Reflections in the Water – Our Adventures on the Amazon

“Buena onda”…There’s something about warm, watery places that just suit me. There’s a vibe that saturates these places and everyone in it – a welcoming and relaxed sense of fun. In these warm watery places, basic survival seems to come relatively easy and leaves people with so much more energy and time to devote to just enjoying life. Much less effort is needed to fend off the elements or to fill the tummy. Delicious, exotic fruits drop right out of the trees, and even obtaining your daily protein requirement consists of a relaxing activity many first world folks would choose to do in their leisure time – bobbing quietly in a boat, just waiting for a fish to bite. In these places, not only survival is easy, but so is entertaining one’s self, with the water offering limitless opportunities for play and respite from the heat.

I feel this buena onda here on the Pacific Ocean at Playa Mancora, just as I felt it last week a thousand kilometers inland near the border with Brasil on the banks of the Amazon River – both with warm breezes and cool water, and both filled with people with no worry and no hurry, and wearing practically nothing. Music floats lazily through the hot air and ice cold beers abound. Yet, one place is a dry coastal desert and the other an ultra humid tropical jungle, the latter with few inhabitants who will ever see the ocean.

One great thing about Iquitos was that despite it’s scarcity of roads, it was so easy to circumvent the packaged tours and venture all over the jungle, up and down all sorts of rivers, to all kinds of fascinating places, all on public collective boats.

We went up the Rio Nanay to the village of Padre Cocha, where we had the yummiest cheapest humitas (a rice-based tamale) and shave ice for lunch, then followed the town’s main “highway” (a concrete sidewalk just wide enough for 2 bicycles to ride abreast) 15 minutes to a butterfly farm.

We toured around the floating market town of Belen on the Rio Itaya in a non-motorized canoe–taxi. There, rickety planks extend out from the shore to serve as sidewalks between the first few floating (and sinking) houses. If you live beyond that, you swim (or hail a canoe) the rest of the way home.

We took our first dip into the famous Rio Amazon on Kristian’s birthday, when we hopped one of these putt-putt collectivo canoes, called a “peque peque” by the locals, for the village of Barrio Florido. But the man we were chatting to during the ride turned out to be governor’s teniente (right-hand-man) in the town just beyond Barrio Florido, and offerend to show us around. So we took him up on it and went to Santa Rosa de Ojeal instead. Jose Fernandez introduced us to practically everyone in town and then led us across the soccer field and through the woods to his own home/sugar mill. But this was not your “run of the mill” sugar mill (tee hee), but a contraption that resembled a converted lawn mower, sitting in the middle of his indoor-outdoor living room, which, upon a couple good yanks at the cord, would rev up and squish the juice out of each sweet stalk. Nor was this mill used for ordinary ends, but once Jose has a barrel full of sugar can juice he passes it through a home made distiller to make what they call “aguardiente”, which made my head spin after only one sip! After several toasts to Kristian’s birthday, Jose and his family loaded us up with strange fruits from their yard and sent us on our way to catch the next canoe back to Barrio Florido. There, we sipped on a local beer and watched the world float by from a lovely open-air bar whose foundations stood right in the legendary river. When we finally inquired about the next “bus” back to Iquitos, our amigo at the bar cringed, eyebrows high in a very “you are up shit creek, my friend” fashion and informed us that the colectivo canoes had stopped running for the day, as the ink of night was fast filling the veins of the Amazon and the boats have no lights. Oooops. In the end we had to resort to chartering a private ride for 20 soles instead of the collective price of three soles and slowly made our way against the current to Iquitos, while dodging a barrage of oncoming driftwood in the pitch black of the jungle night.

Perhaps our best adventure boat-hopping down the Amazon came a couple days later when we took off in search of a remote village called Urco Miraño, where we were told the people were indigenous Yagua, friendly and real. First we zoomed down the Amazon for 45 minutes in a collective speedboat to a small port town called Mazan. There, we got a mototaxi from the bank of the Amazon over to the other side of town on the bank of the Rio Napo, which you could take all the way up to northern Ecuador if you had two weeks to kill. We got so absorbed in our delicious lunch of paiche, a giant, ancient (and endangered – oops) river fish, that we missed the direct boat to Urco Miraño. The boat that we did catch dropped us off after three hours in the middle of nowhere with vague instructions for walking the rest of the way. But luck was on our side and some little kids emerged from the bushes and hailed us a lift with another lone boater. Once at Urco Miraño we stepped off the boat into a world where cash means practically nothing and people welcome you into their homes and their lives for free. Where beer and whisky are unknown but masato, a fermented yucca soup, is slugged down by men, women and children with gusto at all hours. Where everyone in town is related to everyone else and everyone pitches in when there’s work to be done. Even we got to join in as they happened to hold a “minga” during our stay. The whole town was invited to B.Y.O.M. (bring your own machete) to weed one person’s yucca plot then convene at the host’s home for a masato party afterwards. So with a couple of borrowed machetes, Kristian and I hacked away in the jungle heat all afternoon, drowning our blisters in many, many bowls of masato (ick!) both during the minga and afterward at the party. Upon our departure from Urco Miraño, our host, Corina, presented me a beautiful reed bag she wove herself and to Kristian a keychain to thank us for our help and remind us of our visit to their little pocket of the jungle – as if I could ever forget that incredible place!

River Rythms

the creeeek craaaack of hammocks swaying…. the plop plop of fruits escaping from parrot beaks and landing in the river below…. the lapping of ripples against the long wooden skiffs moored to the dock….  the nasal hum of an outboard motor, along with cheerful singing from the boat drivers, fading in and out as they go by…. the threatening roar from a howler monkey…. the emphysemic hacking of the prehistoric, blue-faced, mohawk bird…. the hollow fssssss of a pink dolphin coming up for air…. the silence of the suspiciously still sunbathing gators dangerously nearby on the bank …. the sudden oowahoo-wa-oooo of one bird…. then eeeh! ow! ow! ow! of another…. more intermittent twittering, clucking, clicking, wailing, yapping and screaming from a myriad of other river birds…. and all the while in the background is the seismic drone of mosquitoes far and near…. and the fax machine beeping and buzzing of the countless other insects…. each creature adding its own unique tune to the rhythm of the Rio Yacumo, in the jungle pampas of Bolivia.

Esteros de Iberá, NE Argentina

So we traded the far south’s cold and icy sea, filled with whales, seals and penguins, for the far north’s hot and muggy swamps with caymans, monkeys, and giant amphibious rodents, when we abandoned Tierra del Fuego and our Antarctica plan, spun 180º and made a b-line for the Esteros de Iberá. This place, like Antarctica, is also very remote and rather difficult to get to, but unlike Antarctica, we actually succeeded in reaching it, as it was only isolated from the nearest major bus route by a 200 overland kilometros, instead of 1000 over sea.

And what a place!!! After a long, hot and extremely bumpy ride across an expanse so green & flat it could have been a golf course for giants, we finally arrived at the sparsely populated Colonia Pelegrini. The village lies on what was technically a peninsula jutting into the huge Iberá lagoon, but the connecting isthmus was so skinny that one lane of traffic could barely squeeze onto it, making it feel more like we were camping on just one of the many floating islands on the lake. Although we got thoroughly munched by mosquitoes and were sweating bullets in the hot, humid, treeless terrain, it was a most satisfying visit. In one day, we saw the largest rodent in the world (carpincho) who spends most of his time in the water, over 20 yacuré negro (black cayman) lurking among the floating islands, a gaggle of yellow monkeys nibbling at the nuts in a palm tree, a rare miniature deer (pudu), and a ton of colorful and bizarre birds. During a 2-hour pole-boat tour among the floating islands we saw one bird so big it looked as if it could fall through the floating grass at any moment, martín pescadors (king fishers), cormorants, another bird who yapped like a chihuahua and flew like a mosquito, with its spindly legs hanging limply below, and even a giant, slow flying bird of prey, called the caracole. All this with a backdrop of water reeds silhouetted in front of a blazing red ball as the sun sank behind the islands and disappeared into the dark pink of the lagoon.

Talk about instant satisfaction and constant stimulation! If it weren’t for the excrutiatingly slow, hot, boring, uncomfortable bus ride you gotta suffer through to get there, Esteros de Iberá would be the All-American traveller’s dream come true.