Red Shoe Musings

Another boat trip

The tour was good but fairly slow moving which I suppose was fitting given our location. We were sat in a boat for two days going up and down different parts of the river. We saw toucans from afar, sloths, parrots and dolphins. Would have been really cool to see toucans close up, I seem to have a thing about toucans and parrots at the moment.

We swam in the river and I, to be honest, was pretty terrified of getting munched by a huge fish. I'm not sure if this came before or after our guide recounted horror stories that at least every year there is some sort of disappearance or unknown attack. Children playing around in the river disappear or are rescued with missing limbs. There are unknown, undiscovered monsters lurking in the depths of the Amazon. Fairly frightening. The fact that there is pretty much zero visibility past the first few centimetres really didn't help my piece of mind.

We stopped at one point to look around a pretty odd Peruvian town, it was dead feeling and completely on stilts. It did however, boast of its own radio channel, town hall and I can't remember what else. The guide seemed proud of it and impressed to show us around. It never ceases to amaze me how many small little settlements there are like this seemingly scattered though the jungle. It's crazy.

We stayed with an indigenous family (not as indigenous as my imagination had envisaged, no feathered head dresses or bows and arrows, sadly. But it was a real experience nonetheless. We used their toilet, hole straight into the river, very bad smell. We slept in the upstairs section of their house with them at night. There were so many mosquitos that we had to hide in our hammocks under our nets as soon as it got dark because it was insufferable.

They had a pet parrot, some chickens and two painfully skinny dogs who, due to the flooding were confined to a prison of a couple of wooden planks with a corrugated iron sheet of shelter from the tropical sun. Poor things. There was one chicken who seemed pretty sick and was living next to the stove, ready to get fried.

Their wooden house, on stilts was pretty simple. They had a polystyrene ice box which served as a fridge which was housing a dead, skinned monkey (looked frightful). The monkey was later sold to someone who dropped by on a boat. I'm very glad I didn't have to witness it getting butchered and grilled, then eaten. Seeing and smelling it getting walked through the kitchen was bad enough.

Pirana fishing was strangely amazingly fun - I caught three! And nearly more. The others didn't catch any. It was tranquil and quite satisfying waiting for the fish to bite, yanking the line out the water as quickly as possible. It feels like you have a split sec to react. I nearly caught a huge red one but it escaped just as it cleared out of the water. Damn it. They're cool looking fish, but it's true their teeth are pretty frightening. You have to disturb the water with your line, they think it's some sort of animal fallen into the water and they come after it. Viscous.

Most of the time I read and watched the world go by. We spent about half an hour in Brazil in Tababtinga which was a bizarre experience for me having got to know Brazil starting with Sao Paulo. Mad crazy different. South America is wicked in that sense its inconceivably diverse.

Hot and apart from our swim we didn't get to shower so I was looking forward to getting back to the hostel in Leticia to get clean and get in a clean set of clothes.

During the time on the boat I got chatting to the guy and he told me a little bit about all the trafficking that goes on in these waters and across these three borders. He said he had friends who got caught up in it some of whom were already dead and others for whom, at least for now things were working out. Dangerous. But a lot of money to be made, so he said. When you see all the places where smugglers can hide it's easy to see why its so attractive to dealers.

When it was time to get off the boat it felt kind of strange to leave. I wasn't ready to get back to the real world actually. And we had already lost some sort of sense of decision making as we had left our lives in the hands of two strangers for two and a half days. We didn't shower, the first thing we did was go and eat ice cream. And after all the sleeping we had done at night time in the indigenous house all we did when we got back to the hostel was to shower and sleep again. I'm sure I had said I wanted a night out.

Next day, evening flight to Bogota. City life again after nearly three weeks in the jungle. This could be strange.