216 days since selling up. David Jones recording.
We arrived in Iquitos, the jungle city, last Thursday. The unique thing about Iquitos is that everyone, and I mean everyone, owns a motorcycle or a motorcar, which is like a rickshaw but instead of a bicycle to drive it there’s a man revving on a motorbike. They seem to race each other, five a-breast, around the city like they’re in wacky races.
For the first night we stayed in a B+B run by an ex-movie producer, called Walter Saxer. His big film was in the early 80s, a German-backed movie called Fiztcarraldo. Ever heard of it? We hadn’t. But there were pics up in the open air bar of him with Mick Jagger and a clutch of actors we didn’t recognise. The film was set in Iquitos, and he obviously loved the frontier-town jungle so much he decided never to leave!
After a sweltering night in our 1970s/early 80s bedroom (and a decent Argentinian steak BBQ’d by Walter) we were picked up in the morning to go on our jungle trek up the Amazon! By trek I mean a two-hour speedboat ride, though it was like no speed boat we’d ever been in before. We had a short stop on the way to meet a local Amazonian tribe who decided they wanted to dance with us and then sell us their wares…
The Amazon lodge we stayed in 50 miles down river was very comfortable, and to our surprise had a swimming pool; though no electricity except between 6 and 10 at night. Our room had mosquito nets for windows, which allowed us to sleep hearing the noises of the jungle. Except in our case it was a party of marauding Peruvian school children on some kind of summer camp. We’ve heard more animal noises in our old house in Goring; normally a fox in the garden and the cat next door.
Speaking of comparisons to England; the jungle trek which promised much, turned out to be like any old walk in an English woods, except they have bigger, nastier ants in the Amazon, mosquitoes and admittedly impressively tall trees. We didn’t see one Anaconda (thankfully!) and only a distant monkey. But we did hear the distant noise, laughter and music of the Amazon tribes - or was it just the group of Peruvian school kids going on their trek in the opposite direction?
The next morning we were back on our boat on the Amazon, which has quite a romantic sound to it, but spent the morning fishing for piranhas in the heat of the sun and spotting Pink Dolphins native to the Amazon. Unfortunately luck was against us. The piranhas didn’t bite despite the large lumps of beef at the end of our hooks, and the dolphins shied away.
To wrap up our overnight adventure in the jungle, we were then speeded back to Iquitos on a tiny speed boat this time driven by the Evil Knievel of Amazon speedboat drivers, who delighted in dodging the floating logs and other debris coming down the river with the narrowest of margins. To make things even scarier we were accompanied on this journey by the ‘Mervyn’ of jungle guides (i.e. Mervyn the depressed robot from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). At the half way point of the journey he turned around, all of a sudden, and asked me if I was ‘happy’. I said, ‘yes’, thinking he was enquiring about how comfortable I was on the journey back (although it was the most uncomfortable journey ever). He replied that he wasn’t happy, and asked did I want to know why. Of course my counselling training came into its own and stupidly I said, ‘yes’. He told me the love of his life, a girl in the village, was marrying another man and he had had to cry himself to sleep last night. He then turned around with his back to us and didn’t say another word for the rest of the journey. Anyhoo we made it back safely.
We stayed one more night at the jungle B+B, and then left for our last night in Peru back in Lima, for which we had arranged a special treat in a five star hotel – it was so worth it. We had cancelled our hostel room; we thought we needed some pampering after our jungle experience. Next stop, Mexico! Such fun!
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