Our alarms woke us at 3AM so we could meet in the lobby at 3:45 to depart for the airport. We arrived at the airport much quicker than the trip from the airport to the hotel - far less traffic at 4AM than at 1AM. There was more activity at the airport before 5AM than I expected. Checking the bags took a while, but their security screening moves notably faster than any U.S. airport than I have been to. Unfortunately my brain was not yet engaged after so little sleep and I ended up surrendering the very small pocket knife I had brought in checked baggage on my second day of the trip.
When we arrived in Iquitos we walked down stairs onto the runway and the warm humid air felt like falling into a bowl of soup.
We got our bags and re-assembled our group, then boarded a bus and got introduced to our local tour guides, Willy and Junior. We heard a bit about the history of Iquitos while bumping down the narrow road accompanied by thousands of tuktuks, both taxis and personal vehicles, along with buses and construction vehicles. Iquitos is a busy place between the oil industry, logging, and tourism.
We arrived at the Explorama dock and prepared for our boat journey. Once the luggage was stowed and some other logistics ironed out we boarded a boat I would describe as a water taxi.
We went a few miles down the Itaya River and stopped for a bit at the confluence with the Amazon. The Itaya is dark like tea, apparently for the same reason: a lot of leaves and bark ends up in it, and it is fairly acidic. With the dark color, the confluence with the dirt brown Amazon was notable.
Then we motored another 45 minutes or so down the Amazon to Explorama Ceiba Tops lodge.
After some time to get settled in to our rooms, try out the hammocks on the large patio, and wander around the grounds a bit, we met at the main lodge building for lunch with a choice between fish steamed while wrapped in a large aromatic leaf, or chicken covered with a mild chili/curry sauce with a hard-boiled egg wedge on top.
After lunch we loaded into two open boats and went fishing for piraña and looking for dolphins. We found a spot on a small branch of the river with a fair amount of floating vegetation and cut the motor to fish. The fishing was pretty easy: if you didn’t feel them biting it meant you had lost your bait. Our rods were simple sticks with fishing line tied on the ends. Our boat pilot and guide baited the hooks with bits of meat. I caught a small catfish but several people got small pirañas.
Back at the confluence of the small branch with the main river we spotted dolphins. We saw one of the small grey ones leap out of the water and do a flip, but mostly it was just a matter of getting a brief glimpse of nose, fin, or tail as they rose ever so slightly above the brown water. We saw a group of three of the pink dolphins, which are larger than the grey ones.
We returned to the lodge and had a little time before dinner. This time the choice was fish or a saltado-style chicken with spaghetti noodles - the chicken was the only fairly disappointing meal I had at Explorama Ceiba Tops - there was not much flavor and the sauce was too thin to stick to the noodles.
After dinner we went on a night walk to see frogs, bugs, and cayman. The frogs were surprisingly loud, and we learned that the way you spot the cayman is that their eyes are very reflective of a bright flashlight.
Julie got up early for the dawn bird-watching activity, but I really needed those extra couple hours of sleep.
After a breakfast where we chose between different scrambled egg or omelette types, or a giant bowl of fruit, we stepped aboard the small open boats again and journeyed down-river to visit some members of a Yagua tribe. We walked through a path cut out of the jungle to a clearing where they had built a circular lodge.
Our assistant local guide spent some time explaining how this native people had originally lived far down the river in Brazil but had moved up-river to escape problems (being enslaved?) during the rubber boom in the 1920’s - 1940’s. He also talked about how the Yagua are considered a level 2 tribe in a rating system where level 3 people still practice their customs but are fairly integrated with “western” culture and the modern economy, level 1 people are “non-contact” peoples, and level 2 peoples still live primarily in their traditional ways but have contact and exchange with “western” culture.
After the orientation, one of the women put traditional achiote crushed seed orange/red marks on our faces so that their chief could give us a traditional welcome chant and ceremony. And we heard a bit more about their history and way of life. We learned about the “jungle beer” or “masato” that the Yagua women make by mashing then chewing and spitting out yucca or manioc which is then fermented by their saliva. The men wear a head-dress of long split dried leaves which, from a distance, makes them look a bit like muscular women with blond hair. There is a theory that early western explorers of the lower Amazon mistook the Yagua men who attacked and repelled them for women and explained their experience with a story about a tribe of fierce warrior women they called Amazonians.
Then several Yaguans came in with drums and a flute and showed us one of their traditional dances. After we all joined them for a bit of dancing we went outside and got to try their blow gun after watching them demonstrate it.
They also had a mother and baby sloth they were keeping as a pet that people could hold.
On the way back we stopped to take a walk through Indiana, a small town on the river. It has a few paved roads, including one that goes a couple of miles to another town of similar size, so there were a number of tuktuk taxis and motorcycles, but we did not see any normal cars or trucks. I saw a “Lifan Cargo” trike with a flatbed on the back load up a bunch of bags of sand, then saw it returning for more later on.
We returned to Explorama Ceiba Tops for lunch with a choice of steamed fish with a teriyaki-type sauce or ham that had been fried with a tandoori-like coating of chili and spices. We had purple corn pudding for dessert. The servings were quite large and the corn pudding is fruity and has a texture more like jam or jelly, so it was like eating a whole jar of mixed berry jam - most people did not finish theirs.
We were given an hour and a half break after lunch for siesta, and Julie slept while I checked email and my silly iPhone game and worked on this journal for yesterday.
In the afternoon we went on a nature walk from the lodge. We learned about a number of different trees and plants and how the local peoples eat or otherwise make use of them, and looked for wildlife. Usually they spot monkeys, lemurs, and lizards, but the weather was clearly changing - a strong wind and darkening clouds for an hour or so followed by increased humidity - so the guides explained that many animals had probably taken shelter for a possible thunderstorm. A small frog was the only animal our guide found in the jungle, but we saw some amazing trees.
We heard thunder a few times in the distance but it was not until over an hour later that a light rain began. After the walk through the trees we returned to the small lake near the lodge where we had seen caymans last night. There was one large splash that was probably a cayman startled by our arrival, but they are mostly nocturnal. The guides had some fish food, though, so we threw food in the water and watched a bunch of small fish, a couple of bigger ones, and some turtles come grab it.
We had a bit of time before dinner. We tried some different cocktails from the bar menu: a Chilcano and a Piscoco. The Chilcano is ginger ale, ginger root, and pisco, while the Piscoco is pisco with coconut milk. We had some good conversations with some of our tour companions, then it was time for dinner. This time it was grilled fish that was apparently similar to lunch, or grilled chicken. The dessert was watermelon.
Unfortunately the next day required another early departure, but only 6AM this time, so almost everyone was eager to get to bed early.
We were given some boxed breakfasts as we boarded the water taxi at 6 and headed back up the Amazon on a beautiful morning. There was a very light chicken salad sandwich, some yucca chips, fruit, and a fruit drink. During our roughly hour-long trip the sun rose so that, as we neared Iquitos, it shone on a bridge over Rio Nanay, one of the other rivers that borders Iquitos, then later provided nice lighting for a wide variety of docks in Iquitos. We saw several timber operations, some fishing boats, oil barges and other heavy equipment, the army’s dock with military boats and a few hospital ships, some ferry terminals, and lots more that I couldn’t figure out.
At the Explorama dock we were given a boxed lunch, then we boarded a bus back to the airport where we bid farewell to Willy and Junior, our local guides. Then we flew back over the Andes to Lima in an Airbus A380.
