Leticia,
Colombia
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
As antisocial as I can be at times, I do have to admit that frequently the thing that makes or breaks a traveling experience for me is the people I share it with. Lucky for me my seven day cargo boat trip through the Amazon included the group of English medical students it did. No, I didn't need their medical expertise, but their company made the trip much more fun than it otherwise would have been. They'd just finished a month of volunteer work in Georgetown, Guyana and had plenty of horrific stories from that wreck of a city. We passed the hours talking and playing cards, and sharing the misery of all those mundane meals and cramped conditions made it all bearable. Actually, misery is a big overstatement. It was a pretty fun trip. We did have to eat chicken with white rice and plain spaghetti twice a day, but hey, at lunch they also gave us beans!
We saw dolphins swimming alongside the boat a few times, but otherwise wildlife spotting was minimal. After six nights, we arrived in Santa Rosa, where we boarded a smaller boat for the brief trip to Tabatinga. I walked across the border to Leticia, Colombia and went straight to the airport to buy my ticket to Bogota. A few hours later I was in the air.
Photos from the big river cruise are on
flickr.
