Rolling down the river: Iquitos to Yurimaguas

Iquitos was not our city. After we had walked over to the Plaza de Armas (that’s what basically every main plaza in any Peruvian town is called) we felt like we had seen it all. The rest of our backpacker friends left for a hostel, we went to the harbor to buy an onward ticket down to Yurimaguas.

The only problem in Iquitos is: There ain’t “the harbor”, there are about seven of them. And of course no one has a clue where the boat to Yurimaguas might leave today from. The second problem is: Everyone pretends to know it. We’d figure that out in detail tomorrow. Today we were told at the second harbor that the boat was already booked out. It only took around half an hour to elaborate that. We got dropped off at the hostel. Reunion with the cargo boat crew.

Iquitos is dirty and noisy. Somehow run-down, I know it has seen better days: Around the 1920s, when the world economy was till booming and did not fear the massive breakdown it would face in 1929, Iquitos was a buzzing city, where the newest fashion was worn. Today it is the biggest city (around 400.000 inhabitants) without road connection to the outer world, but is still crowded with cars and mainly tuk-tuks. We didn’t find anything appealing about the city.

It is meant to be a great starting point for jungle trips and Amazon basin excursions, but as we had just spent a couple of days in jungle, imagined the trips to be cheaper in Bolivia and were warned by Lonely Planet that there are obviously a lot of black sheep operating amongst the herd of travel agents in town, we refrained from taking a tour.

We spent the afternoon eating, watching kids playing soccer and volleyball in the park and planning our escape, which would successfully follow the next day: After driving around in a tuk-tuk for harmless 1,5 hours and checking basically every harbor that Iquitos features, we finally found the cargo boat supposed to leave for Yurimaguas. We were on. (When we left, I somehow thought of a great musical we had played once upon a time back in high-school: Rags. A story about immigrants fleeing to America. Their goodbyes must have looked a little similar to what we saw from our first deck…)

This time, it was more the local way of travelling: Instead of 7 backpackers there were around 170 people aboard, Julez and me being the only non-Peruvian travelers. The price was local-friendly, we paid 40 S per head for a four-day-trip, including three meals a day – which would turn out not to be as disgusting as I had presumed. But the activities stayed the same: Chill out, talk to your hammock neighbors, eat, read, play card and dice games. My personal favorite: Lie in the hammock, marvel at the unique landscape pass by and let my thoughts escape into space…

While floating on Rio Marañon for the first two kilometers or so, we were still in Iquitos. Houses along and in the river, bars, shops and even a floating discotheque passed by! As well as many, many motorized canoes…

Once we got out of town, the landscape became greener. Palm trees, bushes, jungle. Stunning.

Everyone now and then, around three times per day, we would stop at an indigenous village to deliver goods, drop off some people, take new people on board etc. pp. While doing so, approximately 20 inhabitants would run around the boat selling any kind of goods, from dead fish, half-alive chickens to lively parrots, fruits, veggies, pre-cooked meals, sweets, plants and whatever else they had in store. It always felt like a 10-minute-market that ended as suddenly as it had begun. I had the impression it was these guys’ highlight of the week. And, pretty sure, it in fact was. What else could they do out here all day long?

We didn’t have too much to do either. Besides above-mentioned activities, we had our daily highlights as well, may that have been a spectacular sunset…

A crystal-clear, starlit sky (hard to take a picture of, though) or a colorful rainbow (or even two) after having watched heavy raindrops fill up the river.

It was not the most eventful adventure we ever had, but it was a fantastic experience that I can recommend to everyone who ever sets foot on South American soil!