Right, back to the trip. First off we flew into Iquitos. In the airport in Lima before we left, though, we managed to run into a local football (soccer) sensation, Leao Butrón. He's the goalie of the national football team who just defeated Argentina in a major upset the week before. We all agreed he was muy guapo, and very nice about being harassed. Then we had to pay the insanely stupid amount of either $3.71 or s/ 10.27 in airport tax (really!?!). Once landing in Iquitos, we spotted rival paddlers at the airport (British, all wearing matching outfits) well prepared with carbon fiber paddles, and we set off in moto taxis to our safe haven.Iquitos is deliciously seedy. It has the feel of a jungle outpost where old pirates and peo
ple with warrants for their arrest go to hide out. The locals are friendly, but many verge on con artists (for example, faking an empty gas tank in an attempt to double the moto taxi fare). We stayed at La Casa Fitzcarraldo, a lovely little B&B on Ave. Marina. The Swiss owner, it seems, was the producer of a Herzog film, Fitzcarraldo, about a rubber baron who dreamed of building opera houses in iquitos and had a 320 ton steamer ship carried up and over a waterfall by locals (in the movie version, at least). Anyhow, fabulous breakfasts, cold showers. My favorite bit was the 5 story tree house with the pet snake on the 3rd floor. Minus the boa, I would have given my right hand to play in such a tree house as a kid. Oh, and there was an ocelot (painted leopard) in a cage right outside the dining room. Humane-treatment issues aside, it bit Colin's finger and made him bleed. He was trying to pet it, though, to be fair.Anyhow on day 2 we set out to
get all our supplies: plastic chairs, machetes, saws, rope, food, buckets, duct tape, life jackets. You know, the usual. We ended up in Belén, a part of town which is flooded in the rainy season and in which people build there homes on wooden rafts, which they moor to poles when it floods. There's an open air market (where we haggled with the Chinese for our gear) and also a cool medicine lane called Pasaje Paquito (according to wiki, though finding street signs is rather a joke) where jungle plants and animals are sold for medicinal purposes at all these stands. Had I known what on earth they were I would perhaps have been tempted to try some out. (view above from end of market over iquitos)
After a stop for some refueling plantains which burnt my tongue to a cinder (see pic), Colin and I were off to the Naval Research Lab (US Navy, that is) to meet up with a friend-of-a-friend, Dr. Amy Morrison, a dengue researcher, to borrow paddles while Catherine and Javier went back to the boating supply shop to try to convince them to get off their duffs and go get 12 lifejackets from their mysterious supply place. This all involved running back and forth to the hotel and all around the city in moto taxis. My favorite bit: the windshields, made out of plastic sheeting and boarded by wood. They don't go all the way up and the driver looks over them at the road. Works quite well, actually.
Moving on . . . we left quite early the next morning on buses (5 of them, i think) to Nauta, the start of our rafting journey. Took only 2 hours (remember that, when I get to the return journey). After enduring some mild sexual harassment from a crew member off the winning boat, and spilling my hot-milk-in-a-bag on my lap (YOU try drinking hot milk from a hole in a bag), we arrived in Nauta. There we 
endured a couple of hours of welcome speeches.The highlight, truly, was this Canadian guy, David, who was celebrating his 71st birthday that day. And yes, he has a tattoo of a snake on his knee. And a pierced ear. And a red mohawk. Pretty much the most bad-ass guy I've ever seen over the age of 50. He was super nice, too. Too bad we didn't get to hear his stories . . .
After lunch we all set off with our gear onto this rickety boat (sort of mississippi paddleboat-esque) across the amazon to a beach island. The plan was to make our raft and camp out there. The one thing that became evident at this point in time is that organization was kinda minimal. We were supposed to get in order of our boats to select our 8 logs of balsawood with which to build our raft. After boat 3 of 57, this plan started falling apart and Javi and I (latin and french) started grabbing our logs. Catherine and Colin (and many other anglo-saxon types) calmly waited their turn while a free for all ensued. Classic multicultural mayhem. Anyhow we then had 8 logs of balsa and 4 small sticks
of balsa, plus our machete, saw, and a bunch of rope and the goal was to turn it into an amazon-worthy craft. Yeesh!After about 4 hours of trying to approximate the work of the locals we had made considerable progress, but still hadn't lashed any logs together. Given that we only had 1 hour of daylight left, and a little group of local boys and teens had come over to watch us, with concerned looks o
n their faces, we finally conceded to the plan almost all gringos do, and paid 20 soles to get help. In about 2 hours, they redid our work better than we had done it, plus lashed it all together with all the necessary joins. Turns out, they know what they are doing.It should be mentioned that some people decided to forego the traditional route and that the sound of chainsaws could we heard well into the night. By 9 pm we were exhausted and we just chilled by the campfire watching the clearest milky way i've seen since the middle of the Atlantic. We weren't aware until way past dark that there was such a thing as a raft that didn't float, but at that point we were too tired to lug ours to the beach to test, so I passed out sending up small prayers that our raft would float . . .
Up at the crack of 5, we worked furiously to test our raft (floated-ish!) cut off the legs of our chairs, lash them to the boat, assemble a sun shade, secure our food bucket . . . and all of a sudden at 830 all the other rafts were already on the water and we were being told it was time to go. Never mind that we thought the start was at 9. So we hussled on the river, to join up. Our boat did NOT float with the bucket, our gear, and the sunshade. We were distinctly U-boatesque. While not an unpopular style on the river, it didn't bode well for getting anywhere fast.
More on our u-boat next entry . . . I know you're just dying of suspense.
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