Dad and I spent an eventful four days rolling on the mighty Amazon River. It was so much fun! We started in Iquitos, which the largest city that can't be accessed by road: you either need to fly in or take a boat... we flew. As a city, Iquitos was interesting. It was full of motorcycles and rickshaws and was once the center of the rubber industry. Now, tourism is it's main economic activity. Right off the Plaza de Armas, there was a building that was built by the same guy that built the Eiffel Tower. We ate dinner there, which was pretty neat.
We went into the jungle with a tour for 3 days and 2 nights. We stayed in a beautiful lodge, without electricity, 140 kilometers outside of Iquitos. We arrived after a 3 hour boat ride up the Amazon. We stopped about half way to use the "bathroom" and right away, we saw the river dolphins playing near by the floating stop. The dolphins were fun to see, and they looked just like normal dolphins, which I was surprised by.
Our lodge was beautiful and ran like summer camp. We had to be in the dining room whenever the bell rang and then had a morning, afternoon, and evening activity. Our activities were hiking around looking for monkeys and medicinal plants, piranha fishing, visiting the nearby fishing village, night excursions to look for caimans and other nocturnal wildlife, dolphin watching, and taking a swim in the river.
All in all, the Amazon was different than any other part of Peru I've seen and the remoteness is amazing. It wasn't as buggy as we expected, though they still managed to get me and it was easily the hottest place I've been. Whenever we were one an excursion, we dreaded the command "PONCHO PONCHO PONCHO!" which meant were going straight into a down pour. When it rains in the Amazon, it POURS!
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