12 June 2013
Dear Mum and Dad

After spending the last week at over 3000 metres sea level in the Peruvian Andes we have dropped like a stone to sea (or amazon) level. You would have thought that following all that altitude training we would feel strong as oxes. However the reverse seems true. Here in iquitos there is almost 100% humidity. As well as feeling drenched and dehydrated at the same time, we feel exhausted and tired of fighting off greedy and duplicitous touts at every turn.

Iquitos is a small city. It is the largest city in the world which is inaccessible by road. You can get here by plane (which we did) or by boat only. The place has a manic air. It's absolutely loco. It's swarming with three-wheeler tuk-tuks which they call MotoKars, which must have been shipped in via cargo plane or ferries down the Amazon. They race them around the streets like maniacs, I don't think there are any rules.

It's small enough so that every tout in town knows we are looking to do an amazon tour. This means that every tout in town (feels like thousands of them) now know me by first name, and cheerfully hail me as I turn every corner. "Hey Nicholas, Nicholas!! Jungle tour!!"

Everyone here is in on a scam. They lie and cheat and tell you black is white to sell you their tours. Nobody is aggressive or dangerous though...They are just all on a cut of something.

This city is large enough so that several ex pat Europeans now consider this a home large enough to disappear into. There seem more "coco loco" dropout Brits here than you'll find even in Puket, Ibiza or Goa.

So now it's Wednesday night. Tomorrow early doors we are getting taken into the amazon on a 3 day tour.
Hopefully caimen (alligators), anacondas, monkeys, capybara (rodents heavier than a man), pink and grey dolphins, piranhas, tarantulas and so on. A bit like Bolivia but this is The Amazon.

We've just returned from a five star meal at a floating restaurant with a swimming pool. In the middle of an amazon "tributary" so big you can barely see either side (Rio Itaya).

We will be returning from this camping and lodge trip on Saturday but immediately go on a boat for 5 days to reach Yarimaguas. We will sleep each night in hammocks on deck (we bought the hammocks at a strange hardware store earlier served by a camp teenager with a lisp) for 3 days. We were told to buy rope to tie our belongings to the hammocks since otherwise the locals wheel your bags away in the night. We bought the ropes in Belem market which made Lindsay feel sick due to horrid sights and smells. She perked up when we bought pure 100% cacao (chocolate) from a woman's stall selling Anhuasca vine (incredibly potent hallucinogenic), San Pedro cactus (less potent hallucinogenic), maca ("jungle Viagra"), puma skins (highly illegal), monkey skulls (grim), and a cross section of a boa constrictor that died eating beans and some wood.
I'm not even making this stuff up.

The upshot of this is that we may not be in touch again until next Thursday. Don't fret, we'll be having fun.

Lots of love

Nicholas (and Lindsay)
X

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