Amazon Adventure

I arrived from Tingo Maria to Pucallpa, the last city to be reached by road before the Amazon on Sunday night I think.. the days are blurring a bit to be honest, in true slacker style.

It was a fairly uncomfortable journey given that 10 minutes before getting on the bus I had just read in the Lonely Planet book that this route isn´t safe (esp at night, which i was also doing) as there are armed robberies linked to coca trafficking on this route. Ooops. not to mention my persistent trots and a non-stop 8 hour journey due to the armed robberies.

however, i arrived in one stain free immaculate piece without any trouble. spent two days here, staying in a hostal run by two elderly sisters who enjoyed the grim side of christianity - my room had a huge picture of a bleeding christ over the bed, dying for my sins. pucallpa was pretty dull, im assuming becuse i arrived on a monday. still, i managed to hook up with some gringo guys heading to Iquitos on the Don Segundo boat so i was a little more relaxed about the 4 day trip.


Unfortunately, i am a tourist in my own country. which sucks but is true, I have been told out right a few times. Peruvian men are pretty persistent in trying to rip me off at any possible chance, hence the above relief at meeting some other europeans. Around the Amazon i don´t look like any of these guys, and come to think of it, not too much in Lima either. In Huanuco, where my birth mother is from, also stood out like a sore thumb.... On the plus side, the peruvian women are pretty keen...every cloud has a silver lining and all that. My sister does look immensely like the folks here though, scarily so as i looked around the boat from my permanent 5 day hammocked state. I wonder if she would get the same treatment as I am. I´m keen to call her and talk to her about it, as really she´s the only person who will ever be able to understand what I´m feeling right now.

Managed to get my shoes stolen on the boat by day 3, which sucked due to Night of the Gigantic Flying Cockroaches on Night 2. The bugs kept flying towards the light above my hammock and then falling down on my body, in order to avoid getting trapped on the spiders web that has been thoughtfully spun over the bulb. (fortunatley quite a small arachnid). These bugs are the size of the Kinder egg toy holder, so this regular incident wasnt exactly welcomed. My shoes, carefully positioned so I could drop out my hammock and slip em on and stamp the fucker dead. They do not die under the weight of a flip flop, so luckily this event was a one night only occurrence. As i dodged the cucarachas exiting the toilets, i passed a young girl squealing as she brushed a sizeable pile of carcasses out into the river, some of which in their crushed state still managed to waggle their legs. My friend David put one on my head in the morning as a practical "joke". There are downsides to being a bloke.. i guess i was looking a bit too practical for this trip though, so maybe its back to inpractical wasteful skate shoes or stick to the flip flops.

I wrote this on the boat yesterday...


The boat ride is pretty cool, in terms of living like the average poor peruvian. I can feel my muscles wasting away from lack of protein and exercise. I´m hungry and in low spirits which I´m sure so are they. The meals on the boat are pretty much slop and stale bread for breakfast (i haven´t dared try the slop tbh), rice, a tiny bit of chicken (eg: half a wing) and 2 boiled green bananas for lunch. Tea is chicken broth with noodles in it. All cooked up by a fabulous pair of queer looking people, a hybrid of biffa bacon´s mutha with eyeliner and plucked eyebrows. They scowl and serve very little to anyone who laughs at them. In my head I have conjured up fanatasies of them having Meat Men times in the downstairs boiler room - especially after seeing them holding hands with the super butch macho captain. I got a lot of meat on the last day, and my two friends got a special tomato and pepper with their meal. it was noted.

I wonder if the peruvians think the food is good or not? They all run for the meal gong when it sounds, very unbritish behaviour. My mum always used to tell me off for doing this.. But I like seeing their happy faces as they can´t get to the Esmeralda kitchen any faster. I wanted to take a photo but as with many situations I realize it´s pretty out of order. This their life, not just a boat trip. I´m glad I got to experience this.

The boat is a great place in terms of reading, planning and reflecting.

So far I´m going to Yurimaguas after a few days in Iquitos, and then onto Chiclayo on the bus. That will probabaly take a week to get there, maybe more if the boat to Yurimaguas isn´t that frequent. I reckon I´ll spend 5 days in Chiclayo looking at some of the ruins and surfing in the nearby beach town. Then another bus back to Lima and either surf there or make my way to Ica, Arequipa, Puno and Cuzco. I might buy myself another pair of shoes for the Inca Trail or maybe not...the flip flops from Brazil seem to have stopped rubbing my feet so I´ll see how my flat feet deal without a supportive arch.

Read two really good books on this boat, George Orwell´s 1984 and the Motorcycle Diaries. The latter had some quite harsh reflections on the people of this country: " they are a defeated race".

It is really hard to see people living in such shocking conditions, especially in Huanuco. It was extremely filthy, poor, small and boring, yet without any other options. I met a little boy called Joni who asked to eat my sloppy seconds, that I only really ate so I could take my malaria tablet with. It was very humbling and I made a note to always finish whatever I get from now on, as well as to stop being such a stomach on legs. Joni lived up in the shanty town of Huanuco, he said he knew my birth mother when I told him my story and her name. I thought it was sweet of him to try and pretend. It was also a good slap in the face as to how life could have turned out for me. That kid could have been me. I´m not angry with my birth mother anymore, at 19 she gave me not only the chance of life but also the best opportunities to go with it. I´m probably one of the luckiest bastards alive and I´m not planning on throwing it away.

A corrupt government and a failing economy hardly inspires people to believe life will ever get any better.

1984 on the other hand explores how heirachal society works on the need for the poor to be kept in their place, uneducated. As well as for the government to keep engaging in war, in order to waste resources so that the poor can never have enough and never afford to go to college. Never to fully realise that they carry the economy and deserve more than anyone to have more. War is necesarry so that the masses believe in the government (who manipulate the media) in order to look after the difficult affairs that they dont have time to understand, because they´re busy working to survive.

I guess that´s why we look at South America in general\in hope to actually overthrow the government and demand change. Their hierachy is built on a mass of extreme poverty, they revolt because to not do so would mean (means) starvation and death. Unlike Europe, where the poor can still scrape an existence.

Hierachy only exists by keeping the majority down, and whilst I for one would like nothing more than to live in a world where everyone has the same opportunities, wealth and (un)status, there´s always someone who would want more - it´s human nature isn´t it? I just don´t understand how everyone on this planet will ever co-exist in peace and harmony, which isn´t meant to sound pessimistic just a need for me to do more.

Think globally act locally, has always been one of those phrases out of Schnews I think a lot about. The plight of transexuals in South America is something I´m keen to inform more people at home about. In Brazil for example, your aquired gender is not even recognized. I´m sure it´s like that in most of these countries, but need to do more research...

Because really, England is my home. My respect for my Parents has gone up tenfold on this boat trip. They spent 10 years living on the Amazon and loved it. Their own self constructed mud hut, just like the rest of the locals, if anything they´re more peruvian than I´ll ever be, than I´ll ever be able to experience in this trip anyway. 10 years living on the Amazon, as beautiful as it may be, would be tough as fuck and sounds like my idea of living Hell. Respect.

All that said, the extremely young mothers on this boat have done a fantastic job of making sure their numerous offspring are clean and combed (with filthy brown water pumped fresh from the Amazon into the sink tap) before breakfast at 7AM and in another set of clean bed clothes at 9PM. As opposed to us gringo scruffs who havent showered or changed clothes since Tuesday. (I don´t actually have any clean clothes left)

We really are on a chicken boat. There is a cock and a hen upstairs, the former greets in the morning at 5AM with a loud series of uncontrollable cockadoodledoo´s. They are the proud parents of the woman in the hammock next to me´s cardboard box of 7 loud cheeping chicks. They get let out every so often to run around the decks and strut their big strong legs. No battery farm here, although they still will get eaten. At least here, they use absolutely everything, and the little runts dont get their necks snapped just for having a gimpy leg. I picked a few of them up and asked the woman if she could eat them after having reared them, as she genuinely seems very proud of them, an extension to her own offsping. "Of couse" was the smiling answer.

There´s also 3 scared cows on the front deck who crap themselves frequently with fear, and a few pigs too.
The children are doing really well all things considering. Only tonight are they really starting to get bored and tired (read noisy and hyoeractive). There´s so many really small kids, one of them reminds me of my nephew Joel quite a bit. And whilst he plays with our beers cans - his mother being complelty fine with this- and puts bits of dirt off the cockroach corpse ridden floor into his mouth, I can´t help but think about the stark differences in his and Joel´s life. Because Joel had a 50\50 chance of being one of these kids too.

Got a few hours left before nightfall (7PM) when the mozzies start and hopefully we´ll be in Iquitos before morning. Being on testosterone I think makes me extremely tired. The trip has been great because I get to lie in my hammock all day, reading, sleeping, having a beer, before having the communal meal and then napping off the food\drink before settling down for a nice early night around 9PM...