Woke up really
early, considering we went to bed around 1:30ish. Woke up about 5 am
because we were freezing. (I know, in the Amazon, right?) The room
had an A/C unit way up on the wall, and it was fine when we went to
bed, but didn't shut off, and we didn't notice it had a remote on the
bedside table. But it ran all night and all we had were sheets. I
woke up freezing and walked out and down the hallway to see Iquitos
just after daybreak for the first time in the light. It is lovely and
poor and sad and glorious all at once. Beautiful people, very poor.
The young hotel worker, Jared, said he would go with me to find a
phone charger and we hailed a mototaxi and found one. On the ride
there we talked about the differences between our countries including
minimum wage, street maintenance, plumbing, trash collection, how
much a job pays and how much things cost as well. He was a cool guy,
probably about 22. We made it back to the hotel, packed up, got a
breakfast of toast and jam with banana juice and our driver came and
picked us up for our Amazon trip. We got dropped off down by the
river after driving for about 15 minutes, passing a lot of
construction. The project was for a city-wide sewage treatment
system. Currently, all the sewage goes to the river, untreated. After
the project, it will all be sanitized. We walked through a small
market near the water with fresh fish and fruit. I think a lady
didn't like us very much and said some things under her breath b/c we
didn't buy her fish. We walked down a wooden plank dock to our boat,
a 15 foot long wooden boat with benches along both sides and a wooden
roof. There were 8 of us. Mark, myself, Ray from the Netherlands,
Molly from North Carolina, Mike from Massachusetts, Ray from
Wisconsin, and Benoit and Annabelle from France. We saw some amazing
birds and were told what each of them were. I remember the turkey
vulture. We then came to the point where 3 rivers merge into each
other, 1 being the Amazon. You could clearly see 2 black colored
rivers flowing into the “milky coffee” Amazon and here we saw
some pink and grey bottlenose dolphins breaching all around us. Then
we stopped at a small fishing village to see their caiman alligator
farm with giant lily pads. I bought a beer from one of the locals and
was amazed by the beauty of this place. Saw a macaw, chickens and
roosters were running around. Very different here. For example, our
camp down river, in the room we are sleeping, there is a goose in a
box in the corner of the room incubating some eggs. We saw the
alligators, giant lily pads, and huge fish before heading back to the
boat and going down river to our camp. First thing we see when we get
there is a man carving a boat and fresh fish being dried out on a
rack made from sticks. The dock was just a couple of boards and mud
steps and the walkway was boards for about a quarter mile so you
wouldn't have to walk in mud. The house has a semi-large room with 3
hammocks and the whole thing is screened in for bug control. There is
one solar powered light and 2 large picnic tables. There are a couple
of lamp lights lit by kerosene and the outhouse bathroom that is lit
by glowsticks. There are 3 main sleeping rooms, 2 have about 10 beds
each and the third has 3 beds. All the beds have mosquito nets over
them and if you were reading this on my notebook as I'm writing it,
you'd see many mosquito smudges on my paper, because they're all
over. We were served lunch which consisted of cucumbers, tomatoes,
some amazon vegetable with chicken, rice, potatoes and lemonade. I
took a nap in a hammock and when I woke up, we took a pretty long
boat ride and fished for piranhas with rods made from branches and
fishing line attached to them. The boat motor barely worked when
starting and stopping. I caught 4 sabalus and Mark caught the only 2
piranhas of the group. All-in-all we caught about 25 fish. We tossed
them in the bottom of the boat. We headed back as the sun set over
the trees. It was amazing. We saw heron, bats, kingfishers and many
other birds on the way back. Also, earlier I had gone to a tree down
by the river at camp and saw leaf cutter ants all marching from the
mud with fallen pieces of flower from the mud, up a small vine,
straight vertical for about 4 feet, then across a huge branch, and up
the tree trunk further than I could see, it looked like the Planet
Earth documentary, very cool to see. Dinner was ready when we got
back from fishing. Beef with gravy, rice and pasta. I think we are
eating the fish we caught for lunch tomorrow.
After dinner we
walked down to the beach to look at all the stars, which were amazing
with no light pollution for miles and miles. We saw the Southern
cross and the scorpion, constellations which are only visible in the
southern hemisphere. Molly and Ray had some marijuana from Iquitos
and we smoked it, then we were supposed to go look for the espinoza
frog, a crazy cool bright green tree frog found only in the Amazon
jungle and has DMT, a toxin it secretes from its skin, which can have
a psychedelic effect on humans. Unbeknownst to a few of us, this
required a boat ride. Buzzing from the weed, I was giggly and in
absolute awe of the whole experience. This sounds like one of the
best stories of my life, sounds like a movie. Taking a nighttime boat
ride on the Amazon River, millions of stars, many shooting stars,
trekking up a muddy hill in mud boots, nearly knee deep in mud at
places, up into a clearing lit only by the moonlight, down to a
swampy area to find these brilliant green frogs. Our guide caught 2
of them. He used his machete to clean off a branch and caught one
with a stick off of a branch that was seemingly out of reach. It was
awesome. We went back to camp with the frogs, and almost everyone
went to bed except for me, Molly, Ray and Ashuku, our guide. We
stayed up for about an hour asking him questions as I wrote this
blog. Whew! I hope I didn't forget anything...what a great day!
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