Iquitos and the Peruvian Jungle

Iquitos is a bustling and fun city, with the main draw being the Belen market, but our first act is get out of it on a jungle trip. This is, after all, is one of the main reasons for being in the Amazon.


- Fizzing through Iquitos on a mototaxi is a great laugh


- Here's one racing past


- Fags galore!!!


- The closest we get to piranha

We hook up the very next day with a couple of American girls from the Bay, Christina and Daisy, and our guide, Elvis (no he's not hooked on burgers). It's first a mototaxi, then a bus ride (there's always a bus involved somewhere) to the small port of Nauta, 100km South on the Rio Marañon, under cloudy skies. Here we pick up a little river taxi to take us to the village where we'll be based.


- Getting ready for action in Nauta, near the mouth of the Amazon


- Bring me jungle


Up the Marañon a way, then through a little, shallow channel filled with water-lilies and reeds, then across the strong current of the Rio Ucayali (a name immortalised by the crazy-haired Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo), is the tiny pueblo of Nuevo Libertad. The houses perch high up on stilts above rich, succulent mud.


- Our stilt pueblo from the water


- Inside our little stilted complex


- And just outside ... this is too pretty


After a lunch gloriously free of beans, we four gringos, Elvis and his two brothers pick up our hammocks and wellington boots and set off in a dugout canoe up another little channel. Shades of the Amazon Star here as we almost immediately ground on a sandbank, but the difference is Elvis, who leaps out, and with a pelvic thrust sets us moving again. Then, dodging the fishing nets maintained by other villagers, we make a right turn up the Rio Yarapa. It's a black river about 20 yards wide, with jungle overhangs forming the edge. It's fizzing with life under the surface. All kinds of little turbulences come and go, and mysterious strings of bubbles adorn the surface. "Anaconda," explains Elvis with a grin, "maybe". Lucy is happily buzzing with supposed snake-horror.


- Elvis guiding us down a rapidly emptying channel


- More lovely jungle


Another turn-off and we're suddenly shoving our way through stubborn roots and branches, and then we've landed, at the mouth of a muddy path. Wellies on, we splat our way into the rapidly darkening jungle, soon coming upon a group of clearings that will be our camp. By torchlight we (actually, Elvis, with a little clumsy assitance) erect our hammocks, army-issue mosquito nets and bivouac canvasses. Elvis is hyperactive with his machete, fashioning poles and strings from the surrounds at a rate Ray Mears would be proud of.


- A sickly grin as the mosquitos swarm around our half-built camp


- Our lovely camp in the morning light


- Camp toilet: a half-built dugout


- Christina and Daisy enjoying a cuppa in the jungly mud


- Elvis and brothers, essential jungle-buddies


Juan Carlos, Elvis' brother, has meanwhile cooked up spaghetti and sauce over a raging fire, which we eat standing up. It probably smells as good as it tastes, but we all stink of the mosquito repellent we have liberally sprayed over our skin and clothing. We expend much energy swatting and cursing. And still they come, sticking to us like lovers, humming snatches of sweet mozzy-music in our ears and giving us little jungle kisses all over our bodies. As we set out on a night-walk, it becomes obvious that we're going to have to learn to love them back, because we aren't going to shake them off.

The forest is extremely sinister by night, regardless of the moon that means it's "too light" to see caiman in the water. The foliage crowds in on us, mostly palms at ground level, and there are many strange noises away from the path. "Don't touch anything", warns Elvis, invoking tree snakes and spiders to keep us honest. In the event we see lots of little, mainly inocuous things: fungi, frogs, ants, stick insects, orchids, and the glimpse of a crashing monkey. No jaguars, no snakes.

No snakes until back at camp, that is. A swift examination of the toilet area by Elvis reveals a little squiggle of snake, pencil-thin and maybe 50cm long. It is silver. "This is very dangerous", says Elvis, backing away slightly, "one of these bit a guide recently and he died in four hours". The snake is swiftly despatched with the flat of a machete. The girls cross their legs and try to hold on until morning. Noone fancies taking a midnight trip here.


- Ribbit


- The toilet-snake: deadly, and dead


The following morning, after a surprisingly good night's sleep in the hammock, and fried bread and papaya courtesy of Juan Carlos, we set off into the jungle again. Elvis gives us chapter and verse on the medicinal qualities of this and that tree, and we drink sweet water from the liana vine.


- Elvis gets busy with the palm fronds


- More Lucy's style than mine


- Just don't say anything...


- Elvis drinking of the liana. Apparently, if you boil it up it cures everything


- We'll never go thirsty in the jungle ... providing we have a guide and a machete


- Jungle Oli shows the girls how to weave palm leaves for a roof. Easy!


Again, we see no big snakes, but rounding a very muddy patch of path, Elvis pulls up sharply and points to a nondescript puddle. The worm-like swarm in the puddle are baby anaconda. The mother would have left when she heard us coming and is only "seconds away", hiding in the undergrowth. Bah!


- Swarming with baby Anacondas. Mummy's around here somewhere. Time to leave...


Our next butt-crunching boat ride, for these dugouts are short on comfort, is to a small lake to swim with the dolphins. But they are AWOL, so we make do with feeding the woolly monkeys on a nearby tree. They seem to be particularly interested in boobs for some reason...


- Woolly-monkey-business


- All aboard! Now, where's that bread?


- Oh God, please don't turn that tap on!


- Lucy's got a paddle, so she's happy.


- Directing progress from the rear


The final, distinctive part of our jungle adventure is an internal one, as we embark on a ritual cleansing of body and mind.

It's 9pm. In a candle-lit corner of our stilt-complex, Lucy, me and the two girls sit, backs to the wall. We are with a local shaman, who, incongruously, wears a red football tee-shirt and a baseball cap. He pours each of us a cup of red, opaque liquid from a plastic bottle. It is foul, thick and bitter and immediately feels wrong. He explains that the drink we just taken, ayahuasca, will cleanse us. We are likely to vomit and, if we are lucky, have diarrohea. We may experience visions. He tells us to smoke the cigarette he hands us which is a vital part of the process, although he doesn't say why. Pretty soon, I'm having a serious headspin and sweating heavily.

Then the shaman starts waving his fan, a handmade palm-frond affair, which makes such a buzzing, humming noise that I am convinced that I'm being asaulted by crazy insects. Then the hallucinations come: a stream of junky cultural references that have been lurking around in the quiet recesses of my brain for some time. As they reach their peak my stomach kicks in, and before I'm anywhere near a bathroom, I decorate the mud with lunch. After composing myself a little, which isn't easy, I go back and sit down. Everyone else is having the same problem. Lucy finds herself a convenient corner and heaves repeatedly.

The shaman keeps his fan working and sings little tunes. He checks in with us after we've all been assailed by the heaves to see if we would like some more of the terrible brew. None of us want, or need it. I'm fairly sure he repeats these conversations back to his fan, but noone else thinks so. I'm probably dreaming that. The pattern of visions and vomit continues for some time. Eventually, the shaman decides that we are not about to fly from the roof and calms us down with a different tune. Then we are sent to bed.

The following morning we have a debrief. All four of us hallucinated heavily and we have laugh running through the sillier ones. None of us feel really bad. I am a bit tender in the stomach, but very clear-headed, as though I have got rid of a lot of mental rubbish. Feed me some new information!!! To complete the ritual we drink lemonade and eat a vegetable soup, then take a long shower.

You'll be pleased to hear that we have no photos of this disgusting process, but...


- ...the ayahuasca ceremony might have looked like this on a different day


- This is certainly how we felt (actually a shrunken head)


And that's it for the jungle. Last word goes to the mosquitos:


- Yeah, but you should have seen the mosquito afterwards...

The Amazon River: Belém to Iquitos by boat

So, we arrive at Belém do Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon, strung out after 36 hours of bus, rice and beans. We've shared our pain with an English/South African couple, Philippa and Conrad. These two are taking the same onward journey as us, on a slow boat to Manaus, and make for good companions.

Belém is good for buying hammocks, so we do that. Then, after some rice and beans and the first of many incredible tropical juices we follow the Rough Guide's sagely advice and queue for the boat, some six hours before departure, hoping for that perfect hammock spot. Things are starting to go wrong already: yesterday's deaprture ran into problems and all the passengers have been moved to our boat. As we board, we do our best with the hammocks, picking a spot near the exit and away from the toilets, but as the hour of departure comes and goes, more and more Brazilians are piling in and crowding our space. A pair of Dutch teachers who've latched on to us give up the ghost in claustrophobic fear and abandon ship before the off. Apparently yet another boatload of people has been sicked off onto us. "How many liferafts does the boat hold?" Lucy asks the captain. He looks like he doesn't know, says "about a hundred", and scurries off. Maybe we're a bit worried. A nearby old hammock-hand tells us that the deck isn't really that crowded. Maybe we're still a bit worried.


- All hope and expectation, queuing for the boat


- Quietly hanging our hammocks. We've got a great spot.


- Holy hammock! Where did they all come from?


A couple of hours late, at 8pm, we depart, and our concerns recede with the lights of Belém. We take a couple of tinnies on the top deck and feel the the spirit of Amazon adventure infect us. By ten O´Clock we're swinging ourselves to sleep.

In the early hours we're awoken by a sharp maneuvre and a rending screech. This doesn't sound good, and indeed it isn't. The story emerges slowly, our best source of information being Robson, our Swiss-Brazilian compadre in the cabins. The captain has been taking cachaça, and girls, on the bridge. His attention thus compromised, he has failed to notice that great iron buoy in mid-stream and swiped it hard, taking out one of our propellers in the process. We're now going slowly.

But not to worry. We're safe, and on the Amazon! The jungle sprouts on all sides, and stilted houses peep out of the margins. Kids on canoes pop out to wave at us or receive plastic bags of goodies. Some enterprising ones moor astern while we move and sell us strange jungle fruit.


- Here come the kids on their canoes


We park at a tiny dock and crew jump over the side to make some repairs under the waterline. They do something, because soon we're off again. Lucy and Philippa decide to confront the captain about his dodgy decision-making and get, respectively, a grope and a kiss for their troubles. What a piece of work!


- The state-of-the art dock where we make some repairs


Life on board is slipping already into something of a routine. Breakfast, at six am, is some super-sweet coffee, a bun and, if we're lucky, a slice of melon. This is followed by a bit of dossing in the hammocks, then a trip up top for some sun and mooching about. Lunch, bizarrely, starts at 10:30, and is consistently rice, spaghetti, beans and meat. No variation. More mooching and snoozing and watching the jungle slip by. Dinner (rice, spaghetti and meat, no beans) at an unsociable 16:30. Upstairs for a beer or two, then an early night. It's quite agreeable and funny at first.


- We call it the "funny fruit". Looks wierd, tastes wierd, is wierd


- A lovely moment in the sun. Now I want a beer


- Conrad and Philippa waiting for us to move


On night number two, there is more drama. We are lost up a channel through the Ilha do Marajó, and stuck. Thankfully, a barge is passing and pushes us back to safety and the right path. Apparently, according Robson, we were taking a "short cut", and the captain got it wrong. We seem to be making steady progress again on day three until luncheon, when there's a great twaaang from below. Robson tells us that the propeller they fixed is now no longer attached to the boat, thanks to the sandbank we just crashed into. Our captain is looking more and more like a liability. We swap our rescue barge for a smaller boat that limpets itself to our side and chugs us along.

We are seriously behind schedule now and beginning to get grumpy. We sand-bank for the third time and spend hours rotating vainly before we finally free ourself. Another short-cut gone wrong, and the captain is lost again, so we travel backwards for the rest of the day. Conditions in the hammock deck are starting to become squalid. Our fellow travellers, 98% Brazilian, are showing little regard for public hygiene: noses are emptied on to the floor, spit is spat willy-nilly; there's shit in the toilet, shit on the toilet, shit outside the toilet, shit in the shower, and shit in a cup (given that everything from plastic bottles to cigarette packets is routinely thrown overboard, I can only assume that this last is a piece of protest art). Lots of people, including me, come down with a common cold. We are not happy bunnies.


- We're stuck in the mud. One of these boats is going to pull us out...


- Thank God! It's the bigger one!


After five days, our supposed journey time for the entire trip to Manaus, we have made half distance, where we stop for repairs. The maritime police say we cannot leave until the repairs are completed. We leave at 10pm, so it must be fixed! But no, this is the latest crime of our captain, who has tricked the cops and is still sneakily using the smaller boat to push us. At the next stop, we revolt, going straight to the police station and rousing a sleepy lieutenant with our bevvy of complaints. He shrugs and says nothing doing until the next port. Another day of rice and beans!!!

Finally we're moved, on to a far nicer boat, who make far nicer rice and beans and even sell fruit. It's an incident-free final section of journey. We eventually dock at the famous floating pontoons of Manaus at 3am on day nine.


- That's more like it. Relaxing on the Cesar Brelaz with a lolly


- Keeping watch for sandbanks, dolphins and whatnot


- Wouldn't fancy meeting that at night with our last captain in charge...


Time for a rest in Manaus, not the World's prettiest city. But it's a managable size, and has the most amazing juices. We're talking such exotics as maracujá, capuacu, tapereba, camu-camu, acai, guaraná, catuaba and mirata. It also has that iconic opera house, transported piece by piece from Europe back in the rubber-baron days.


- The confluence of black and muddy water. The black water contains tannins that kill mosquito larvae. We like that!


- The Opera House as seen from Manaus' revolving restaurant


From Manaus we take a fast, and efficient boat to Tabatinga, in a complicated corner bordering Peru and Colombia. The highlight of our journey is having one of the windows "shot" out as we passed close to the shore. In Tabatinga we eat ceviche (fish soused in lime and chilli) and I burn my mouth trying to bite open a cashew nut straight from the tree; do not try at home, kids.


- How much ceviche?


- Local taxi at Tabatinga

From here we catch yet another fast boat into Peru and the bustling port of Iquitos. Madly, it is still possible to bring your ocean-going vessel here, some 3,500km up the river.

There's more jungle action on the way, but for now we leave you with some of the amazing sights that the Amazon river has to offer...


- A bloody sunrise, 5:30am


- The shimmering water of the Amazon, a squall is coming


- And a peerless sunset.


- And yet another...