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Previous: Iquitos
Finally, this is what I had come to see: The Greatest River on Earth. The Nile is a bit longer but the Amazon carries 75 times more water than it does.
The small boats tying up at this passenger landing only serve the nearby river communities but sea going ships of up to 4 000 tons can reach Iquitos from the Atlantic Ocean 3 700 kms away. Boats of up to 3000 tons can go upstream to Pucallpa where the nearest road stops 800 kms away from here.
A hundred km upstream from here, the Marañon and Ucayali rivers join at Nauta to become the great Amazon River. Both of these tributaries are big rivers by themselves. To get to Nauta, the Marañon had flowed 1800 kms from its source near Huánuco at 5800 meters in the high Andes. In Europe it would be huge, being 50% longer than the Rhine. The Ucayali is even longer. It stretches some 2600 kms if one includes its tributary the Apurimac that reaches almost to Lake Titicaca. The Amazon is fed by no less than 17 great tributaries of more than 1600 kms in length. The Marañon and Ucayali are only two of them!
As there are no roads into Iquitos, everything must be brought in by boat or plane. Consequently, fish from the river, fresh or dried, forms an important part of the local diet. There are a lot of varieties of which several are found only in the Amazon basin and more importantly, there is a lot of it.
The upper town Iquitos, which I showed on the last page, is an important commercial center for a huge area, all of north eastern Peru. Upper town businessmen process and ship out the local products, lumber, rubber, chicle, nuts etc. and bring in supplies for the whole region, of which, petroleum exploration and production equipment.
Lower town Iquitos is occupied by the less sophisticated "Caboclos" who elke a living from the river in these shacks on the river's marshy edge.
The term "Caboclo" is not derogatory, it only means "someone who derives his livelihood from the river". Neither is it racial for Caboclos can be white, black, indigenous or mixed.
This part of Iquitos, called Belem, looks very much like many such settlements built by Caboclos all over the great Amazon river system covering parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and, of course, Brazil.
It's worth mentioning that the Amazon basin is the largest in the world (6 150 000 square kilometers), way ahead of the Congo (3 800 000 kmē) and of the Mississippi (3 222 000 kmē).
Iquitos' main cargo port is at Masusa a few kilometers downstream. Houses are built on stilts for protection against periodic flooding which is so normal that the sidewalks of the main street are elevated.
As Masusa's side streets have no sidewalks, I suppose the people here use dugout canoes during the floods.
Ocean going vessels seldom come to Iquitos since the loss of the international rubber trade. River boats tied to this floating dock serve small river communities inside Peru from the Brazilian border up the Ucayali river to Pucallpa and up the Huallaga river to Yurimaguas. There is no fixed schedule, boats leave when they have unloaded what they have brought and loaded up again.
The river boats tie up to the shore anywhere when the floating dock is full. The boat's destination is chalked up on a blackboard displayed by the wheelhouse along with its projected time and date of departure. Passengers can sling their hammocks on the upper decks while cargo and the crew occupy the lower decks. A couple of bars and a liquor store cater to boat crews and to waiting passengers who have little else to do. Masusa can get rough at times.
I considered boarding one of these for the two or three day trip to the border but finally decided to take a fast launch that does the run in only 8 hours so as to save this type of experience for the longer cruise from the border to Manaus.
We were requested to be at the landing at 5:30 AM so that the boat could leave at six. It was still dark when I got there a little early at 5:15 only to learn that departure was delayed 24 hours to allow the police to investigate the pirate attack the boat had suffered on the way up from the border the previous day. Shots had been fired to get the boat to stop. An 11 year-old girl had been shot in the leg and a man my age had been grazed by a bullet on the skull. Six pirates had boarded, they had searched the baggages and had robbed everybody. Interesting...
The other passengers seemed annoyed at the delay but not worried about leaving on the next morning because, as they explained, this wouldn't happen again soon for it occurred only once every three or four months. Furthermore, I was told not to worry because such attacks generally happened on the way back from the border because, according to the conventional wisdom, the malhechores (wrongdoers) were generally after drug money being brought back into Peru from Brazil. All this sounded quite reasonable so I didn't worry and took the boat the next morning.
Iquitos is only about 150 meters above the level of the sea, 3700 kilometers from here so there are no rapids; the river drops only four centimeters per kilometer. The Amazon is very calm when there is no wind but its current is strong and swift because it is carrying so much water. The average flow of the Amazon into the Ocean is of 190 000 cubic meters per second, five times more than that of the Congo's and more than ten times the average flow of the Mississippi!
It was exciting to feel the power of this great monster silently delivering three million tons of earth every day from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean in its brown waters.
We stopped to report our passage at a military police outpost in a place called Pijuayal just before reaching Pebas. I would have liked to take a picture of it but I did not dare for I knew how touchy the Peruvian police are about photos. And also because they were watching!
There are so many horrible stories about the Peruvian police ripping off backpackers or ransoming tourists after finding planted drugs in their bags that it is wise to fear them more than muggers or than Sendero Luminoso bandits. I have no doubt that some of them must be honest but they definitely do have an image problem collectively.
I was impressed to witness the great natural phenomena that the Amazon is but it was as commonplace as their backyard for these children at Mairuna. As a matter of fact, it was their backyard.
We stopped many places on this milk run but generally only very shortly to let someone on or off or to deliver something or both like here in Caballococha.
Everybody got off to undergo exit formalities at Santa Rosa, the last Peruvian outpost located on an island in front of Leticia in Colombia and the neighbouring Tabatinga in Brazil.
Caboclos are easy going, friendly people who like to have a good time. They are reputed to love music and to enjoy having a beer while dancing at noisy Sunday afternoon parties like this one (right in front of the immigration shack). They are also reputed to have large families!
