AMAZON, NOT-DOT.COM

A passenger ferryboat on the Amazon.  For overnight trips there are hammocks.

Our ship, the "Aqua," underway.  And luxury comfort.

Three degrees south of the equator, in Peru.  Really far from Vermont.  In many ways.

It’s the largest city in the world that has no roads leading in or out.  The only ways to get here are by plane flights from Lima, mostly, or travel by riverboat.  When you consider that Iquitos is on the western Pacific side of South America, it is intriguing to think that you can arrive by boat from the Atlantic Ocean, sailing some 2,300 miles from the 200-mile wide mouth of the Amazon all the way to Iquitos, Peru. The Amazon begins at Iquitos, technically speaking, because it is here that the Marañon and Ucayali, major rivers themselves, meet to form what from this point on is named on maps as the Rio Amazonas.  And it is here the Amazon makes its unfaltering right-hand turn to the east.  These are all facts I had been blithely unaware of.

After the Marañon and Ucayali rivers join, the Amazon, technically speaking, begins

It’s impossible to avoid talking of numbers when describing the Amazon:  it’s the largest drainage basin in the world (some 40% of South America), with tributaries pouring in from Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil.  It is as much as 30 miles wide in places at high water from approximately November to June, and nearly a mile wide in Iquitos.  Yet for all its length it drops only about one inch per mile for some 4,000 miles. The water is thick and opaque with clay sediment, unlike the “black water” feeder rivers, clearer, yet darkened with tannin.  A cone of sediment some 200 miles or so long coats the ocean at its outlet.  A nightmare of navigation after dark, the river is replete with floating logs and branches that occasionally stick up like the remains of a rotting pier, and constantly shifting sandbanks.  The entire river used to flow directly past Iquitos but shifted course a few years ago, and Iquitos now lies along the Rio Italaya.  A goodly portion of the land through which the rivers flow is floodplain.

Along the Rio Itaya in the Belén sector of Iquitos, houses set to float on balsa logs line the banks.

During the wet season the water rises some 20 or more feet around Iquitos, but last year was freakish, and in March the water kept on rising and rising, flooding all the lower ground of Iquitos except for those houses built on balsa rafts.   Making matters worse, last year also brought Iquitos a dengue fever epidemic. One of our ship guides, Victor, told us how the floodwaters were so extensive a swimming anaconda grabbed a 9-year-old girl in her own flooded house.  Fortunately her screams caught the attention of her father who paddled to the house in his canoe and with a blow of his machete cut off the snake's head.  This flood was in weird contrast to the equally freakish drought of the year before.  Climate change, our guides felt, was affecting water levels, the amounts and timing of the rain, and was bringing increasingly high temperatures. 

The poorer people and new arrivals who populate the Belén sector of Iquitos saw their stilt houses flooded last March.

Our hotel in Iquitos, more than likely on terra firma.

Iquitos is bustling, heterogeneous, grubby, rakish.  In short, interesting.  Since there are no roads that lead anywhere. with the single exception of a 70 mile-long road that took 30 years to build and connects the town of Nauta, population15,000, to Iquitos, nearly everyone gets around by motocarro, a kind of covered rickshaw propelled by motorcycle, the engines of which provide a constant background roar.  Iquitos is growing wildly, already having over a population of over 600,000, fed by people from the jungle lured by possibilities of having different or better lives.  All of our guides––Cesar, Daniel, Victor, Roland––had been born in remote parts of the jungle and still have family there.  Victor’s father, for example, who lives a day’s boat trip away down the Pacaya River, still catches fish with a spear.  Near where Victor’s family lives but further away from the river where one still finds “traditional” tribes lives a group known as “cat people” because of sticks thrust through their noses that look like whiskers.  The way Iquitos is developing, its size could one day rival Manaus, the famous Brazilian frontier town in the heart of Amazonia.  But no matter how large Iquitos gets it’s likely to remain a city of two- or at most three-story buildings.  A couple of years ago some shortsighted person built a ten-story building that almost immediately started to lean as it settled into Iquitos’ soft sedimentary clay.  Instead of taking it down, the government bought it and popped several antennas on top, and it remains a decaying fungus-spotted blue eyesore.

A street in Iquitos, with the too-tall blue building in the background

On our elegant ship, where we spent a week exploring the Amazon and several other rivers, memorably the Pacaya in the pristine Pacaya-Samiria Reserve, we were coddled with nightly tasting menus of imaginatively prepared local and Peruvian food, wine, and Pisco Sours, Peru’s national cocktail.  (Peruvian food overall, including Lima, is the most interesting and delicious amalgam of flavors from the Andes, the ocean, the tropics–fruit for example–and the Amazon.)  Cocooned in our air-conditioned staterooms we could watch the insects plaster themselves on the outside on our windows after dark.  But from our short hikes we returned drenched with sweat, even though our expeditions were completed before 11 in the morning or no earlier than 4 in the afternoon.  We wore long sleeves despite the heat because of insects or the chance, say, of leaning against "punishment trees," where biting ants crawl up and down the trunks or up and down whatever is touching the trunks, hats to protect ourselves from the sun, and rubber boots because of snakes.  We knew, too, as we coasted in small launches along the rivers that the lovely welcoming riverbanks were not really as welcoming as they looked, even though malaria-carrying mosquitos were not in this area according to our ship’s guides, proof of which was that the little owl monkeys we saw can’t live in malarial areas. 

Owl monkeys, normally nocturnal, but interested in us standing below.

We would not have wanted to be abandoned for a night without shelter.  We had seen snakes on our walks, frogs, bats, and spiders, and the light-reflecting red eyes of the cayman lined both banks of the river at night.

  A "Goliath" spider

The poison dart frog

Me, gingerly holding a small cayman

Me and a three-toed sloth.  This was a visit to a friend of our guide's place, so I'm not togged up head to toe.
Holding a sloth isn't terribly smart as parasites and ants live in their fur in symbiosis with the sloth.
Fortunately, I had no open wounds.

Holding this (baby) anaconda was an entirely different thing.  It was heavy, but–honestly–felt benign.

The piraña I caught; Ken caught one of the same size.

Early explorers of the region emerged from the jungle skinny, unkempt and often unhinged.  Many of them starved:  In “The Lost City of  Z,” David Grann describes several expeditions undertaken in the 1920’s by the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett who was as famous for vanishing without a trace as for his discoveries:  “Scrounging for food, Fawcett and his men could make out only buttressed tree trunks and cascades of vines.  Chemical –laced fungi and billions of termites and ants had stripped bare much of the jungle floor.  Fawcett had been taught to scavenge for dead animals, but there were none to be found:  every corpse was instantly recycled back into the living.  Trees drained even more nutrients from a soil already leached by rain and floods.”  

Still life:  a carnivorous butterfly, feasting on a dead catfish.

They encountered sweat bees (drawn to sweat, of which there was surely an abundance, and called–horribly–“eye lickers” in Brazil), vampire bats that transmitted lethal protozoa, malarial mosquitos, maggots that infected open wounds, electric eels that sizzled the horses and dogs they had with them, fire ants, pirañas, poisonous vipers, poisonous ants, termites, caymans, trees with poisonous sap (the curare tree, for one) poisonous frogs (the poison dart frog) and leg-eating mud-holes.  In “The River of Doubt,” the tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazon expedition, author Candace Millard adds:  “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite:  Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its in habitants, every minute of every day.”  Whew.

Ken, modern day explorer

It took two of us to pull me out of the mud.

Most of the people who live along the rivers are subsistence farmers, growing small patches of corn, yucca, papaya, melons, and sometimes rice.  Most of their protein comes from fish.  In the markets we found wild boar meat, turtle meat and turtle eggs, and innumerable kinds of Amazonian fish from small catfish to paiche, the largest known freshwater fish.  New conservation practices discourage the traditional eating of manatees that are now finding protection.  Illnesses that befell explorers don’t seem to trouble the local people who use the many natural medicines of the jungle.  The local people swim and wash in the black water rivers, and many swim in the Amazon, with immunities we undoubtedly don't have.  I would be wary:  lurking in the murky water, along with the graceful gray and pink river dolphins, are pirañas and various kinds of parasites, the most notorious of which is the candiru, well known by watchers of exotic animal programs who may know why–ugly story!–you should not pee in the Amazon.

Ken feeds a young manatee at the manatee rescue center near Iquitos.  River manatees need to take mother's milk until they are a year and a half old.  This special substitute milk is supplied by the Dallas Aquarium.

We visited a school where kindergarten was crowded with beautiful cheerful faces.  But the higher the grade, the fewer students, especially girls, there were in class. An upper level secondary class (where they were learning English) held only three boys.  From everyone we met we felt warmth and hospitality, and there were always waves and smiles.  This caused us to feel almost uncomfortable, as we were invading their houses just by looking, or photographing:  living quarters, belongings and all, are vulnerable, completely open to the air, each family on a platform with few walls or coverings for them to hide behind.  What do they think about where we come from, or who we are?  If they were to leave Iquitos in any way other than by boat, where would they choose to go?  I cannot imagine how Lima would affect their senses.  None of our guides had ever seen snow.  One guide, I'm pretty sure, had been to Lima, but I don't think the others had ever left Iquitos except to travel in the jungle.

A young mother, age 25, in her home, with two of her children.  Each sibling takes care of the younger one, and they often wander on their own.  Young boys play with machetes, and I watched one four or five year old pull the tail of an anaconda.

This father is repairing his outboard motor; below and at rear is their floating kitchen.

A man fishing from his dugout canoe.

The launch from our larger boat, at right, explores a small river.

And then there were the river dolphins, gray ones and pink, and many, many birds.  By category I can name kingfishers, wading birds, vultures, hawks and kites, ibis, herons and egrets, flycatchers, swallows and swifts, tanagers and honeycreepers, orioles and blackbirds, parrots, macaws and parakeets, trogons and hummingbirds, nighthawks and nightjars, toucans and barbets, woodpeckers and woodcreepers.  I must also admit I didn’t see many of these birds very well, but when I heard our guide call out “There’s a black-fronted nunbird,” I really tried to find it.  My favorite was the "Horned Screamer."

Dark comes quickly, and early.  Those who live here wake with the sun, and go to bed with the dark.