Welcome to the jungle

We got up this morning, packed up, waited an infinitely long time for our breakfast at the Hotel España, then took a taxi to the airport for our flight to Iquitos. It was strange to be flying domestically, and we didn´t have the hassles of immigration and exchaning money. We still, however, had to pay a departure tax. Despite being a short domestic flight, we were warned that we should be at the airport 2 hours ahead of time to be sure we actually got on the flight. And we did, with no problems.

Although it´s a short trip to Iquitos, we still had one stop-over in Pocallpa where, surprisingly, most of the passengers on the plane got off. The little TANS Peru Boeing 737 was only 1/2 full for the rest of the flight. Throughout the whole flight, we had clear, fantastic views of mountains, desert, and, finally, the dense green jungle, tons of small rivers, and the huge Amazon River. The plane landed in Iquitos (rather a bit too quickly in our experience) and pulled up to a building off the runway. We were happy to see a man with a fluoro vest wheel a staircase up to the plane, which we descended and walked across the tarmac, just like in Adelaide. We were immediately assaulted by the hot, humid weather of the Amazon jungle. The airport is ´inside´ with four walls and a roof, but they don´t connect at all. After getting our bags, we went outside and caught a motocarro into town, a little seat attached to the front of a motorbike, like many we rode in southeast Asia. In fact, just the sight and sounds of the tons of motorbikes on the streets brought us back to our fun days in Phnom Penh.

Iquitos is a large town (nearly half a million) on the banks of the Amazon. Actually, it´s the largest city in the world not with no roads reaching it. The only way to get here is by air or a very long boat trip, and is a tourist jump-off place for treks through the jungle and on the Amazon River. Iquitos saw grew rapidly during the rubber boom, but quickly declinced at the start of WWI. Now most money comes from oil (yes, unfortunately they found this evil black stuff in the jungle) and tourism. Still, we think it´s got a bit of it´s own sort of charm.

We walked around the suffering heat and humidity of Iquitos while trying to find a hotel for the night. Most places seemed to be a total rip-off, but we finally found one for a reasonable price (it was actually the first one we went to--at the time, we thought it was expensive, but once we compared it to other places, it was the best choice). We then set out to find a company to take us into the jungle. After talking to several over the course of a few hours, we finally chose one, with the help of Gerald, the owner of the restaurant The Yellow Rose of Texas. Gerald used to be the Minister of Tourism in Iquitos, and he knows just about everything regarding tours into the jungle. And he is so happy to help travellers out without asking for anything in return. Of course we ate all of our meals at his restaurant because he's got the coldes beer fridge ever. It sits between 0 and -4C. And it totally rules! We easily put down a few with sandwiches for dinner before heading back to our hotel, where we proceeded to glue ourselves to the TV in our room and watch MTV.