2/25/06
CAJAMARCA, PERU

The road from Tarapoto loops through foggy green mountains before dropping into the rainforest. It's a mess. The car fishtailed, clambered, and pounded up and down. Cussing through this was Ian, a Brit who's been traveling since the 1950s. When we opened the doors in Yurimaguas we were swarmed by motocarros (motortrike rickshaws). We picked one fast, threw in our gear and went blasting through town. Slowing into the harbor, a mob wrestled the trike to a stop, hollering the names of boats and grabbing at our packs. With a lot of barging and yelling we made for the water. There's no dock at the harbor; just muddy planks flopping under the bare feet of porters. We boarded the Eduardo IV and made arrangments.

The Eduardo IV is a three-decked metal cargo boat that smells like a grease trap and a farm. In spots the floor klunks under your weight and bongs when you step off. Its top two decks are for passengers to hang their hammocks. From the top railing we watched men dragging cows onto the bottom deck in a torrential slop. It left at night. The moving air was a relief.

Okay: boat travel. You can scoot a plastic chair outside and put your feet on the rail and watch the jungle slide by. The warm beers from Yurimaguas didn't last long, and the '80s action movies didn't even rate as background noise. The other passengers were a friendly lot. After the first day Ian often had a little kid climbing on his lap, and it was hard to get any reading done. I chatted in pidgin Spanish, watched the cows squash around, and looked out on the sun-smeared water.

The boat was pulling a long motorboat that would now and again peel off to pick up people waving from palm-thatched houses. At a couple villages, the Eduardo itself nudged into the mud, prompting a rush of activity: villagers hopped on with bowls of grilled fish and bunches of plantains, selling in a hurry while passengers and supplies bounced over the planks. I bought fruit that I'd never heard of, like giant seed pods with a sweet white pulp. The shipworkers fed green plantains to the cows. Pushing out again, the last vendors got off and the boat eased back into the broad brown currents.

By nightfall on the second day, I was blissed. I sat hypnotized by the endlessly scrolling, moonlit jungle. Sometime while we slept, the Río Marañón merged with the Ucayali to become the Amazon.

By dawn everyone was struggling out of hammocks and packing-- we'd reached the harbor at Iquitos, an overpowering sight. We watched the chaos from the railing. Locals let a motocarro driver friend up the stairs, saying that he wouldn't try to rob us. That sounded good, so Fernando drove Ian and me from the harbor to the Plaza de Armas, where a big sign says No To Child Sex Tourism. Jesus. I got a room at a hostel with taxidermized jungle animals.

Iquitos is a city shipped into the jungle by river-- it has no road links. The streets scream with motocarros and the stuttering engines of old wooden buses. Poverty is everywhere. The squalor is at its worst on the Amazon, where tens of thousands live in floating shantytowns. Kids there essentially swim in the toilet. Hookers make kissy noises from boats.

After days of blown tires, riding with chickens, and the river, I was baffled by the sight of so many gringos. They fly in: tourists, missionaries, and steak-fed expats here being big shots. I ate breakfast at The Yellow Rose of Texas, which the owner bragged is "like the embassy-- this is American soil." He got rid of a shoeshine guy by pointing. The rubber boom would've been great for him.

Exploring the innards of the market, I felt my watch pinched off my wrist. The kid splashed down an alley of muck, and I stood there with a too-late adrenaline rush. I actually looked at my wrist. Some of the vendors showed sympathy, but I just felt culture shock.

It was a cheap watch, and an hour later I was haggling over a cheaper one. "It's very good," the vendor was saying. "Casio!"
"It's not a Casio."
"It's the same as a Casio."
"It says 'Cassiq.' What's a Cassiq?"
"Very good watch. Look," and he showed me how the buckle works.

Iquitos puts you in a colonial role whether you like it or not. History was bad here, and you are walking foreign money.

Ian and I booked a three-day rainforest trip with two guides, Raul and Saulo. We traveled two hours by bus and three hours by motorboat up the Río Ucayali to Raul's village: drowsy houses on stilts, banana trees, orchids. The heat was sludgy. Raul sawed a couple planks as seats for the dugout, and in the morning we paddled hours up a tributary overhung by foliage, amazingly thick with wildlife. Multicolored birds whooped and clicked. Some shaggy black howler monkeys crashed from tree to tree.

It's high water season, and the river was a swamp flowing halfway up tree trunks. To find ground meant squeaking the canoe between branches that pull your hat off; in the bow Raul whapped at vines with his machete. He staked his paddle in the mud and tied the canoe off, and we went on foot into the mosquitos.

I've never felt grosser than when wrapped in that hot slithering vegetation, soaked in a slime of sweat and DEET and swamp gunk. At night in the mosquito netting I could smell myself fermenting. It was clear that, on a longer trip, the jungle would smother and lay eggs in me.

Wading in water as high as our rubber boots, I took one ox-like step and plunged past my waist. I scrambled out and tried to save my camera, swabbing at it with the least-damp corner of my shirt. Turned on, it gibbered in electronic death throes. Rough week for the old equipment.

We slogged around in the woods. Weird trains of blossoms drooped off trees glittering with ants. Now and then Raul would drop into a crouch and shoot a finger at the canopy, whispering, "Hsst! Monkey!" I'd weave my head around, trying to line up with his extended arm until shaking leaves bared a critter loping up a branch, throwing us quirky looks as it got out of sight.

Fruits lay all over the leafy carpet: huge, tiny, stinky, sweet, acidic. We tried a bunch; Ian begged off many. Raul chipped a rubber tree so it leaked "milk." You roll the milk in your fingers and it's rubber. The guides pointed out medicinal plants-- musky crushed leaves, wet peels of bark thwacked off by machete. Good for insect bites? Pregnancy? I said sí a lot on this trip, and repeated a lot of Spanish names for plants and animals while simultaneously forgetting them. There was too much going on.

After dusk we paddled through flotillas of glowworms, heat lightning flickering in the distance. We were looking for caimans, whose eyes shine red in flashlights. We saw a little one. Reeds hissed against the boat; frogs chorused all around us. Drifting back to camp we heard a huge, wet hmmph!-- a river dolphin, said the guides.

In the morning we ate fish and plantains in the canoe. Between my feet gulped the day's lunch: four ugly catfish and a piranha sloshing in bilgewater, all from the nets Raul had set. Piranhas, when you're holding them looking at their fierce little underbites, make soft honking noises: unk, unk, unk.

On our way downriver we heard the slapping ripples of dolphins (said the guides), and we hushed over the opaque water. A pinkish back curved up near the canoe and submerged. Another rolled by. They seemed unreal-- big dolphins in the jungle. One plowed the water with its long nose, eyeing us before slipping back under.

The shower in Iquitos was rebirth. I ate an excessive dinner with my daily malaria pill, and I slept. I visited a creepy museum of casts of Amazon Indians, motorboated to languid villages with a Quebecois woman, ate rice-and-chicken meals from banana leaves. The city stewed under a wet sun.

Leaving took some head-scratching. From Iquitos you can't fly to Chiclayo anymore, nor to Trujillo, nor to Tarapoto-- where, I heard, flights were canceled because vultures were getting sucked into the engines. You can fly to Lima. On the evening of my flight, I randomly flagged down Fernando's motocarro. He drove me to the airport and undercharged me, and my departure by air was crisp and bilingual. The Amazon Basin went away in the dark.

Central Lima is a curt place that's best dealt with at top speed, dodging around pedestrians and taxis and holes while stealing glances at the colonial architecture and sidewalk merchandise (were those nunchucks?). I replaced my camera, ate shawarma, had my foot chewed at by a turtle on a roof, and left.

Huanchaco, just up the coast from Trujillo, is a beach town with soft sand, gorgeous sunsets, and fishermen paddling banana-shaped rafts over the breakers. I lollygagged with other backpackers. The Moche and Chimú sites outside Trujillo (Huacas de la Luna y Sol, Chan Chan) made for good day outings, but momentum fritters pleasantly away at the beach. I swam a lot, swapped a paperback.

Before my trip I'd arranged some digwork in the area, at a Moche site called El Brujo, but that's since fallen through. This may be typical Peru. It's just as well-- I'd already been weighing those six sedentary (sweltering, laboring) weeks against the idea of extra travel. Now freed up, I headed into the more traditional mountains. Cajamarca is supposed to do a lively Carnaval.