Jack n Karen's Travel Blog: Amazon River in Peru

We flew into Lima, Peru and promptly were dropped off at the wrong hotel in the Miraflores District. Oh, oh not good! But within 30 minutes the driver was back and we found the hotel.

Amazon people

We are on an adventure by OAT-Outdoor Adventure Travels. We have 3 segments, the first being 5 days in the Amazon. We flew from Lima to Iquitos, the largest city in the world (pop. about a million) that can’t be reached by road.

We came on a 2 hour flight then took a transfer boat 100 miles down the Amazon. The mighty river flows west to east through Peru to Brazil. Iquitos is 2,300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean yet is Peru’s largest river port for cargo ships and barges.

Our naturalist guide and lodging are with Explorama, started in the 1960’s as a unique system of 3 lodges & a research center that houses students, researchers, environmentalists and inquisitive travelers, boats to move people and several foundations to help improve the lives of the indigenous people of the area with clean water and education.

Shaman , or healer, using plants of the jungle

Canopy walk

Small motorized canoe

Used to move supplies and produce to market

We stayed 3 days at the fairly remote Explorama lodge and another 2 nights at the Ceiba Lodge that is much more of a resort (hot water, air conditioning and even a swimming pool).

The Explorama Lodge, built over 50 years ago is on the edge of small tributary of the Amazon in the middle of the huge rain forest. It’s very similar to a “summer camp”! A screened-in wooden main dining room, individual rooms with screen windows and paper-thin walls that made for hearing lots of laughter from the adjoining rooms! Showers were only cold water, beds were wooden cots with thin mattress and mosquito netting and lot of jungle sounds around. As rustic as it sounds, there was wi-fi (!), a well-stocked bar and individual bathrooms-which of course we appreciated and not necessarily in that order.

Mosquito netting over our bed

Our days were packed full of excitement always traveling by small open boat or on foot. Since the Amazon is very near the equator the temperature maintains a steady 85 degrees with stifling 90% humidity!! Our “safari-type” clothing was soaked with perspiration matter of minutes. The 13 of us figured we are all in the same boat, so to say.

Some highlights were:

•fishing for piranha (collectively we caught only 1);

•a tiny single person rum distillery that has a 200 year old sugarcane press powered by a horse;

•meeting two different healers-one in a micro sized medical clinic run by an American doctor and the other a skilled Shaman who studies and utilizes medicinal plants in the forest;

•the longest treetop canopy trek in the world-1/4 mile with 14 iiplatforms and cable walkways 120 feet above the forest floor; has

•visiting the Yagua people to learn about their culture and how the arrival of Europeans and time has affected them;

•demonstration of how the Yagua make and still utilize poison tipped darts in blow guns to hunt (and our opportunity to try it!);

We were so fascinated by life along the Amazon and its tributary rivers. Between Iquitos and Brazil there are several large villages of 4-5,000 people, many tiny villages of a few hundred people and numerous solitary families “squatting “ out a living with what they can use from the forest for their homes. The Yagua homes generally don’t have electricity, toilets or even running water. They are large in space because of the extended families but very sparse inside often with little or no actual furniture. In very recent years the Peruvian government has been supplying individual homes with a 40 watt solar panel and battery. This provides a single light bulb in the main room and kitchen and electric plug for perhaps a radio. Kitchen stoves are often still open flame. While the benefit of the solar is immense the reasoning behind is less altruistic. The government really wanted to thwart the drug traffickers who were supplying the people with kerosene and lamps! So now there is no kerosene produced in Peru.

Most all of the small villages have at least a primary school and those with around 400 people also have a preschool and high school. Teachers, many from villages themselves, have 6 years of college in Iquito. The government pays their salaries, the village provides a house for them to board in during the school year and many books and supplies come from foundations such as Explorama. We got to interact with the school kids several who proudly showed us their pets (turtle, puppy or parrot) or a simple pinwheel made from a leaf.