Hotel Maranon Iquitos

... to town, this one only cost ten soles !!!<br>Finished the night in "The Yellow Rose of Texas", an Iquitian sports bar, watched half of the Peru-Bolivia game, the whole of the England-Belarus game and half of the Argentina-Uruguay game. I also spoke to the first Englishman I had met in 3 days, some kind of a record that !!!<br>Had an early night.<br><br>Hasta luego ..... Ronaldo

<br> Saturday Aug 22<br> Andy and Eric were up for the sunrise although I slept through that, but I did wake up in time for the dinner bell. The boat looked like the Eduardo we came in on, except that is about all these two boats have in common. The staff on this boat swept the deck in the morning. Great. And the employee swept his pile into a dustpan and threw it into the river. Not so great. And then he did it ...

... he groaned. It held onto the line and we all stared at it while Falcon waited for it to stop thrashing. Falcon pointed to the red gills. &#8220;The worst shock is from here. It can be deadly. You can&#8217;t grab this one.&#8221; He carefully pinned the head of the eel with a stick and tried to get the hook back out of its mouth. &#8220;Aayyy,&#8221; he grumbled as he got mildly zapped. Andy and Eric took turns poking at the metal hook to see what it ...

... showed a half a dozen adult men carrying the dead snake.<br><br> Even more deadly yet is what the locals call The Bushmaster. This snake is in the jungle, relatively large, and kills people within minutes of its bite. Thankfully, they aren&#8217;t very common and we didn&#8217;t see one the whole time we were in the jungle.<br><br> We headed back from the hike and came back to Gedrani having cooked a buffet of fish and rice. Andy is the only one of the three of us who ...

... plaza, and complained about the sweltering heat. You sweat sitting down. You sweat more lugging your rucksack through the city in search of a hostel. Walking lasted about 20 minutes and then we decided to just catch a motocarro (3 wheel moto-taxi) to Mad Mick&#8217;s Hostel.<br><br> The rest of the day is less interesting-a run to the laundrymat, a session on the internet, and best of all, setting up our tour the the Amazon Jungle! We plan to spend 5 days, 4 ...

I received a lot of messages wanting to see some pictures of my pet. I uploaded some pictures of my new friend Iquitos. He is a Pygmy Marmosets, and will only grow probably 50% larger than he is now. He is considered the worlds smallest monkey, and is probably about 3 months old. I bought him some baby formula milk and have been feeding ...

... egg, milk, papaya, orange juice and someting called algarrobina...which is some sort of traditional medicinal herb from the jungle. Whatever, it was really good. I also tried a liquor called rompe calzon...tear off your pants. The first sip was a bit much so the woman added honey...thick ...

... During the next 30 years, the city was a dichotomy of fabulous wealth and abject poverty. The rubber barons did just fine exploiting the native laborers. Does any of this sound familiar? Are my socialist leanings showing? By WWI the boom was over. Rubber tree seeds were smuggled to Malaysia where costs were quite a bit lower, probably in no small part due to the logistics and costs of transporting the ...

... The family had cooked chicken soup for dinner which unfortunately I couldn't eat because I need to keep my stomach empty before the Ayahuasca ceremony this evening, I'm so hungry too!! After the sun had completely set we boarded a small boat to be taken to Ayahuasca ceremony which is being held in a small hut somewhere in the forest. I surprisingly feel very calm, I think the French guys are more nervous than me and they won't be taking the Ayahuasca. We ...

... looking fish that actually walked on their fins! Considering how many fish there are in these rivers, it is hardly surprising that some of them decide to walk instead of swim. Evolution at work! At night, when we were on the shore, we heard a loud bang and a lot of noise coming from the boat. As it turned out, a big fish with huge, menacing teeth had jumped into our canoe. My guide called it a dogfish. And so we didn't really have ...