The 2018 Blog / July 6, 2018
Hola Halfie Nation,
We are currently (well now we are sitting in our hostel in Arequipa, but we finally have good enough WiFi to get this post up!) sitting in Karma Cafe in Iquitos, Peru, the world’s largest city only accessible by boat or plane! TripAdvisor promised us fast WiFi here but they lied. The smoothies, however, are delicious. This is our 4th day in the Amazon and it’s been one of the best legs of our trip so far.
Our journey to the Amazon started when Jonny booked both of us plane tickets out of Lima while I wasn’t paying attention. We didn’t actually check what time the flight was until the morning of, but we made it to the airport with plenty of time after we booked it out of the restaurant where Carol stole our food (see the previous post for the dirty deets). And soon enough, we had touched down in Iquitos and hopped in a tuk tuk to our hostel!
The next morning we were picked up by the guide from Amazon Experience, a company we actually checked the reviews of (lookin at you Galaxia) and shelled out a little extra money for. We stopped by the tour office where we picked up rain boots and met the owner of the company, who informed us that we would be filmed for marketing materials. So for the first day or two of the trip we had a short guy with bleached blonde hair and a tall skinny guy with dreadlocks following us with a drone.
Anywhoooo, after an hour and a half on a little wooden boat, we arrived at the Amazon Dolphin lodge, a very, very basic lodge where they only turn the power on from 6pm-9pm every day and they have a dining hall with mosquito netting with holes in it big enough for the local cat to come in and out. This place, we found out, is run by an old man from Barcelona named Juan. Our guide warned us not to talk to him because he’s crazy - apparently he practices “medicine” and claims to have a cure for something that there is actually no cure for. He had a long table (in the public dining room) with a bunch of his “medical” books and some jars with leaves and a giant jar with a dark liquid, and across from that table he had posters for vision tests, like the ones with the letters in different sizes. He spends every day sitting at a small table next to the long table, where he has two laptops and some other jars of stuff that I think are for food, and he was watching a documentary about ancient Egypt when I walked by. His outfit of choice is a white button down, khaki shorts, and knee high navy socks. He also apparently likes to tell the cook how to do her job, which she does not like.
At one point, I needed to buy a poncho (after Jonny kindly donated his to me a few weeks ago and then STOLE IT OUT OF MY BAG right before we went for a hike in the rainforest) (Jonny here, this statement is false. Sarah took my poncho after i kindly lent it to her one day back in Ecuador and refused to give it back. So i had to take matters into my own hands), so Juan opened a closet and gave me one and wrote something down somewhere, so I assumed I’d be charged for it when we checked out, but when we left Juan was nowhere to be found so I got a free poncho. Gracias, Juan.
Our days in the Amazon were spent with our guide, Junior, who got great reviews on TripAdvisor and was a little awkward at first, but we all warmed up to each other eventually. He’s 24 and from the Bora Tribe and likes to tell long stories. A lot of them were good, like the time he almost got bitten by one of the most poisonous snakes in the Amazon but then his grandma performed a ritual so he would be protected from then on, and some of them were a little hard to follow, like when he told us the legend of the pink dolphin...something about how the pink dolphin was actually a man and he fell in love with a village girl but he also stole stuff from the village and then the girl disappeared...idk honestly.
This was our hero and new facebook friend Junior.
With Junior, we went on some day hikes and some night hikes (with tarantulas, much to Jonny’s despair). We saw some birds and a lot of bugs, which Junior liked to touch even though we were like nO JunIOR do NoT tOUcH tHe pOisoNoUs ANTS. We also took a trip to Monkey Island, a rescue center for monkeys that were once illegally kept as pets. I became a mother that day, to Tonya, the clingiest wooly monkey there ever was. Legit, before we showed up I told Jonny I wasn’t gonna touch any monkeys because I wanted to stay ~disease free~ but then as soon as we showed up Tonya climbed on my head and stayed there rubbing her ass on my neck and chewing my hair the. Entire. Time. I also had to yell at her for trying to touch a parrot I was holding in my other hand. I’ve never felt so maternal.
That night we watched sunset from the boat and got to see pink dolphins (and a couple of smaller grey ones). That was super cool. We also got to swim in the Amazon River (whaaaat!!?!), but we pretty much just hopped in and out because I swear something bit my butt. These piranhas out here tryin to cop a feel...unbelievable. Thankfully I got my revenge the next day when we went piranha fishing. However. We learned that we are good at many things, and fishing is not one of them. Whether I caught mackerel instead of piranha, or I got my line stuck in the grass and had to have the boat driver help me get it unstuck, or Jonny’s bait got eaten as soon as he put it in the water, we struggled. We ended up with three piranhas that they then fried up for us (SO GOOD. But tiny lol).
There were some less exciting adventures too, like the time we got out of the boat and walked for ten minutes to see like five lily pads that were covered by overgrown grass. And there were some weird times too, like when we showed up to the Yahua Tribe’s village and they painted our faces (for some reason the Chief decided that Jonny deserved a better paint job than me??? I do not understand), and then we did a dance with them...which was more of a quick walk around a pole with a few steps backwards occasionally. They also taught us how to use a blow gun, which we shot at a target. Junior told us if we missed then we’d have to stay with the tribe forever. Thankfully we are dart champions. Here’s a family photo:
And finally, our days with three full meals a day came to an end (if you don’t know what an apple banana is GO EAT ONE THEY ARE INCREDIBLE). After a two hour boat ride in the pouring rain (that was super cool, being on the Amazon during a rain storm), we made it back to Iquitos. We went to the highly recommended Manatee Rescue Center, where we were told we could bottle feed baby manatees, but we showed up and saw a whole bunch of turtles and only two manatees who just kinda sat there in the water. Our slight disappointment was rectified, however, by Selba the sloth, who for some reason was out of her cage and just chillin in the grass eating leaves. We love you Selba.
Anywhoo, we gotta get back to eating our alligator nuggets (honestly not sure if that was legal or not) and drinking our smoothies before we return to Lima tomorrow! Ciao amigos.
Originally published July 6, 2018 / See the Iquitos gallery
