Slow Boatin' Vol. I: Crossing the Border

Our time in Colombia was coming to an end, and it was time to deal with the formalities of crossing borders for the first time.

Me and Fatimah on our last day in the Amazon jungle....
Note the backpacks made of palms.

Fatimah and I were fresh out of a 4-day jungle trek when we decided to take our fate into our own hands and deal with our passport stamps and ticket buying to go to Peru ourselves. Rene, a lovely old philosopher and the manager of our hostel was interesting and funny, but tasks that would take someone five, ten, maybe twenty minutes, took Rene three days (it literally took 28 hours to get a roll of toilet paper). Rene had offered to help us, but we didn’t want to be stuck in Leticia another week, so we went over his ponytailed head and did it ourselves. Still covered in mud from the jungle and smelling like 3 days of BO and heavy insect spray, we went to the immigration office at the airport in Colombia for our exit stamps, and then took a boat taxi across the Amazon River to Peru for our entry stamps.

The office in Peru was on a 3 hour lunch break when we arrived so we started asking around for boats, which ended up being just enough time to receive a hefty dose of LARA (Latin American Run Around). The LARA is the product of a cultural phenomenon where people in Latin America will give you advice or directions regardless of if they know what they are talking about, some say in an effort to be ‘polite.’ I would personally much rather hear an ‘I don’t know’ than trudge through a quarter mile of Amazon basin silt just to be told we went the wrong way, but that’s just me, and that’s just the culture. One guy fixing his boat’s engine by rebuilding and reinforcing parts of it with beer cans had actual information, which he presented to us in an 8 minute monologue form, the distilled version was: there is a fast boat that is 70 US dollars and it takes 12 hours and leaves at 4 in the morning; there is also a slow boat for 25 US dollars and takes 3 days and leaves at 8 at night, he suggested this boat, because it included meals and was cheap (he mentioned the meals at least 6 times).

After deliberation and a bit of douchesque and cheap skate decision making on my part, we ended up on the slow boat. Words cannot quite describe the shock I received coming onto this boat. It was like if your grandma had gotten you socks for Christmas, but put them in a Playstation box; a bit of disgust, a bit of anxiety, and a wave of pissed-offedness. This boat consisted of two platforms, one on top of the other, packed to the brim with people in hammocks. There were no lockers and no security; your stuff just went on the floor of the platform under your hammock. Despite the typically entrepreneurial tendencies of both Colombians and Peruvians, nobody was selling hammocks at the docks, so Fatimah and I were relegated to a single hammock.

Our home for 3 days, at least there were life jackets!

Furthermore, our only snack was a bunch of bananas I had bought on a whim because they were 1 Nuevo Sol (35 or 40 cents), which seemed like a good deal for a couple kilos of bananas. They were pretty ripe, however, and started falling on the floor of the boat off their bunch. I’m a proud supporter of the 5 second rule, regardless of what Mythbusters or scientists say, but falling on the floor of this particular boat, even for a fraction of a second, voided any edibility these bananas once had. Furthermore, the boat taxi driver said the boat would accept US dollars because it is a border town operation, which was a lie, and we had no Peruvian currency. So here we were for the next 3 days with a rapidly dwindling and rotting snack stash, one hammock, and no cash. I was pissed, at myself, at the boat, and at the bananas. Fatimah nursed me back to wellbeing with discussions of fasting and how it would be good for us.

Come to find out half of why these boats take 3 days to get to Peru is because they stop at every little Amazon village along the way and pick up and drop off people and cargo. One of the first villages we arrived at teetered on the status of a ‘town’ and had an ATM to prove it. Now we could at least pay for snacks and the boat tickets and things of that sort. The hardware store also sold plug adaptors, so I was able to plug in my laptop on the boat, allowing us to watch movies, and I was able to get my work done.

An example of one of the many Amazon towns we stopped at,
this one apparently had an excess of lumber.

Hour by hour the slow boat, trudging down the river that looked like dirty chocolate milk, was growing on us. There were caveats; such as the two (2) bathrooms that the roughly 80 people on our platform were to share. These were pretty much like permanent Port-O-Johns© with a hose coming down from the ceiling that was, apparently, a shower head. The toilets in these bathrooms used river water, so it was difficult to tell whether people were following the ‘if it’s brown, flush it down’ ideology (they were, however, most certainly letting the yellow mellow). Thieves are also apparently omnipresent on these boats, so wherever we went, one of us would have to keep a look out for our things or we would have to carry a 1000 dollars’ worth of cameras and computers around in a bag. Our hammock placement right next to the kitchen was both good and bad, the upside was we didn’t have to go far for a drink or snack or a place to sit, the downside was that we were sleeping right in a high traffic area, and right next to the table that was the site for afterhours gambling.

Another, slightly slower slow boat we passed.

Another typical day at the office...

The friendliness of the kitchen staff and many of our fellow boat goers, plus the sheer relaxation of having nothing to do were lovely. On the last night I joined the aforementioned gamblers for a late night binge on cheap Brazilian wine that tasted a lot like Wild Irish Rose© or some other kind of high gravity bum wine. We rewarded ourselves for our thrift on the boat with 2 nights in a hotel that was neither seedy nor shabby when we arrived in Iquitos. We also made a pact to avoid slow boats, which we unfortunately had to break about 72 hours later.