Yurimaguas
Trip Start
Feb 06, 2007
1
63
332
Trip End
Jan 14, 2008
Yurimaguas,
Peru
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Pete wanted to visit Belen again to take some photos. Today we found the monkeys and turtles, some alive, and some skinned ready for the pot. Seeing a monkey hand and a monkey tail on a meat stall was not very nice, nor was the sight of turtle minus shell.
After breakfast our gear was left ready-packed at the hotel and there was time for a quick visit to Quistococha, which is a zoo and recreation area about 15km from Iquitos. We had been warned that the zoo was horrible, with disgusting cages. This was not exactly the case. For some obscure reason a lot of monkeys and large cats were housed in dismally small cages, but at least the animals looked well fed and healthy, the cages were clean, and didn't stink. Other animals were much luckier and had excellent leafy areas to roam in. We have seen much better zoos, but we have also seen much, worse
Pic 1
.Other places to see include a botanic garden with labelled plants, a plant nursery, and there is a beach with clean white sand and a roped-off swimming area. If you like swimming in warm green water, this is the place for you ! A restaurant serves a lunch of fish. You pick the fish, they cook it over hot coals, and it arrives with potatoes and salad. Like last night's tea, the fish was yummy, and we wished we had picked a bigger one.
All in all, Quistococha is a pleasant place to visit, and at 3 soles, very good value. The micro bus to get there cost 2 soles each, and went from near Plaza 28 de Julio.
We leapt in a bus to return to Iquitos 10 seconds before the heavens opened and chucked the rain down, but back in Iquitos it was impossible to keep dry, it rained so hard. Pete just had to have a piece of cake and 2 scoops of ice cream in an upmarket caff in the Plaza de Armas (to get us out of the rain), and it was so expensive it was as well he liked it.
The mototaxi dropped us at the port at 4.30pm where we were herded on to Eduardo V and up 2 sets of steps before the thieves had time to get their hands on our stuff. The top deck of the boat had only about 12 passengers besides us. It was quiet and safe, as one of the staff watched to make sure no vendors or middle deck passengers dared climb to our First Class domain
Pic 2
. We all left our stuff around, with no fear that it would be nicked. So much for all the warnings about security. However, down one deck it was chaos. There were hammocks hanging every which way, and peoples' possessions in heaps all over the place. You would have needed eyes in the back of your heads to keep it safe.With our packs safely in our cabin, we watched in fascination while goods and people were loaded on to both our boat, and on to Henry 2 beside us (going to Pucallpa). It was organized bedlam. A group of strong guys manhandled a dugout canoe on to a truck on Henry. They had to lift it up several metres, until the front fell into the deep tray of the truck and one guy was left hanging by his fingertips from the back of the canoe, above a very muddy bog. Everyone cheered when he rescued himself. Four or five truckloads of Inka Cola were brought on to our boat by men running with stacks on their shoulders and heads. One man carried either 60 600ml bottles or 18 2.5 litre bottles. Try doing that at a trot up a steep gangplank. The 2 bulls from yesterday had reappeared and kept getting in the way, until someone started feeding them on plantains. By the time they stopped eating they would have consumed at least 50 unripe plantains each. One looked up when his pile had only a few plantains left with an expression that clearly said 'If I eat any more, I am going to be sick'. We checked that our ticket price included dinner (the dining room looked alarmingly empty), and found it did not. 'All meals' excluded dinner the first night and breakfast the last morning. So we had a quick dash to the vendors and came back with a banana leaf containing something. Bad luck. It was rice, slightly flavoured, and almost inedible. Dinner ended up as bananas and biscuits, and the rice fed the piranhas
