From me to you

The next couple days we spent in Tarapoto, which was the first place we stayed where it actually felt like the jungle.  It was hot and humid, but not quite uncomfortably so.  Or at least, I didn’t think so, but I’m used to the heat.  Everyone else has been pampered by lovely mountain climates and was halfway to a heatstroke the moment we stepped off the bus.  However, there was an undeniable correlation between the temperature and the scenery – the higher the temperature, the better the scenery.  These photos were from the drive.  We drove by lots of rice fields and banana plant fields (I’ve been informed that bananas do not grow on trees, they grow on really big plants that look like small trees, hence the confusion).  Aside from all the green, what really struck me as different were the houses.  They all had walls made out of wood!  Where I live, the predominant building materials are sand, adobe, and reeds.  All the houses therefore have walls made out of cement, adobe, or grass.  To see houses made out of wood took a little getting used to.  For some reason, I didn’t trust them as much.  I mean, in such a humid climate, are they really that reliable?  Or are they moldy and ready to collapse?  Yeah, I know, I’ve spent too much time in the desert. 

Then there is Tarapoto.  If you look it up on the city’s official website, it will tell you that it is “pretty dry from May to December and pretty wet” the other six months.  Now, either they are really stretching the truth to call it “pretty dry” or I simply have no idea what “pretty wet” really means.  During our visit, it was 89 degrees there, with 62% humidity, which makes it feel more like 95 degrees.  This 62% humidity is during the “pretty dry” portion of the year, mind you.  It also rained every day we were there, which is another reason I am questioning the accuracy of this description.  Thanks to the heat, the main form of transportation in Tarapoto is mototaxi.  During the afternoons, we contemplated paying them 10 soles to drive us around for 30 minutes, just so we could enjoy a breeze.  In the end though, we just couldn’t spare the ten soles. 

However, we did splurge on the hotel and get one with a pool.  I think we may have paid at least $15 a night for this place, but it was worth it.  I don’t think my mountain friends would have made it without that pool in the afternoon.  Later, we climbed onto the roof to watch the magnificence that is the sunset in Tarapoto. 

And then, at about 4 a.m. that morning, we hopped in a taxi for the four hour drive to Yurimaguas, which is where we met our jungle guide, bought what food supplies we needed for our time in the Amazon, and loaded everything onto our boat, the BF Ucayali, that would take us 10 hours upriver to Lagunas.  I’ll include pictures of the boat here, so that I can jump right into jungle stories on the next email.  Basically, the way travel works on the Amazon River and all its tributaries is like this: 

The first floor of the boat is filled with various cargos
that are being taken upriver (not a lot of roads around here), then the second floor is allotted to the humans and their hammocks, leaving the penthouse to live cargo, like the chickens that so kindly accompanied us on our trip.  We tried to hang out up there for a while (there’s more of a breeze), but eventually the smell got to be too much for us, so when we weren’t napping in the hammocks, we hung out on the roof in front of the huge barrels that were on their way upriver to be filled up with bootleg liquor and then transported back to town.  This was by far the best way to pass the time, since the hammock area was just a little bit too crowded for that kind of heat.  It was from this roof that we documented what is quite possibly the best sunset ever recorded in the history of boat rides.  I’ll end this chapter with a few of those pictures, then start off the next post in the junglejunglejunglejunglejungle.