head-and-shoulders and back-legs-and-tail sections of a turtle. They make soup with the rest, and serve it in the shell. Yum.

We might have been in the middle of the rainforest, but taking the riverboat journey wasn’t like stepping into The Jungle Book. At places the river was very, very wide – about two miles by the time we reached Manaus – and the boats were large and noisy. So the entire sum of our wildlife sightings while travelling was Chris glimpsing the fins of some river dolphins, once. For the real jungle experience we took a tiny launch out for a day into the channels between Leticia, Colombia, and Benjamin Constant, Brazil, during our second pit stop. We booked with the tour guide Antonio Rengifo and it was just the two of us with Antonio’s son as our guide and a boat man. We haggled the price down to COP$100,000 - £40 each – and it was worth every penny, perhaps the best day of our entire trip so far!

It was entirely down to luck and an eagle-eyed guide, but that day we saw:

• Two sloths munching leaves high up in a tree. The pattern on their backs was exactly like the peeling white-and-light-brown bark. Apparently seeing sloths is extremely rare.
• Three of the enormous iridescent blue butterflies you usually only see pinned in boxes.
• Two groups of tiny monkeys gobbling down fruit in the trees. They made a speedy getaway once they spotted us, some leaping right over our heads to get away, but one little baby stuck around to get a good look at us (see picture below).
• One enormous, bright red parrot flying past. 
• Red piranhas – the most dangerous kind! We fished for them with bits of steak and caught one about six inches long.
• Countless river dolphins. There are two species in the amazon – grey, which only grow to about 1m long; and pink, which can be 2m long and have flat nubs instead of proper dorsal fins. We weren’t exactly prepared for quite how pink they were – bright, solid baby pink! They looked more like inflatable pool toys than real dolphins.

By the time we reached Manaus, we’d definitely had enough of boats for a while. The third boat was the best, but I still wouldn’t exactly call it comfortable. From Manaus onwards there are luxury cruise liners and the like, but you have no option further up the river (not that we could afford it even if it existed...). Surprisingly we were virtually never bored. The necessity of breaking the journey in two places made it easier, but if we were ever restless it only took a few seconds to look around and remember we are in the middle of the Amazon bloody rainforest. The skies were huge, the sunsets incredible, and the far-off lightning storms at night were, well, electric.

It was an amazing, unforgettable journey, and we already know that one day we’ll come back to do the rest, Manaus to the Atlantic. We’re just going to get rich first.

SARAH

Baby monkey

YURIMAGUAS (PERU) TO MANAUS (BRAZIL) BY AMAZON RIVER BOAT


GENERAL TIPS. Deal with the guys on the boats for your tickets. The price is highly unlikely to be negotiable. Take your own hammock, but beware thin material: You will spend a LOT of time in your hammock – the thin ones may not go the distance to Manaus! Get to the boat and secure your hammock space early – like 6-8 hours before the “scheduled” departure. Hammock places are at a premium and you need to be there to defend your airspace – people will hang their hammocks above yours if they can get away with it. Plus one of our boats left two hours early … You need to be on the boat. Try to get a place next to a central pole – and take a length of chain to secure your bags to it. We did this in the rainy season and travel times might be longer in the dry season. On the boats you will be showering in river water, and all waste water goes directly into the Amazon river. Think of the dolphins! Don’t use shampoo. Head for the top deck – more air and less noise. The journey can be done the other way, upstream, but it takes a LOT longer! Food is provided … but take fruit and snacks. Never leave your stuff totally unattended, even if you think it is secure. It only took 30 seconds for my chained-up bag to be stolen. Try to hold on to all your rubbish – the crew will chuck it straight overboard.


1. YURIMAGUAS TO IQUITOS. Yurimaguas is accessed by four-hour bus from Tarapoto, which has lots of onward connections including Lima. We used Movil Tours from Trujillo to Tarapoto and on to Yurimaguas. There are several ports in Yurimaguas. Don’t go to boat company offices in town, get your ticket to Iquitos at Puerto Boca dealing directly with the guys on the boat (and get a good look at it, too). Our boat was Eduardo VI, which was OK, though there is no way of doing this section of the river in anything approaching luxury. We paid S100 (£25) for hammock space. Tiny cabins were available. You can buy hammocks in town, or maybe from a seller on or near the boat, from S20 upwards. The journey took two nights and two and a half days. The price includes three basic meals a day, but you need to take your own tupperware to eat out of and expect to eat more or less the same thing all the time. Boats leave every few days.


2. IQUITOS TO SANTA ROSA. One boat a day leaves Puerto Pesquero in Iquitos for Santa Rosa, the Peruvian town at the tri-border where Peru, Colombia and Brazil meet. The conditions were better than the first boat, with far fewer people and improved meals brought to you on actual plates by the crew. It took two nights and two and a half days and cost S80 (£20) for hammock space. Tiny cabins were available. Speedboats do the journey in eight hours but cost four times as much. Immigration formalities for leaving Peru are done in Santa Rosa. Then take a ten-minute, S6 launch across to Leticia, which is technically Colombia. Leticia and Tabatinga are two ends of one town, but Tabatinga is Brazil.


3. IMMIGRATION. Get your Peruvian exit stamp sorted at the police station and immigration office (two separate buildings, you need to go to both) in Santa Rosa. You then need to get an entrance stamp of some kind within 24 hours of officially leaving Peru and arriving at Leticia/Tabatinga. For Colombia, this can only be done at Leticia airport, which is a short bus ride from the centre. For Brazil, you need the large white Federal Police building on the main street in Tabatinga, about ten blocks on the left if walking from the official border point. It is conveniently only open 9.30-11.30am and 2.30-4.30pm. We stamped into Brazil for the onward journey but stayed in Leticia (the better side of town) for a few nights – not sure if this is technically OK but we had no problems.


4. TABATINGA TO MANAUS. The most expensive and most comfortable leg. Hammock space cost R$170 (£62). Boats leave Tabatinga Wednesday and Saturday at 2pm. Military police perform rigorous luggage checks (and body searches) before boarding, which can take a few hours of queuing so get there early (we arrived about 8am) to get your hammock up first. The food was much better although still monotonous, and unlike the first two boats there was a well-stocked tuck shop selling beer and also serving more interesting meals at a price. It also had a chapel. The showers were bigger, better and cleaner. The journey took three nights and just under three days.