A cargo ship down the Amazon
The road to Iquitos part two: not advisable if you don't eat chicken.
“You do seem to be spending a lot of time on buses,” my friend Andy, a cynical Brit, remarked to me this week.
“Rachael, wow! I was wondering what percentage of your grand tour you are spending on buses, must be at least 15-20 per cent!” – a message from Robert-Jan, my effusive Dutch friend.
Uhuh. Whichever way you spin it, the chariots of Cruz del Sur, Transzela and the like have had some good business from us lately. But Dave and I really mixed things up a couple of weeks ago when we hitched a ride on a cargo ship down the Amazon river towards Iquitos – the world’s largest city completely unconnected by road – for three nights, no less.
My last newsletter left you somewhere between Chiclayo and Tarapoto, with the vague hope of getting to the Peruvian Amazon by boat. In my mind, we’d arrive in Yurimaguas (where the road ends and the river continues on to become the Amazon) later that day, and spend the night there before working out our next moves – but as usual, life had other plans.
We arrived in Tarapoto by bus late morning and spent a bit of time trying to determine whether or not the bus onwards to Yurimaguas existed, or if we’d have to get a colectivo (shared taxi) for the final leg of the journey to the port. Frustratingly, it seems that the buses do exist, but nobody at the bus station seemed to know or was willing to tell us when they departed – only “much later”. Just when I thought I was getting somewhere with one ticket officer called Juan, the tuk tuk mafia arrived to crowd and intimidate him – and Juan changed his mind about the likelihood of a bus existing after all… Suddenly, it all made sense.
Begrudgingly, we took a tuk tuk on to the colectivo station, where our bags were grabbed from us once again and bundled into the boot of a car. At each point, it struck me just how much of a hurry everyone wanted us to be in. No time to stop and buy a drink, no time to stop and think about whether we wanted to get in this particular car or not. Eventually I snapped a bit, having been awake for too many hours without food, and told them all I needed a break and that we’d take a ride later on.
We sat for an hour in the colectivo business’s car park with a lunch of ice cream and mango juice, all the while being watched impatiently by the drivers. And then it was go time once again – backpacks tied to the roof of a van, knees squashed into seats designed for much smaller humans – 2.5 hours haring up and down around hilly bends through a tropical downpour to Yurimaguas town, where we were met once again by swarms of tuk tuk drivers, crowding and hassling, each desperate for our custom.
The driver who won our custom for the journey onwards to the port (purely on account of the fact he was first to snatch our bags) was called Alex. He, I suspect much like all the other tuk tuk drivers, happened to knew of a boat that was leaving the port for Iquitos that night, so we said we’d take a look.
The Eduardo X was no beauty, but was certainly in much better nick than the neighbouring boats at the dock. It was also the one that came recommended through the blog post we’d read about how to do this journey – and so we were keen to secure a space on board if we could.
By this point we were both hot, exhausted and ready to drop – preferably in a real bed. But we were assured there would be no boat the following day (a Sunday), and there were no guarantees about departures the following days, either. Whether that was all true or not, I had my suspicions: these boat lads were hustlers and wanted to fill up the Eduardo as quickly as possible. But at the same time, we weren’t in a position to risk it, since getting stuck in Yurimaguas for several days would cut short our time in the Amazon, and first impressions suggested the city itself didn’t have much going on outside of the port. We decided to go for it.
This cargo ship had no available cabins for hire, only hammock space, offered to us by an associate of the captain at 120 soles per person (about £24). Cheap, no doubt, but hilariously all the rushing about without stopping meant we didn’t have much cash on us – and so I haggled him down to 100 each (£20), which, for multiple nights including food was hands down the best value accommodation/transport we’d secured all year.
Our next challenge was to buy all the things we needed to survive a few nights on board – the expected arrival time was left vague, it could be anything between two and six nights depending on the current and the number of stops the captain chose to make to deliver goods along the way. Allegedly, there were only 25 minutes to go until departure at 6pm, something else we felt suspicious of but realised it was best not to get complacent about. Luckily, Alex the tuk tuk driver was ready to step in, and the three of us tore back into town to wake up his various napping family members to sell us their stuff.
The first “shop” we stopped at was someone’s living room. A woman who was clearly in the middle of cooking dinner for her teenagers pulled out some hammocks from a cupboard, offering them to us for an outrageous price – possibly because she could see the desperation on our faces and possibly also because we had disturbed her cooking. We politely declined and Alex drove us to a few more houses before finally we found a real store selling textiles. Two hammocks purchased for the fair sum of around £5 each, we were shown to another place for tupperware, plastic spoons, toilet roll and guide ropes for our hammocks. We bought water, fruit and some biscuits, and then we were ready to go.
Alex’s tuk tuk tyres screeched into the port for 5.59pm. We said our heartfelt goodbyes and set about making our camp on the upper deck, helped by a fellow shipmate called Sese, who had about 5,000 times more experience of erecting hammocks than either of us.
And then we sat.
By around 9pm, we gathered that the boat was not going to depart that night. Much more worryingly, it was becoming increasingly clear that there would be no food provided until the following day. Having survived on exactly one ice cream and one empanada all day, things were starting to feel desperate. Dave very bravely ran out to see if there was anywhere to buy dinner nearby, and came back with peanuts (literally, a bag of). We made do with those, accompanied by some of our fruit and biscuit rations. I felt slightly more human after braving the “shower” (a single cold tap positioned directly above one of three toilets on the lower deck) and Dave and I settled into our hammocks, laying awake for most of the night listening to the sounds of a party taking place down in the port – most likely populated by the very crew we were relying on to get us moving the next day.
At 5.30am, we woke up to the sound of a metal pipe clanging on the side of the ship – a noise we quickly learned to associate with mealtimes and not unlike how I imagine life in prison. The fact we had nowhere to safely store our possessions apart from in and under our hammocks meant that one of us had to stay at our camp at all times, and so I headed downstairs, armed with our little paper meal tickets and tupperware bowls to queue for a bread roll each and what I can only fairly describe as a ladle of milky gruel. Still, as desperate and semi-starving prisoners we were chuffed, and even more so when the boat finally started moving.
Our days fell into a pattern. The clang of the breakfast pipe around 5.30am, a little nap until mid-morning, taking it in turns to pace around the deck and watch for dolphins, until the clang of the lunch pipe sometime between 11 and 11.45am. There’s something about lying about in a hammock all day (and there was nothing else to sit on, apart from the grubby floor) that makes it really difficult to stay awake for long. We read our books, practiced some Spanish verbs and played cards, but mostly we took it in turns to drift in and out of sleep all afternoon until the clang of the dinner bell around 5pm.
Reassuringly, to fit with the prison routine, it was easy to guess what we’d get for dinner, because it was always exactly the same as what we had for lunch – which was always a bone of chicken with potatoes or rice. To mix things up, the dinner chicken was turned into a chicken and rice and potato soup by the addition of lukewarm water poured on top. It wasn’t terrible. But that might have been helped by our low expectations: it was exactly what I’d expected the food on board to be like. And, crucially, we had a secret weapon in our bags: a bottle of hot sauce.
On the second night, we pooled the last of our resources and worked out we had enough for exactly one beer each – sold from the lower deck’s kitchen window with a side of irritation and mild disgust – which we enjoyed with the last of our biscuits, giggling like lottery winners.
Call it Stockholm syndrome, but I became really fond of our floating home. I liked visiting the cows and chickens on the lower deck, and I even enjoyed my daily toilet shower to cool off in the late afternoons. I made a makeshift pillow out of one of my packing cubes and a duvet from a plastic poncho purchased back when we hiked Machu Picchu. And, after initially feeling a bit stressed about being offline for so long (there’s always a bit of work or writing to finish, and emails to send) I learned to relax and really enjoy being completely off-grid for one of the few times on this trip.
Something I didn’t enjoy was the completely incongruous presence of four other British people. They were young backpackers in their early 20s, each with the kind of overly-loud and demanding voices that can only come from private schooling, and they were really bloody annoying.
After such a long and complicated journey to get to this point, I think Dave and I were both in shock to encounter other gringos in the same situation (how dare they!) let alone Brits. Friends from home who backpacked in their 20s have asked me, jokingly, if we’re surrounded by guitar-playing Henrys here in South America, and the answer has always been no until this point – in fact we’ve barely come across any Brits at all over the past nine months, it’s a bit weird. So there was something horribly ironic about our first encounter with gap-yah ravers being on a cargo ship in the middle of the jungle.
We didn’t go out of our way to talk to them, but friendship didn’t seem to be on the cards from their side either – the group were already on board when we arrived, having quickly cordoned off the entire far end of the upper deck as their own, which was quite a statement of separation considering that the rest of the deck was full to bursting with local families.
As annoying as it was to be kept awake by screaming Peruvian children and their TikTok-loving parents, I was glad to be in with the masses and not drinking vodka and shouting about “legendary” parties and the best highs down the gringo end of the boat. As the hours passed, we noticed a gradual shift of Peruvian hammocks further and further away from them and their music, until there was a clear divide between bow and stern, with a few metres of no-man’s land in-between the two camps. Our mate Sese clearly hated to them too, which transferred into a greater camaraderie with Dave and I once he learned that we didn’t know the other white people and we didn’t enjoy their noise either.
On the third night, the boat stopped at a large river-side town called Nauta to unload a huge delivery of bananas and eggs (I was a bit obsessed with the number of eggs on board. “A million!” said the captain when I asked him, and I believe it to be true. A shame we weren’t allowed to eat any of them to accompany our daily chicken water). Some of the Peruvians were rapidly putting shoes on, so I asked El Capitan if we had time to go offshore. He granted us an hour, and Dave and I giddily scooted off to see the sights of Nauta (not many), pausing briefly to enjoy the air-con of a pharmacy and then settling at a small bar (handful of chairs outside a shop* [room with a fridge and a loudspeaker]) to share the world’s cheapest beer with a good view of the ship.
The following morning, Sese woke us up before dawn to tell us we’d be arriving in Iquitos imminently. I felt almost sad to be leaving boat life behind, but not the boiled chicken. Plus, the water coming out of the bathroom taps and shower had been turning increasingly brown as the days went by, eventually matching the colour of the river around us (a coincidence?) so it was probably time to go.
We joined our neighbours in quietly packing up our belongings, and I gave my hammock to Sese as a token of our unlikely friendship – and because he had been heavily hinting all weekend that his hammock was broken and that mine was rather nice. Nobody woke the other British people. The sight of them still snoring in their hammocks, empty drinks bottles and clothes scattered all around them, as the rest of us headed off the boat, will forever be implanted in my memory.
Bleary eyed, Dave and I took a tuk tuk to the main square in Iquitos and walked towards the river to see the Amazon in all its glory just as the sun was rising. It wasn’t yet 7am, and the only other person around was the owner of a café, very fittingly, called Dawn on the Amazon. The owner called out to say good morning, and that he wasn’t open just yet but we could come and sit outside and he’d bring us some coffee.
And so we sat there for several hours, watching the city wake up and enjoying real food with fresh fruits and a view of the river. I turned on my phone and connected to the wifi to find that the world hadn’t ended, beginning the search for somewhere to stay that night and hesitantly returning to some version of reality once again.
Travel bits and tips from this week
From Máncora in northern Peru, we took a series of buses south-east to get towards Yurimaguas: Máncora to Piura; Piura to Chiclayo; Chiclayo to Tarapoto (overnight).
Rumour has it there are buses on from Tarapoto to Yurimaguas, but we struggled to get much information about it. In the end we took a tuk tuk to the colectivo station, where we paid about £6 each for the 2.5 hour journey across the hills to Yurimaguas.
At the port, we were once again mobbed by people trying to sell us hammock space. The boat we were recommended (and the only one we saw promising to leave anytime soon) was the Eduardo X.
We easily haggled down to 100 soles each (about £20) and bought hammocks from a store near the marketplace for £5 each.
The journey time from Yurimaguas to Iquitos depends heavily on the current and the cargo on board. It took us three nights and two-and-a-half days’ travel to get there, which is faster than the average, even if we did leave 12 hours later than billed.
Going back the other way takes a lot longer because you’re going against the current.
If you’re planning to do this journey, you’ll need to bring your own water, hammocks and eating utensils. I strongly recommend taking loo roll, snacks and hot sauce.
In Iquitos, I had the best coffee and breakfast of my life at Dawn on the Amazon café.
We were lucky to find a very snazzy Airbnb with air-con and a washing machine(!) that was available that same day for less than £17 a night.
When I finally got to have a non-boat shower, the water that came off me was very brown.
I’d do it all again without hesitation.