A week on the water

We spent three days in Iquitos which is a cute little town but we also needed some time to get used to the heat. After so many day on the gold Altiplano and a week at windy and dry Huanchaco the humidity of the jungle hit us hard. We used the time we had in Iquiitos to do what will probably be the most memorable experience of the whole trip for me: we bottlefed baby manatees at the Amazon Rescue Center. In Peru a lot of people keep manatees as pets in their pools and then they don't know what to feed them and a lot of these poor creature die a slow death. Or they get hunted and injured by harpunes and knives. These animals get cared for in the Rescue Center. The older ones are actually in a diferent place where they don't have so much contact with humans anymore and have to look for their own food already, but they use the babies to convince people to make donation in the form of buying a bottle of milk that you are then allowed to feed them yourself. Of course it also worked on me (I would have given something anyway, becuse the entrance fee of 3 Soles is just a ridiculouly low amount of money to keep a place like that running) and feeding the manatees was just so amazing. They are so cure and adorable, but see it yourselves:

Two days later it was time for us to board our boat to the triple border of Peru, Columbia and Brazil. We knew that the boat would be full but I really did not imagine what we experienced then. We arrived early in the afternoon and picked what looked like a good spot as there were very few people on the boat yet. The boat was about to leave around 6, when we finally left at 9 it was so cramped full of people, you couldn't walk anywhere, you couldn't sit or stand anywhere. Luckily there was a police control before we left the harbour, because theysent us stright back to the port as there were a 100 people more on the boat than allowed. So we went back and finally left the port around midnight for the second time. This delay ment that we would also arrive in Santa Rosa one day late. We slept surrisingly well on the first night, but on the second and third day more and more people went on the boats at all the little villages we stopped at and in the end the boat was just as ful as in the beginning. Aditionally the food was quite terrible. Not only was it only boring rice and chicken (we knew that in advance), but the boy-girl handing it out was so quick and you often had to shout at him/her to make sure to got something to eat. If you went to the toilet you normally missed the meal. The toilets were also quite horrible: no seats, not paper (Which is quite normal for Peru), but also there were only 4 on the whole boat and they didn't flush properly and when we stopped somewhere to load and unload they wouldn't flush at all. I was very gratefull for my festival and australian drop toilet experiences which prepared us much better for this kind of conditions than the other gringos on the boat. All together I can only recommend to pay the extra money and take one of the fat boats for 200 Soles that only need 9 hours for the distance we needed three days for.

But finally we arrived in Santa Rosa, took a little Kanu to the police station where we ha to wake up a guard sleeping with a machine gun across his lap. Nobody dared to touch him, but clapping hand finally made him wake up and we got out peruvian exit stamps. We crossed the border on another kanu and went straight to the boat the buy a ticket and lock our bags in. The people of the boat company were so kind to allow us to sleep on the boat for free so we didn't have to look for acomodation that night. Then we wanted to get some money and that's where the problems started. Two of our credit cards had reached the limits and then someone entered the code of the third one wrongly and the card was blocked. We tried to find internet to notify our parents which resulted a little bit dificult but with the help of the nice lady from the tourist information we were allowed to use one of the old computers of a school where people were having a computer class which was very basic (the diference between a pc and a notebook for example). Afterwards we still didn't have money, but luckily the nice french guy we met on the first boat borrowed us 300 Reais.

That problems solved we walked to Columbia and had breakfast. There was also a little festival of indigenous youth going on with some speeches and a dance show. In the afternoon we went back to Brazil and did some fruit shopping etc. for the next day.

The next morning we had to go off the boat, so the police could check it and that's when we really noticed the diference between Peru and Brazil. Florian had spilled some juice on the floor and the police immediatly asked what it was and even checked things like the expiry date on the fire extinguisher (I' pretty sure the other boat didn't even have one). There was also a red line on the floor marking the zone where you were allowed to hang your hammock and much more space which allowed you to walk normally on boath sides of the boat. The food was also really good, not a big variety but there was always rice, pasta, the obligatory brazilian beans, meat in some sauce that you could use as a pasta sauce nd one day even salad and desert every day. We feld a bit like on a cruise in comparison to the first boat.

The police also checked every bag of every passenger when we boarded and on the next day another raid for drugs happened when we police boat tied up next to our boat and searched it again. They also checked our flour but after a few minuted which made me kind of nervous, figured out that it was really only flour and not cocaine. Oh, impotant advice: If you're in a police raid for drugs, don't go to the toilet. The german guy next to us had to get naked and spread his buttocks, I found it hilarious when he came back, but he looked a little bit traumatized. Unfortunately the police raid was the only interesting thing to happen in the next 3 days, all of our books were read already, so we just sat around and chatted and slept a lot until we arrived in Manaus.

Huanchaco

We spent an extremely comfortable night in the luxury bus from Lima to Huanchaco and arrived there in the early morning. We immediatly found a nice familiar hostel where they gave us the family room for 15 soles per person. Huanchaco at this time of the year was very quiet. not a lot of tourists were around because the water is quite cold at the moment but for our purpose it was just perfect. We slept a lot, ate read and didn't do much at all.

After a few days our friend Mel arrived and together we visited some of the ruins of ancient civilizations around Trujillo. One day we went to the Moche temple called Huaca de la luna which is one of the oldest in the whole country. The temple was build on top of an older temple which sat on top of an even older one. All together the huaca contains 5 diferent temples stacked up on each other. As the spaces were filed out with clay when a new temple was build, the old ones are very well preserved, even the paintings on the walls still contain some colour. After about 2000 years. That was quite impressive.

Another day we went to Chan-Chan, a gigantic city of 14 km² where the people lived after the moche empire broke down for unknown reasons. This place has been rebuild, unlike the Moche temple where only preservation work has been done. The rebuilding of the walls gives it a kind of artifical tourist attraction flavour but nonetheless the sheer size of the place makes it an impressive exprience to visit.

On our trips to the temples we came along one of the oldest breeds of dogs in this country: the peruvian dog. They have no fur and blck skin with only some single thick hair like pigs. They are incredibly ugly but apparently there is a law that every temple has to have some of these dogs, to keep traditions up. Anyways, some of them were wuite friendly some we played with them.

After relaxing for a week, only interrrupted by the obligatory stomach bug, we took a 17 hours bus to Tarapoto where we only spend one night and on the next day we had our first domestic flight to Iquitos. The flight took us only 40 minutes while the only other way to go there (the boat) would have taken us 3 days. But as a boat is considerably cheaper, this will be our method of transport in the next weeks when we travel from Iquitos to the border with Brazil and then onwards to Manaus and finally Belem.