The Amazon River: Iquitos to Manaus

This trip started to unfold almost a year ago, when we learnt through word of mouth about a retreat center in the middle of the Amazonian jungle that offered the kind of spiritual experience that we were looking for: with native healers and ages-old traditional use of sacred plant medicine. We signed up months in advance with the boldness that you get when you look at something scary from very far away, but as the time to board our flight to Peru approached and we learnt more and more about what we signed up for — which required among other things depriving oneself from alcohol, caffeine, and other earthly pleasures for weeks in advance — we got more and more anxious.

Regardless, we were heading to Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon. It seemed absolutely obvious to us that after the retreat we had to leave Iquitos the hard way: by public fluvial transportation downriver to Brasil.

The retreat

To get to the retreat center From Iquitos it’s a half-an-hour bus ride to the village of Santa Clara, plus a 25-minute boat ride up the Nanay River to a dock in the middle of nowhere, plus one hour of walking. Yup, it is remote.

The experience was ultimately profound, healing, empowering and all those new-agey words that you can overhear any random afternoon in Sebastopol’s¹ local cafés. Likely transfomative too, but you’d have to judge by yourself or ask us a year or two from now.

Iquitos, Peru

Iquitos is the world’s largest city (not on an island) that cannot be reached by road. Sitting less than 4 degrees of latitude south of the Equator, it’s a bustling town that will hyper-stimulate all your senses, especially if you’re sensitive to humid heat. It seems to exist in that dreamy boundary between fiction and reality, with its crazy but uncannily smooth traffic of mostly two- and three-wheeled vehicles and buses with glassless windows, and the vestiges of a wealthy and ruthless past that was the rubber boom, more than a century ago.

Before and after the retreat we took some time to explore a few of the many offerings around Iquitos, including a couple of nights in a floating lodge on the Momón River.

Iquitos to the Triple Border

The second half of the adventure started with figuring out how to do this down river thing. The research we carried out before the trip led us to conclude that we had two options: the pasteurized one, and the authentic one. The pasteurized one is to reserve a spot on an expensive cruise ship, which feels like looking at the world through a glass window. The authentic one is to do what locals do. Except for the few towns that have an airport, boat transport is the only option that natives have to travel to and from their communities, so there must be a way. The problem is that what we found on the web was mostly anecdotal and somewhat inconsistent, so we decided to do it the old way: ask the locals and improvise. Things were even more uncertain because the river was at its lowest level since records began in 1902, which made navigation difficult and prone to running aground. The only thing that was clear when we left home was that we had to take a boat to Santa Rosa, an island in the Peruvian side of the Peru-Colombia-Brazil border, cross the river to Leticia, Colombia, and from there cross a street to Tabatinga, Brazil where we could take another boat to Manaus.

Once in Iquitos we learned that we could either take the “fast” passenger boat to Santa Rosa for a mere 15-hour trip, or the slow cargo boat that would take about three days. We opted for the former and secured our space, which made us the proud owners of two old-fashioned paper tickets with the blanks filled with handwriting.

One afternoon a few days later we boarded the ferry, and the following morning we had a mini-adventure with the mandatory immigration dance that reminded us of the cruising life bureaucracy. In Santa Rosa, the ferry ties up to a floating dock in the middle of the river. From there it is: a water taxi that gets you most but not all the way to shore; a walk over a long, narrow, rickety walkway; a white-knuckled tuk-tuk ride over the muddy river bank and across town to the immigration post where you stand in line to get your exit stamp on your passport; another tuk-tuk ride back to the river and the rickety walkway; another water taxi to the north shore of the river; a walk up the steep river bank, underneath stilted houses, and across a bridge over a smaller river… and voilà, you are in Leticia. You are not done, though. You still have to go to the airport to get your passport stamped with your entry to Colombia, which was another mildly kafkaesque process: once there they told us that we had to prefill a form on the internet, but there was no internet.

Leticia, Colombia

Leticia, Colombia’s southernmost city, is a friendly town that relies heavily on tourism and acts as a hub for many attractions and activities centered around the river and the jungle. With its twin city Tabatinga they form a borderless unit where people and languages mix; when you go down Leticia’s main street the only indication that you are in another country is that the shop signs suddenly turn to Portuguese.

In Leticia and the tri-border area the river is the connective tissue that supports the economy of the region.

The Oliveira II

After a few days in Leticia it was time for an even more outlandish experience: four days on a cargo boat that would take us from Tabatinga to Manaus. Given that it amounted to less than $100 per day for the two of us, including food, we splurged on a cabin. The cheaper option requires sleeping in your own hammock that you hang from the middle deck’s roof. You also need to bring your own plate and silverware to get food.

We had heard (and, actually, seen) that some of the boats that do that route have decent cabins with sliding doors that open up to a small private balcony. We had also heard that meals are buffet style. Our luck had us boarding the Oliveira II (only because that was the one ship departing on the day we wanted to leave), which had… none of that. In fact, when we saw our abysmally dark and spartan windowless cabin we thought we would have been better off on a hammock, but after the first night we reconciled with our space and learnt to love it. Okay, maybe “love” is an exaggeration, but we did get quite fond of the AC.

The food experience deserves a whole paragraph. Breakfast was at 6:30 (reasonable, especially if you overlook the fact that the coffee was utterly undrinkable); lunch at 10:30 (weird, but manageable); dinner at 4 (outrageous, because it means more than 14 hours until the next meal!). The very first meal was an unpalatable soup with bits of meat of unconfirmed origin (likely from more than one species) that had me almost panicking on the prospect of three more days of similarly objectionable fare. However, the next six meals were chicken, rice and beans, which I’d happily have for the rest of my life if that keeps me away from the abomination we had the first day.

I didn’t have a chance to take a picture of our ship. Actually, I did have a chance when we disembarked in Manaus that I missed because I forgot, but since that’s a much a larger explanation I hope you excuse me if I choose a simple lie to a complicated truth. Fortunately, there was a calendar on the boat that I had the foresight of photographing, so here it is, The Oliveira II (and the phases of the moon) in all her glory. Two things I’m realizing just today: either Ñandú had an oversize anchor, or the Oliveira II has an undersized one, by a huge factor, because the anchor in the picture looks about the same size as the one we had. And, speaking of lies, April fool’s day is called the “day of the lie” in Brazil.

The ship stops at several villages along the way, but it’s not recommended to get off, as the stopovers are as short as needed to load and unload passengers and cargo, so we just enjoyed the scenery and the action from the deck.

Every stop provided an intriguing snapshot of life on, around, about, for and by the river. You see people waiting for the ship, their dreams and struggles packed into cardboard boxes and suitcases, and wonder what their stories are. A woman taking one last picture of a loved one — is that her son heading to Manaus for a year of higher education? A huge pile of about 300 empty five-gallon water bottles waiting to be loaded into the boat — do they need to import all their potable water? Two big bunches of plantains — are those for our next meal? Three cars parked nearby — what makes you get a car when the roads don’t go farther than five km in each direction? The river bank is so steep that I wonder how did the cars even get there — perhaps you have to wait for the river to be much higher? A terrified pig is pulled and pushed uphill while he squeals as anyone would do if there was no tomorrow — does he know that’s likely the case for him? A traveling salesman getting off the boat to sell sandals — does he have a lover in this town?

This is the real deal. The human landscape that’s as rich as the natural one. This is José, who grew up in the jungle where political borders don’t exist — when the time came to move to the city to go to school his father told him: “son, you are going to go to school; they will assign you a country, they will assign you a flag, but don’t forget to be human”. This is Bryan, who’s white grandmother didn’t want him to grow up in the jungle with his Jivaro mother, so she brought him to the city — and his mother moved too just to be close to him. This is Jhon, who lost his transportation business in Armenia, Colombia, to the pandemic, and moved to Leticia — he’s thriving again but unhappy with the isolation. This is Jorge, our water taxi driver, a Peruvian man married to a Colombian woman with Brazilian children — so proud of them that he stopped the boat several times during our ride just to come forward to show us pictures of them.

Manaus

Manaus is a large city half way on the Amazon’s run to the Atlantic Ocean. It was called The Paris of the tropics back in the 1800s, when it was the richest city in South America, thanks to the rubber exploitation. Many wealthy Europeans settled here and brought their ostentatious extravagance with them, including the habit of sending their laundry to Europe because they didn’t like their clothes washed with water from the river. The epitome of such flamboyance is the iconic Teatro Amazonas or opera house. It was built with public funds and using materials imported from Europe: marble, crystal, and even wood, which was obviously abundant in the rain forest. At the end of our tour of the Teatro, Kathy told the tour guide that she missed a mention of the fact that the wealth that made all this possible came at a huge human cost to indigenous people, who were enslaved to harvest the rubber. She was understandably pissed that the guide — a young white man — dismissed her suggestion.

Being surrounded by rain forest, in the center of the Earth’s lungs, Manaus usually boasts beautiful, blue skies. Not this time though. The historically dry season fueled forest fires all around the city, making Manaus temporarily the city with the second worst air quality in the world.

Parting words

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1. Bohemian capital of California. ↩︎